Professor Escoffier had a particular fondness for the Romanticism and, along with these activities, his passion for books led him to open a bookstore of old books The House of the bibliophile ("La Maison du bibliophile") in 1922.
Here is the last digitized book of October. It's much smaller, and I wasn't initially considering it to be scanned at all. First, we already have it in our Book Collection; second, it is available at the Smithsonian Libraries digital archive.
This week's scanned book is the third volume of the catalog of the library of René Descamps-Scrive. Last week I posted some excerpts from the first two volumes of the same catalog.
While walking along the stalls at the book market in the Hague, I often find old diaries. I never thought I would have any use for any of them before I found this red hardcover journal.
For quite some time I've been looking for a new way to show gratitude to patrons of iBookBinding at Patreon.com. And several weeks ago I realized that I could share with them some books from my newly acquired collection.
I have extensively expanded my collection of books about books recently. One of the motives to do that was to scan and add them to the PDF Book Collection iBookBinding has been hosting for years. This collection you can get by subscribing to our newsletter.
I have a copy of The Fair Penitent by Nicholas Rowe, published in 1776. I found it in a rare bookstore. It has no boards, barely any spine left, and the frontispiece has been cut out.
Save Your Books is one of the most inspiring YouTube channels about book restoration. It is curated by Sophia S.W. Bogle, a professional with over 25 years of experience in book conservation and restoration.
These past days I’ve been digging into piles of my old and new stuff. Heaps of bookbinding paper and documents, power tools, pieces of wood and lots of other things. Just in two weeks, we are moving to Amsterdam, and all our possessions had to be sorted, separated and evaluated. Many of them went to garbage, some we are taking with us. Dealing with many things that were stored for a long time without moving made me experience the worst sort of allergy I had in a long time.
For almost 15 years the top place in the list of the most expensive books and manuscripts was held by the original copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook Codex Leicester (1500s), acquired by one of the Microsoft’s founders Bill Gates in 1994. With selling price of more than $30 million it was ahead by a third compared to the next book on the list – one of the original copies of Magna Carta (1297).
This video was released in 1981, but it is definitely worth watching. Bookbinding craft is not so prone to changes and all the main processes are shown here in detail.
This project is a bit out of our general scope. However, subject of cloth restoration and conservation in general and matters of working with silk in particular may be of interest to some of bookbinders.
“Every book has a biological story to tell. Pigment, DNA, proteins, microbes. Much more than what is written on the page. The big question is with Ancient books—rare and delicate objects—how do we access this buffet of boilogical clues, without damaging them?”
There are many different steps involved in the book restoration process. Some of them are about doing something with the book, during others specialists are cataloging and preserving information about the book for future use and research.
