Re: [BKARTS] craft standards, poor books

[barbara kretzmann <cutleaf7@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This interesting thread reminded me of an old query of mine.  There 
is a term in bookbinding known as "alla rustica."  When I was still 
quite new to bookbinding, I had a client who asked me to bind a book 
"alla rustica."  I had no idea what that meant, so I asked Don 
Etherington, not finding it in Bookbinding and the Conservation of 
Books.  Don wrote back that he had been unable to find any 
information on the term.  I much later asked Bernard Middleton who 
said it was a book bound in paper covers, in a simple style with no 
headbands, with rough cut edges.  In 1991, I found the term in 
Michele Valerie Cloonan's Early Bindings in Paper  to wit on page 57:

	"binding alla rustica.  This term was used in both the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe Italian paper-covered 
books made from heavy cover paper. 'The Italians do still continute 
to bind in a coarse thick paper, called binding alla rustica, in a 
clownish manner' (Postlethwayt, I, 1751).
	'In . . . binding alla rustica, a coarse thick paper is 
employed, which very soon wears out, unless it is used with the 
greatest care' (Horne, I (1814): 296)."

Cloonan has more on p. 26.

Barbara E. Kretzmann
The Cutleaf Bindery
117 Brandon Place
Ithaca, NY 14850-6115
607-272-8842
e-mail: cutleaf7@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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