Suave Mechanicals

This volume is dedicated to the work of Bernard C. Middleton, MBE, who died in January 2019. In the dedicatory section, the voices of numerous friends and colleagues are present, and they, in various ways, tell us a lot about Middleton and his contributions to the history and practice of hand bookbinding.

This is the sixth volume in the series and was originally published in 2020. The Suave Mechanicals series has been acclaimed internationally for its thought-provoking content related to bookbinding as practiced globally over millennia. Vol. 6 is dedicated to the ‘memory and work of Bernard C. Middleton, MBE, who died in January 2019. In the dedicatory section, the voices of numerous friends and colleagues are present, and they, in various ways, tell us a lot about Middleton and his immense contributions to the history and practice of hand bookbinding, and what a kind, generous man and teacher he was. Many thanks to Olivia Primanis for the time and devotion she brought to organizing and collecting these remembrances’.

Olivia Primanis, ‘Remembrances: Bernard C. Middleton (1924–2019)’; Julia Miller, ‘Editor’s Preface’; Morgan Simms Adams, ‘Identifying Evidence of Textile Curtains in Medieval Manuscripts in the Morgan Library & Museum’; Katherine Beaty, ‘Tackets, Buckles, and Overbands: Italian Stationery Bindings of the HBS Medici Family Collection’; Elise Hochhalter and Giselle Simón, ‘Life So Far: A Book Model Collection’; Karen Jutzi, ‘A Late Coptic Binding with Bridled Leather Boards’; Consuela Metzger, Erin Hammeke and Alexander L. Ames, ‘The Faith that Binds: Swiss Anabaptist Devotional Bookbindings in Early America’; Julia Miller, ‘Modeling Ambiguity: The al-Mudil Codex (David Psalter)’; Holly Prochaska and Ashleigh Ferguson Schieszer, ‘Adding Value: Increasing Access and Visibility to Historic Binding Structures’; Randy Silverman, ‘Bernard C. Middleton, MBE (1924–2019): A Biography and Bibliography’; Shannon Zachary, ‘The Peculiar Impossibility of the Square-Back, Stiff-Spine Case Binding’; bibliographies and index.

• Edited by Julia Miller