The Perfume of Books

Imagine walking into an old secondhand bookstore; a smell hits your senses, perhaps bringing childhood memories to the fore. That is the smell of books breathing on the shelves. ""The Perfume of Books"" takes you on a bookbinding journey through the centuries.

What makes up a book? The history of bookbinding involves much more than materials and skills. The hard work that has gone into putting the book together remains a mystery to most of us. Binders today still use 400 year old techniques, just as potters or weavers may do.

Within the 1500 images in this book you will explore the evolution and diversity of bookbinding that few have been privileged to see. This journey will show you not only changes in what binders developed to keep information together in a comprehensive form, but also in how the interior of the book changed: how paragraphing changed over time and how the title page developed into the format we know today.

This is book 1 of the Booksleuth Series