Many of the early printed books in the Mortimer Rare Book Room have been rebound in the course of their long lives, some of them several times: fragile materials, fire and water, invading armies, changes in fashion, and simple carelessness all conspire to wreak havoc on the coverings of books.
When the rather ordinary 19th-century vellum binding on our one-millionth volume, the Letters of St. Catherine of Siena (printed by Aldus Manutius in 1500), finally fell apart recently, we commissioned a local bookbinding conservator, Peter Geraty of Praxis Bookbindery in Easthampton, Massachusetts, to design and execute a new one. His charge was to create a binding that a Renaissance collector might have put on a newly-acquired treasure such as this.
The magnificent outcome of Mr. Geraty's labors is this full morocco leather binding, hand-tooled in gold, in a design derived from bindings made for one of the most important bibliophiles of the 16th century, Jean Grolier, whose famous library contained many books printed by Aldus. Geraty made a careful study of Renaissance bindings and had an entire set of individual brass tools made for his "Grolieresque" re-creation. These tools then came along with the freshly-bound book, snugly laid into their own private compartment in the folding clamshell box: they are an effective and vivid way to teach undergraduates about early bookbinding techniques.
This beautiful St. Catherine is now cloaked in raiment befitting its status as our one-millionth volume and as one of the greatest of Italian Renaissance books. The inscription running along the bottom reads in English: Peter the bookbinder, at the expense of Martin the curator, made this in 2008.
