| Abstract: | Summaries. Bibliographical analysis depends on using evidence preserved in copies of a book to demonstrate how it was produced, but many sorts of vital evidence can be obliterated by conventional methods of repair or rebinding. Librarians and collectors have accepted the high-class trade bindings of the late nineteenth century as the norm without recognizing the extent to which they destroy evidence and are themselves unsatisfactory for their purpose. More flexible bindings which do not hide the construction of a book, like English limp vellum bindings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, show the bibliographer all he or she wants to see and at the same time can be almost indestructible. |
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