“Bound to Disappear: Describing Aspects of our ‘Invisible’ Bookbinding History”

Julia Miller, author of Books Will Speak Plain: A Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings, will present the 2015 UICB Mitchell Lecture on the Art of the Book, “Bound to Disappear: Describing Aspects of our ‘Invisible’ Bookbinding History”, Thursday, April 2 at 5:00pm in E105 Adler Journalism Bldg. The lecture will look at the motivation behind Julia Miller’s second book, working title Bound to Disappear, about categorizing and describing groups of bindings that have generally been ignored in reference works on the history of hand bookbinding. Some of these bindings belong to obscure and perhaps dead end branches of the history of hand bookbinding. Other binding types may have been examined and described in brief but often deserve a closer look, particularly many early colonial and post-colonial American bindings. The lecture will be supported by a power point presentation illustrating some of the binding types profiled in Bound to Disappear. Bindings from Miller’s teaching collection representing some of these historical binding types will be available after the lecture for the audience to examine and discuss.

Julia Miller is a bench-trained conservator who studies and writes about historical binding structures. She is the author of Books Will Speak Plain: A Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings, now in a revised second edition, published in 2010 and 2014 by The Legacy Press. She authored a typology of American scaleboard bindings in Volume I of Suave Mechanicals – Essays on the History of Bookbinding published in 2013, and serves as editor for the series. She is currently working on a second book, Bound to Disappear, devoted to describing a variety of binding types and structures that have received little or no attention in scholarly writing on the history of bookbinding.