Ligatus Summer School

Ligatus Summer School on historic bookbinding 2015

"The History of European Bookbinding 1450-1830"
14-18 September 2015

"Identifying and recording bookbinding structures of the Eastern
    Mediterranean"
21-25 September 2015

    <URL:http://www.ligatus.org.uk/summerschool>

This year's Ligatus Summer School will take place in the beautiful
city of Zagreb in Croatia, and will be hosted by the Croatian State
Archives.

This year's summer school has been solely funded by the hosting
institution.  We regret that there will be no opportunity to apply
for this year's summer school on the Ligatus website because all
places have already been filled.

Summer school context: The contribution that bindings can make to
our understanding of the history and culture of the book is often
neglected, but they can offer insights into the study of readership,
the book trade, and the provenance of books that are often not
available elsewhere.  In order to realise this potential, it is
important to understand not only the history of the craft but also
to learn how to record what is seen in a consistent and organised
way.  Librarians, cataloguers, conservators, book historians, book
collectors and all scholars who work with early books, can benefit
therefore from understanding the structure and materials of the
bindings they encounter in order to be able to record and describe
them.  Such descriptions of bindings are not only valuable for the
management of library collections, pursuing academic research and
making informed decisions about conservation, but are also important
for digitisation projects, as they can radically enrich the
potential of image and text metadata.  It is our belief that
bindings should be seen as an integral part of the book, without
which, our understanding of the history and use of books is often
greatly circumscribed.

The main purpose of the summer school is to uncover the
possibilities latent in the detailed study of bookbinding.  While
our courses concentrate in particular on the structure and materials
of bookbindings, each of the courses offered in this summer school
looks at bindings from different geographical areas and with a
different approach.  The first course looks at the history of
bookbinding as it was carried out in Europe in the period of the
hand press (1450-1830), with the opportunity to look at examples
from different collections during the afternoons.  The second course
looks at the development of bookbinding in the eastern Mediterranean
and gives instruction in a) the development manufacture of specific
aspects of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine bindings and b) the
development of methodologies and tools for recording bindings,
working with examples from the collections in Zagreb.

Dr. Athanasios Velios
Ligatus
University of the Arts London
+44 2075146432


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