{"id":622,"date":"2012-03-16T20:06:03","date_gmt":"2012-03-16T20:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/?p=622"},"modified":"2012-03-30T14:34:34","modified_gmt":"2012-03-30T14:34:34","slug":"incunable-bindings-at-the-watkinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/2012\/03\/16\/incunable-bindings-at-the-watkinson\/","title":{"rendered":"Incunable bindings at the Watkinson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We have been delighted to welcome Scott Husby, former book conservator at Princeton University and for years prior to that a professional bookbinder under his own shingle.\u00a0 Scott is working on a retirement project which will be a truly vital resource for book history: a database of “incunable” bindings–that is, bindings on books printed before 1501 (termed incunabula<\/em>, Latin for “cradle,” referring to the early period of printing in Europe between 1450 and 1500).<\/p>\n

Scott has visited over 30 libraries and described the bindings of over 23,000 volumes.\u00a0 He has taken photographs, but more importantly for identification purposes, rubbings<\/em> of bindings which are contemporary with their contents:\u00a0 placing a piece of acid-free paper over the binding and rubbing lightly with pencil reveals many tooling marks that you cannot see as well with a photo; one can identify most of the 15thC binderies by their tools.\u00a0 \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Scott is also making note of later bindings, and dating them when possible, so his database is also a record of what has been done with these books over the centuries.<\/p>\n

The book he is working on in the pics shown here is a 1495 edition of the commentaries on the epistles of Paul by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), and bears the bookplate of the Buxheim Library<\/a>, which was dispersed in 1883.\"\"<\/a> Shown here also is the front cover and the first page of text, where you can see a blank space reserved for a larger painted initial letter which was never completed.\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have been delighted to welcome Scott Husby, former book conservator at Princeton University and for years prior to that a professional bookbinder under his own shingle.\u00a0 Scott is working on a retirement project which will be a truly vital resource for book history: a database of “incunable” bindings–that is, bindings on books printed before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":659,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622\/revisions\/659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}