Meeting by Accident

Research into the history of the book and bookbinding makes our historical bindings relevant again and makes them better company. Studying and understanding and identifying and describing give us more information to consider when we must make decisions about our historical books. Accumulating this information most affects our great institutional collections, and to an extent, private collections, because the custodians of those collections have often tried to pay attention to issues of rarity and importance beyond content. There is certainly a growing and very welcome and broader interest today about the whole book (text and binding), its materials and structures, and the ways that time and use mark books, all books. Custodians and scholars have both arrived at the point where they realize materiality and marking are equally important, and sometimes are just as important as content, for understanding the impact of books on culture, and culture on books. Important research is being done on every type of historical binding practice, and it is clearly becoming easier for scholars to find each other, to find the books they are interested in studying, and to publish and share information.