Bookbinding & The Art of Royal Bookbinding

Bookbinding and book restoration

"The trade of a Bookbinder has been ranked among the most difficult of the arts.....
.... The appearance of a book, to a casual observer, seems to require little talent, but if the various subdivisions of the work (which form not less than sixty) are considered, and in the proper execution, of which consists the Art of Bookbinding, it will not be surprising to find how few men have arrived at eminence in it". John Hannett "Bibliopegia" 1831.

Paul Tronson is a Master Bookbinder who specializes in traditional bookbinding and book restoration in the ancient styles of the great masters, with materials that cannot be bought but are hand made using their exacting techniques and formulae.

The book pictured below, was restored and bound at  the workshop of Period Fine Bindings, it is a 1st Edition of Dugdale's Warwickshire 1656, a fastback binding, flexibly sewn on raised cords with laced-in boards. Bound in a white calf and hand coloured using vegetable dyes.  Richly gilt using over 3000 individual impressions of tools of the Charles II /Cromwell period and finished with the same genius of the Royal Binder - William Nott who is thought to have first executed this design.
G.D.Hobson gave the name "Queens' Binder" to the craftsman who was thought to have bound for both Catherine of Braganza and Mary of Modena. Howard Nixon took it further and shown that three binders were involved and called them Queens' binder A, Queens' binder B and Queens' binder C. Queens' binder A was more prolific but B was the better craftsman of the two, Nixon's research went on to suggest that Queens' binder A was in fact William Nott " the famous bookbinder that bound for my Lord Chancellor's library", visited by Pepys on 12 March 1668/9.
Pepys added: "Here I take occasion for curiosity to bespake a book to be bound only that I might have one of his bindings"