Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books
A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology

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Leighton, Archibald ( 1784-1841 )

An English bookbinder who is generally credited with the introduction of the first practical cloth for covering books. Although William Pickering may have introduced cloth earlier, and though woven flax canvas had been used for covering school books in England as early as 1770, it was not until about 1823 that a cloth more-or-less impervious to glue was used as a covering material. Leighton's first cloth was a dyed and glazed calico, with a starch filler. He dyed, stiffened, and patterned small rolls of calico in his own shop, and, by 1832. was embossing cloth with die-stamped patterns, and even blocking cloth with gold leaf. (89 , 236 , 286 )




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