Welcome to this, the third and final installment of our historical rebinding of Johnson's Dictionary Improved by Todd, Boston, 1828. At the end of Part 2, we had just finished covering the fully disbound, washed, mended, and resewn textblock in new full calfskin. This post will walk through the traditional leather staining, gold-tooling, and final touches undertaken to bring the binding to completion.
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Welcome to Part 2 of our historical rebinding of Johnson's Dictionary Improved by Todd, published in Boston in 1828. Last week, at the close of Part 1, our dictionary had been removed from its original decrepit covers, washed, guarded, mended, and reassembled into the neat little textblock pictured above. This week, we finally moved our project from loose leaves back into a bound state, and what a pleasure it is to be back in one piece!
Just as the leaves began to change here in Boston, swashing an already beautiful skyline with a whole new set of colors, our studies at NBSS transitioned from the millimeter bindings of the early 20th century to the full calf bindings of the 18th. Sewn on raised or recessed cords, trimmed in boards, covered with undyed skin and stained with mild acids after covering, the structure was as foreign as it was satisfying to complete. After a few models to get a hang of the processes, I decided to dive into my own collection and rebind a sorry volume of my own from the early 19th century in this style, repeating many of the binding processes that it had first undergone nearly 200 years ago.
You'll have to excuse the awful pun headline, but I just can't start writing out a post without having one down. I groaned audibly at this one myself; hopefully, now that it's out there, the content it introduces will justify it somewhat. After the initial demo and exploratory class period, I've spent a number of evenings trying my hand at paste paper production. Wheat paste has strong associations with the street art movement as a means of 'permanently' attaching posters and flyers to walls and street posts. In the 18th and 19th century Europe, however, it maintained a more 'respectable' status as style of paper decoration and book covering — a somewhat 'folkier' alternative to the Turkish and Italian marbled papers popular at the time.
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