Workshop Content by Day

Daily schedule: 9am to 4pm. Lunch and other breaks will vary from day-to-day. We will provide attendees with a detailed schedule.

Julia Miller will be the presenter unless otherwise noted.

Monday

Welcome breakfast and introductions
Opening remarks from Martha Conway, Director, Special Collections Research Center
Workshop overview
Special lecture by Marieka Kaye — Exploring Plant-Based Substrates Beyond Paper
Special lecture by Amy Crist — Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Bookmaking: Structures, Materials, Techniques
The early Coptic codex, 3rd to 6th century
- The tablet as proto-codex?
- A period of structural experimentation utilizing papyrus, parchment, and leather to create single- and multi-quire codices in various formats.
- Stays, guards, tackets, stabbing, and unsupported link-style sewing to attach texts; semi-limp leather covers lined with papyrus.
Focus on the Nag Hammadi Codices.

The mid-millennial Coptic codex, 5th and 6th century
- Parchment text substrates; unsupported link sewing, spine linings, evidence of endbands; leather spines and wooden boards, full leather and papyrus boards: proto-case bindings?
- Wrapping bands with bone slips, and bookmark attachments.
- More elaborate decoration.
The development of late-Coptic bindings, 7th to 12th century and beyond
- Often-large multi-quire manuscripts, usually written on parchment; more complex binding structures: sewing, hinged board attachment, spine linings, endbanding, and edge attachments; more elaborate and complex cover decoration.
- Coptic and Arabic binding – transitions.
Special lecture by Evyn Kropf: Exploring bindings and book structures of Islamic manuscripts

Who influenced whom?
- Traditional Ethiopic sewn-board binding structures and protective enclosures.
- The pesky anomaly of St. Cuthbert’s Gospel of St. John (the Stonyhurst Gospel) in England.
- Hebrew scrolls, Hebrew bindings: adaptation, loss, and conjecture.
Tradition and individuality: Greek binding structures
- Influences from Ethiopic and Coptic bindings; the Byzantine quandary; traditional Greek and “hybrid” Greek structure.
Moving West
- The missing link? Armenian binding structure and the appearance of supported sewing; influence moving from the West to the Near East?
- Western binding and the dominance of supported sewing and laced-on wooden-boards: Carolingian, Romanesque, and early medieval bindings.
Everywhere all at once and for a long time after.
- Medieval and later gothic bindings, the incunable period and beyond.
- Why so many gothic bindings survive: the numbers made, and their sturdy structures?

Some Pre-Colonial Book forms and South and North American Colonial and Post-Colonial Bindings
American binding continued – eighteenth-century binders, binderies, and bindings
Special lecture by Shannon Zachary — Faster, Cheaper, Prettier: Bookmaking in the Nineteenth Century (Book Structures)
Special lecture by Cathleen Baker — Faster, Cheaper, Prettier: Bookmaking in the Nineteenth Century (Cover Design and Technology)
Closing reception and farewells