Browse Items (8 total)

The red goatskin binding, in a blind- and gilt-tooled panel design with extended floral patterning and double-banded spine, is dated London 1808 in the bottom spine compartment. It remains anonymous though undoubtedly the work of a prominent West…

Glazed pink calf with the built-up polychrome armorials of the Starhemberg family, with gilt studded cornerpieces and a gilt spine divided by double false bands. Characterized as an Austrian bookbinding masterpiece, it remains anonymous and could be…

Margaret Lilian Simpson created this Art Nouveau electroplate silver cover at the National School of Art, South Kensington, London in December 1894. It won the gold medal in a national British competition. Six examples are recorded; its theme is…

May Morris, the daughter of William Morris and Jane Burden Morris, created this embroidered binding ca. 1888. The boards are covered in bright green ribbed silk, worked in a continuous pattern across the covers and spine of floral and leafy sprays…

Black tracery covers lined with red paper, a terra-cotta portrait of Shakespeare in a central cameo. Such covers are often misnamed gutta-percha or papier-mâché. These are made of much heavier caoutchouc (rubber or India rubber in French) and are…

Varnished and beveled papier-mâché exuberantly decorated black panels cover the publisher’s binding of stippled black leather. This may be the work of Henry R. Hoffman, successively of Albany and Manhattan, who, as the in-house binder for Carlton &…

Black goatskin, the covers gilt-tooled in a Grolieresque interlace pattern of leaves and tendrils, with a central arabesque containing the titling. It is the work of Rivière & Son, in Bath, dated 1899.

While the manuscript is dated A.H. 1199, the binding carries the date A.H. 1256 or 1840–1841 C.E. This Persian/Turkish Islamic binding of black goatskin is decorated with gold and red paint, with red & gold-speckled pale-green endleaves.