We all too often read books without noticing their bindings. Particularly when the books are old, brown volumes like those from Nicholas Crouch’s library. However, the binding as a physical object can tell so many stories: they are the products of seventeenth-century craftsmanship, and through the leather or the sewing structure, the decorated edges and the coloured endbands, we can read so much more beyond the pages.
Book conservators are well trained in how to read a book’s binding for clues as to its history. We trace materials and techniques to particular places and times, reading repairs and damage as indicators of how the object has been used. In conservation work, we document each object that comes into the studio: taking note of how it is sewn, its size, materials used. For the Nicholas Crouch project, the documentation took the form of digital spreadsheets, allowing us to build up a body of data on the collection. By the end of the project, we had documented 132 volumes. This data is now available to researchers by contacting Balliol Library.
One of Crouch’s legacies to us, are his detailed contents pages that list not only the items and their costs, but also the cost of the binding, and in some cases who the binder was and the date of the binding. By including these notes in the object documentation, we were able to link specific named binders with the decorative tools on the cover, sewing style, and edge decoration. These markers can be read like binders’ signatures, and by building up a body of data, patterns and comparisons could be drawn up throughout the collection. Here are some of the binders that can be traced in Crouch’s books
Dollive
Alum tawed sewing supports, sometimes cord; edge colouring on all edges.
Ingram
Alum tawed or tanned sewing supports; head and tail edges sprinkled, fore edge coloured (red, plain).
Terrill
Alum tawed sewing supports; edge colouring on all edges (blue, red, yellow)
Doe
Mostly cord sewing supports; head and tail edges sprinkled, for edge coloured (red, yellow)
By Nikki Tomkins
Project Conservator
Historic Collections @Balliol 
Fabulous. As a bookbinder and historian, it is hard to find those little details that are the binder’s signature if you don’t know what you are looking for.