Bookbindings Academy 2026 – Day 1
Organized by: Belgian-Dutch Bookbindings Society and CERL
Speaker(s): Daphne Wouts,Mitchel Gundrum
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
Friday 16 January 2026
- Mitchel Gundrum (Huntington Library, Pasadena) – ‘In secret and at high speed’: Anselme Faust’s 1612 Beschrijvinghe/Prescription, Europe’s Earliest Bookbinding Manual
- 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
- Daphne Wouts (Leiden University) – A special bookbinding by Louis Elzevier in the town library of Enkhuizen (Netherlands): the presentation copies of Martinus Smetius’ Inscriptionum liber (1588)
- Abstract: In Enkhuizen, a city located in the province of North Holland, a seventeenth-century town library is preserved in the Westerkerk. The history of this library was the subject of the dissertation of Daphne Wouts. She also compiled a catalogue of the collection, for which she studied all the books from the library’s holdings. In this presentation, Daphne will talk about one specific book from the collection: Martinus Smetius’ Inscriptionum liber (Leiden: Franciscus Raphelengius, 1588). This book is one of fifteen presentation copies with a bookbinding by Louis Elzevier. Daphne will tell the story behind this binding, which is also the subject of an article that will be published in the yearbook of the Dutch Society of Bibliophiles.
