Lecture on American scaleboard bindings

Please join the New York Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers for a
lecture with Julia Miller:

Lecture:

"American Scaleboard Bindings:  Not Just Another Beautiful Book"
at The New York Academy of Medicine
NYAM Room 21
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
6-7pm

For more information or to register, please email
newyork<-a t->guildofbookworkers< . >org

Drawing from her study of 350 scaleboard bindings in the collection
of The Library Company and several hundred more in the William L.
Clements Library (Americana) at the University of Michigan, Julia
Miller will discuss the variety of structural elements and material
combinations used on American imprints bound in scaleboard.

Scaleboard, also known as scabbard, is thin wood that was used for
bindings in Europe and Britain until around 1600 (and much less so
thereafter).  The material was incorporated into American bindings
as early as the 1680s (and probably earlier) and continued in use
until at least the 1840s.  Scaleboard was used in place of paste or
pulpboard long after those materials were widely available in
America.

Scaleboard bindings have received scant attention in the literature
on American bindings.  Through her research and presentations, Julia
aims to increase awareness of these bindings on the part of
collection custodians, as well as collectors of Americana, and to
increase the identification and description of these bindings in
research collection cataloguing.

Lecture Fee:  $5 (GBW members)/$10 (non-members)

Speaker Bio:

    Julia Miller is a bench-trained book conservator and was a
    senior conservator in the University of Michigan Conservation
    and Book Repair lab for many years.  She has been in private
    practice since 1994 and for the last decade has concentrated on
    the study of historical bindings, building a private research
    and teaching collection to further that interest.  In 2008, she
    received a Samuel H. Kress conservation publication fellowship
    administered by FAIC that enabled her to write a book on
    historical bindings:  Books Will Speak Plain:  A handbook for
    identifying and describing historical bindings, which was
    published by The Legacy Press in December 2010.   During the
    fall of 2010 she received a Mellon Fellowship at The Library
    Company in Philadelphia to study American scaleboard bindings
    and is preparing an article on that topic.  She is currently
    editing a collection of essays by different scholars on various
    aspects of the history of bookbinding that will be published in
    2012.  She has been guest curator for three exhibits on the
    history of the codex:  Suave Mechanicals:  Early to Modern
    Binding Styles in 2003; Elegant to Eccentric:  Bindings from the
    Main Room of the William L. Clements Library in 2007; and
    Historical Bookbindings: A Thousand Years of Structure and Style
    in 2011.

Please find directions to The New York Academy of Medicine here:

    <URL:http://www.nyam.org/about-us/directions.html>

Erin Albritton
GBW NY Chapter Chair


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 25:14
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