Diseño & Encuadernados Bookbinding HandMade, Spain

leather bound books 

The Island of Anarchy by E W [E Waterhouse] -

Rare First Edition 1887 Utopian novel which features religious fervor and an anarchist exile community on a south sea island

marked covers of Dr Nikola by Guy Boothby 1896

Wood Engraving Wednesday

Here are a few delightful wood engravings from a recent gift showing the various processes that go into binding a book. This little pamphlet is entitled A Short History of Bookbinding and a Glossary of Styles and Terms Used in Binding … .printed in London at the Chiswick Press for the bookbinder Joseph William Zaehnsdorf in 1895.These images were probably printed from metal plates that were made from the original wood engravings. The engravings are not attributed, as was the case for most commercial engravings.

Click or tap on the images to see the definitions for these activities as provided in the booklet’s glossary. 

I IMPLORE you, please stop it with this kind of binding on books! As a reader I hate these, and as a bookbinder I hate these!!

The name for this nonsense is a Swiss binding, btw.

The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan 

Illustrated by Hugh Thomson

The Beauty of Flowers in Field and Wood containing the natural orders or families of British Wild Plants with moral teachings illustrated designed to make botany simple and field and wood rambles instructive and agreeable John Thoedore Barker Bath Binns and Goodwin - no date [1852] London Whittaker and Co

#Wordy Wednesday

The English house-wife : containing the inward and outward vertues which ought to be in a compleate woman. As her skill in physick, surgery, cookery, extraction of oyles, banquetting stuffe, ordering of great feasts, preserving of all sorts of wines, conceited secrets, distilations, perfumes, ordering of wooll, hempe, flax, making cloth, and dying: the knowledge of dayries, office of malting, of oates, their excellent uses in a family, of brewing, baking, and all other things belonging to an houshold. A worke generally approved, and now the fifth time much augmented, purged and made most profitable and necessary for all men, and the generall good of this Kingdome. By G.M. [Gervase Markham]

London : Printed by Anne Griffin for Iohn Harrison, at the Golden Vnicorne in Pater-noster-row, 1637.

unusual painted book binding - oil on leather 

Little Isaac Bawden was quite the calligrapher! 🖌️ This 1763 arithmetic book shows off his flourishing skills. The later 1880s Golden Gems of Penmanship, published during the calligraphy revival of the 19th century, allows us to see how Isaac learned this art! Isaac’s book has been digitized, and you can find it here 📖