A Bookbinder's Miscellany: Essays on fine binding with an introduction by Sam Ellenport

8vo (23.5 cm), XVII, 114 pp, plates. Publisher's cloth, gilt-lettered front board and spine. A collection of twenty-two essays and articles by Bernard C. Middleton (1924-2018), the celebrated London bookbinder and author of A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique (1963) and The Restoration of Leather Bindings (1972), gathering together pieces mostly written in the mid-twentieth century that had long lain scattered and out of print in obscure periodicals, together with two essays written specially for this volume. The contents range from technical instruction -- "Notes on the Hand Sewing of Books," "The Supported French Groove," "The Art of Covering with Leather" -- to critical and reflective pieces on the state of the craft, including "The Trade Versus The Rest," "Controversial Thoughts on the Decoration of Fine Bindings," "Fine Bindings: the Present and the Future," and "Sixty Years of Progress and Decline," as well as book reviews, an essay on eighteenth-century Irish feather-tooled bindings, notes on craft bookbinding in Paris, and a memorial tribute to fellow binder Thomas Harrison. In his introduction, publisher Sam Ellenport situates Middleton's career against the vanished world of large post-war binderies and formal apprenticeship, crediting Middleton, alongside a handful of contemporaries, with helping to establish the modern tradition of independent "design binding". A prefatory note by Alan Isaac describes Middleton, still working in his nineties in Clapham, London, as a figure of "totemic appeal to the tribe of binders." Illustrated with photographs including a portrait of Middleton in his study. A valuable primary-source collection for the history and practice of twentieth-century English hand bookbinding.…