Flemish and Related Panel-Stamped Bindings: Evidence and Principles

4to (28.5 cm). xviii, 253 pp, 42 plates. Publisher's cloth, upper board blocked in gilt with a Gothic Revival strapwork panel, spine lettered in gilt on a black morocco-style label (minor shelf-wear). First edition of this landmark study in codicology and the history of bookbinding, the standard modern reference on the large blind- and gilt-stamped panel tools that dominate Flemish and related Netherlandish bindings of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Best known among these are the celebrated "Spes" panels employed by the Louvain binders conventionally designated I.P. and I.B. Originally conceived as a monograph on the Spes panels alone, Fogelmark's investigation led him to conclude that virtually all scholarship since William Henry James Weale's pioneering study of 1894 rested upon a fundamental methodological misconception concerning the identification and classification of panel stamps. He therefore broadened the project into a comprehensive re-examination of the entire corpus, establishing a new evidential framework for the study of approximately one thousand surviving panel stamps and their impressions. The work offers an exceptionally rigorous technical methodology for the identification and attribution of panel-stamped bindings, analysing in detail nail holes and fastening patterns, press-work, registration and alignment defects, wear to the tools, blind shields, clichage, and the difficult question of distinguishing multiple impressions from separate states or issues of the same panel. The text is supported by 42 plates of comparative photographs and diagrams illustrating the author's methods and conclusions. The volume remains the indispensable reference for the study, description, attribution, and dating of Flemish panel-stamped bindings, and is essential for bibliographers, book historians, curators, conservators, and collectors of early European bindings.…