Suave Mechanicals

This is the seventh volume in the series and was originally published in 2022. The Suave Mechanicals series has been acclaimed internationally for its thought-provoking content related to bookbinding as practiced globally over millennia. ‘This volume of Suave Mechanicals is dedicated to Berthe van Regemorter (1879–1964). Those of us who study the structure of early codex bindings are indebted to the pioneers writing on these topics, beginning in the early part of the twentieth century – none more so than Berthe van Regemorter, who wrote a series of articles between 1946 and 1964 on a wide variety of historical binding types. She wrote about structure as much as decoration, a departure in itself. She is best described by binder, historian, and conservator Jane Greenfield, who translated Regemorter’s essays in Binding Structures in the Middle Ages: A Selection of Studies by Berthe van Regemorter (Brussels: Bibliotheca Wittockiana, 1992). Greenfield writes in the Preface to that work: ‘Berthe van Regemorter studied structure in more detail and wrote more prolifically than the few predecessors who had pointed out the road she was to follow, and which is followed by others – scholars and bookbinders – today. That she was a bookbinder, not a scholar writing about bookbinding, gave her an insight which cannot be gained by merely reading about bookbinding’.

This book is published by The Legacy Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

This edition is distributed by Archetype Publications outside of the Americas.