Arcadian Library: Bindings and Provenance

The Arcadian Library, based in London, is one of the finest collections of books reflecting European interest in the Arab and Islamic worlds. Among its c.10,000 volumes are many copies with important provenances and fine bindings. In this companion volume to no. 8 in the series, six distinguished authorities on the history of book-collecting and the ownership and use of books, and the history of bookbinding, deal with significant aspects of the Library's holdingsfrom these varied perspectives. The two opening essays, by Alastair Hamilton and Giles Mandelbrote, survey, respectively, notable European and British provenances, including royal, princely, aristocratic and learned owners, celebrated later collectors, and some remarkable annotated copies and copies associated with their authors. P.J.M. Marks describes and analyses a wide range of European decorative bindings, with particular emphasis on early German bindings, French work from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and the production of nineteenth-century England. Anthony Hobson examines three magnificent sixteenth-century bindings à la fanfare, identifying them as the work of an exceptionally talented binder in the milieu of Gommar Estienne in Paris. John-Paul Ghobrial studies the products of the famous Melkite monastery at Shuwayr in Lebanon, and reveals the mix of European and indigenous influences that moulded the style of the local binders. Finally, Nicholas Pickwoad examines a range of commercial binding structures and materials, deploying close physical inspection and forging a precise terminology to reveal careful craftsmanship and technical innovation. Finally, Willem de Bruijn examines a selection of decorative endpapers.The scholarly essays in this volume are complemented by a very large number of specially commissioned photographs, making available a wealth of comparative evidence and new examples of particular bindings, details of decoration, inscriptions and marks of ownership.

This is a lavishly produced book, in large folio format, and it will be valued and consulted not only for its text, but also for the generous provision of colour illustrations of inscriptions, bookplates, ink stamps, and bindings details which run throughout its chapters., magnificent, captures this zeitgeist perfectly ... it is beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated ... Bindings and Provenace is first and foremost a work of scolarly reference

Giles Mandelbrote was appointed Librarian and Archivist of Lambeth Palace Library in 2010, after working for some years at the British Library. Among his publications are Out of Print & Into Profit: A History of the Rare and Secondhand Book Trade in Britain in the 20th Century (2006), as well as the second volume (1640-1850) of The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (2006), edited jointly with K.A. Manley. More recently hecontributed to and edited (with Barry Taylor) Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library's Printed Collections (2009). He is an honorary Senior Research Fellow of King's College, London, and one of the convenors of the annual London conference on book trade history. At present his research is mainlyconcerned with the book trade in early modern Europe and with book ownership and collecting in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Dr Willem de Bruijn is a Research Associate at The Arcadian Library, London. He studied architecture in the Netherlands and in 2010 obtained a doctorate in History and Theory of Architecture from The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research focuses on the role of the book in architecture, where it has always been both a vehicle for the dissemination of ideas and an object of experimentation - graphic, material and spatial. De Bruijn has published a number of articles relating to hisresearch and is currently working on a book that looks at the typographic ornamentation in Palladio's Quattro libri dell'architettura. He also practices bookbinding. Dr John-Paul Ghobrial is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He works on exchanges between early modern Europe and the Middle East, with a particular interest in Eastern Christians. He is currently writing a book about the first Arabic account of the New World. Alastair Hamilton, former C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute Professor of the History of Ideas at Leiden University and Professor emeritus of the History of the Radical Reformation at the University of Amsterdam, is the Arcadian Visiting Research Professor at the School of Advanced Study, London University, attached to the Warburg Institute. He has worked for many years on relations between Europe and the Arab and Islamic worlds, and his most recent publications include The Copts and the West1439-1822: The European Discovery of the Egyptian Church (2006), An Arabian Utopia: The Western Discovery of Oman (2010), and The Arcadian Library: Western Appreciation of Arab and Islamic Civilization (2011). Anthony Hobson is a historian of the book, with a special interest in Italian books and bindings of the period 1450-1550. He has published a trilogy on certain collectors and their bindings, and is working on a history of Italian bindings of this period. P.J.M. Marks is a curator at the British Library, where her work includes expanding the Library's online image database of bookbindings, begun in 1996. She has published general works on