Suave Mechanicals

This volume is dedicated to honor ‘those who participated in the 1966 Florence Flood recovery; those who subsequently studied historical bindings and took lessons from them.

This is the third volume in the series and was originally published in 2016. The Suave Mechanicals series has been acclaimed internationally for its thought-provoking content related to bookbinding as practiced globally over millennia. This volume is dedicated to honor ‘those who participated in the 1966 Florence Flood recovery; those who subsequently studied historical bindings and took lessons from them; and János A. Szirmai (1925–December 2014) who spent a lifetime showing us how to understand and document such books, reminding us that we must think and judge carefully before we make choices that change them forever’.

Julia Miller, ‘Editor’s Preface’; Erin Albritton and Christine Amato, ‘A Study of Two Semi-Limp Parchment Binding Styles in the Rare Book Collection at The New York Academy of Medicine Library’; Ruth Bardenstein, ‘Historical Bindings of the Chamberlain-Warren Samaritan Collection’; Ana Beny and Kristine Rose Beers, ‘An Inspiration for Conservation: An Historic Andalusi Binding Structure’; Ashley Cataldo, ‘“A Swarm of Binders”: Isaiah Thomas’s Bookbinding Network, 1782–1818’; Marco di Bella, ‘From Box Binding to Envelope-Flap Binding: The Missing Link in Transitional Islamic Bookbinding’; Louise L. Foster, ‘The Nineteenth-Century American Pocket Diary’; Bill Hanscom, ‘Towards a Morphology of the Ethiopian Book Satchel’; Hedi Kyle, ‘The Fold: Evolution, Function, and Inspiration’; Arielle Middleman and Todd Pattison, ‘Benjamin Bradley and the “Profitable Stroke”: Binding Six Months in a Convent and the Need for Copy-Specific Cataloging of Nineteenth-Century Publishers’ Bindings’; bibliographies and index

• Edited by Julia Miller