Bookbindings Academy 2025 – Day 2
Organized by: Belgian-Dutch Bookbindings Society and CERL
Speaker(s): Élodie Lévêque,Zanna Van Loon
Bookbindings Academy is an annual, free online event to share the results of bookbindings research with an international audience. The goals are to share knowledge on bookbindings internationally and to create more possibilities for future international collaboration to increase that knowledge. The Bookbindings Academy is an annual event, and warmly invites researchers to contact us when they have interesting research to present.
Programme
14 February 2025
- Élodie Lévêque (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) – The use of Wild Animal skins on Carolingian Bindings: origin and manufacture
- Abstract: Prepared by the German bookbinder Anshelmus Faust for the monks of St. Bernard’s Abbey in Antwerp in 1612, Beschrijvinghe des Boeckbinders Handwerck/Prescription de la Manifacture des Relieurs is the earliest known manual on European bookbinding methods. Translation of the tools, materials, tools, techniques, and preparations described in Faust’s manuscript will provide bookbinders, print historians, curators, and conservators with a critical firsthand perspective on 16th- and 17th-century bookbinding traditions and consequently help to contextualize the development of book production across Europe in the early modern era.
- Zanna Van Loon – Tracing the hidden trade: the role of Antwerp bookbinders in the bookselling business of the Officina Plantiniana
- Abstract: Even though their work is still tangible in surviving books bound in leather, paper, or parchment covers, early modern bookbinders are often historically overlooked owing to insufficient documentary evidence. As artisans, they provided essential on-demand services that ensured the books’ physical integrity. The close-knit network of Antwerp bookbinders played an important role in the book trade industry of the Officiana Plantiniana, fostering a symbiotic relationship between printing, selling, and binding that was central to the success of the printing office in a competitive and bustling market.
