This course provides practical guidance on identifying, dating and appreciating bindings on handpress-period books, describing the characteristics which enable simple as well as upmarket bindings to be recognised. It focuses on readily visible features, rather than internal structures, while covering the materials used to make bindings, and how to recognise them. English bindings form the backbone of the course, but continental European ones are brought in to compare, contrast, and set the wider context. “What are the questions I should ask, when looking at a historic binding?” is a theme that runs through the course, and students should come to the end of the week better equipped to both pose and answer those questions.

Teaching comprises a mixture of illustrated lectures, exercises, and hands-on sessions with historic books. A highlight of the course will be its ability to draw on the outstanding collection of over 5000 early English books formed by John Emmerson, given to State Library Victoria in 2015, and participants will have the opportunity to see and handle many examples.

AUD$1000 (10% concession rate available for concession card holders)

Prospective attendees will be notified quickly of the outcome of the application, and successful applicants will be provided with a registration and payment link. Payment is required by 12 January 2024 to secure your place.

David Pearson retired in 2017 as Director of Culture, Heritage & Libraries for the City of London Corporation, after a long career in libraries and collections, mostly in London. Since then he has concentrated on work as a book historian, with particular emphasis on ways in which books have been owned, used and bound. He is widely acknowledged as an expert on historic bookbindings and his book English Bookbinding Styles 1450-1800 (2005, reprinted 2014) provides guidance on recognising and dating bindings of many kinds. His other books on bindings, complemented by many journal articles, include Oxford Bookbinding 1500-1640 (2000) and Cambridge Bookbinding 1450-1770 (2023). His 1994 handbook on Provenance Research in Book History (new edition, 2019) is also a standard work of reference.

He has lectured and taught extensively in these fields and has for many years been a faculty member of the Rare Book Schools in Virginia and London. He was Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford in 2017-18 (the lectures published as Book Ownership in Stuart England, 2021) and Sandars Reader at Cambridge in 2022-23. He is a Past President of the Bibliographical Society of London and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. He is also an advocate for wider public engagement around appreciating books as material objects, beyond their words alone, and his Books as History (2008) and Speaking Volumes: Books with Histories (2022) aim to present those ideas in accessible ways.

The course is aimed at anyone who works regularly with historic books in which English and European bindings are likely to feature librarians and curators, humanities researchers, collectors and dealers. It is not a practical course to learn how to bind, and its philosophy is book historical, not art historical – it will cover bindings of all kinds, the cheap, temporary and simple as well as the extravagant and luxurious.