Sample boards from RBS’s Gaskell Cloth Binding Boards and Tanselle Cloth Binding Boards teaching sets.

Sample boards from RBS’s Gaskell Cloth Binding Boards and Tanselle Cloth Binding Boards teaching sets.

Over the course of several decades, RBS staff salvaged and repurposed the boards of broken copies of 19th-century publishers’ cloth-covered bindings to create teaching kits that instruct students in how to identify and classify 19th-century binding cloth grains. Examples from two of RBS’s teaching sets are shown. The first is based on G. T. Tanselle’s foundational article, “The Bibliographical Description of Patterns” (1970); the second kit is keyed to Philip Gaskell’s 1972 classification scheme. In 2008, both sets of boards were updated to include additional cloth-grain nomenclature developed by the conservator Andrea Krupp.

From the collection of Rare Book School