Girdle book (part 4)

It's time to update some of my "work in progress" posts, so here is something about the little girdle book again.

First of all, it turned out quite different from what I originally had in mind...

I decided against a cover made of silk for two reasons:

The friend that is going to use it is a craftsperson, not a rich member oft nobility. So a book bound in silk might be a little bit over the edge - and then I found this picture of a very cute girdle book with a striped leather cover that we both liked very much.

Decision made :-)

The girdle book bound in silk is not totally off my agenda though - I just somehow moved it from the to-do-list onto the wishlist ;-) Now I have to find the perfect text for it. Maybe it's going to be the catechism the Dance of Death is from...  

Back to the little girdle book:

The leather I was going to use for the cover is a very smooth, cream coloured sheeps leather tanned with oxalic acid. Unfortunately, dirty fingerprints stay on easily...

Normally books are blindtooled after attaching the leather to the boards - but here I had to do the blindtooling first. The parallel lines were drawn with a heated blunt knive (really blunt, not only "not really sharp"!) along a wooden ruler. That worked quite nicely and I hope it won't wear off during use.

I glued the leather to the wooden boards with animal glue, which has a great advantage here: You don't have to soak the leather with glue as with wheatpaste, you just apply the glue to the boards.

This way its a lot easier to make sure the blindtooled lines stay parallel than with wobbly wet leather :-) 

On the top and on the sides of the boards the leather was folded around the edges and glued to the inside of the board. Extant leather on the corner was cut away and the edges were additionaly secured by sewing (I don't have a picture at the moment). At the top of the back the leather was folded inside and glued in place so that you can see the silk wrapped headband. 

Five little cast flowers were riveted to the boards as both decoration and protection for the leather surface. Now I have to attach the clasp (you can already see the holes for the nails in the picture above) and finish the loose part of the leather with a cord just like on the original or gather it in a turks head knot - depends on the future owners choice :-)

Girdle book (part 3)

Here are the dirty details as promised in part 1 :-)

First, an overall view of the book, lying on the cream-coloured chamois I'm going to use for the inner book cover, under the textile book cover that really forms the Beutelbuch.
You can see the three raised bands on the spine, that is the hemp cords the sections are sewn onto. The ends of the cords were frayed so they really lie flat when pasted to the oak boards. At the ends of the spine you can see additional cords called headbands. Those were sewn onto the spine ends after sewing the sections to the raised bands. At this time, they don't look very decorative as you can see in the next foto:

 It's just a plain cord lying on top of the pages...

"What for?" you may ask - but this is just the first step :-)
The headbands are used for different purposes. On some books, the leather cover is sewn to them to fix it and to protect the spine from dirt. Not very pretty, but usefull...
The headbands can also be a decoration AND a protection for the book, when headband and leather cover are fixed together not with plain sewing but with one or more strips of leather braided over the headband and through the leather of the cover. This very prominent braid can be the same colour as the leather or a contrasting colour or it can even be a multicoloured design.
But those leather braided headband are not very practical if you want to put a book upright on a shelve as it is normal today...

For a girdle book, this also does not work, at least not for the outer cover.
The next option is to wrap the headband with thread before you cover the boards with leather - and this is what I  did here. As the outer cover is going to be silk fabric, I used silk thread instead of the more common red and white linnen thread for the headbands.

The actual design is not taken from a surviving book, this is just my idea what would look nice when its peeking over the top of the pages when you read the book. Surviving examples often show a very asymmetrical arrangement of colours or are just executed in one colour. But I liked the two dark red stripes in the green silk wrapping to be almost symmetrical (I didn't measure with a ruler or something, I just changed colour when I thought fit. When you look at medieval books, precision to the millimeter seemes to be a concept totally strange to the medieval bookbinder...)

The next steps will be: Putting another layer of glue unto the spine, covering the boards with the (inner) leather cover, attaching the clasps and finally putting on the (outer) silk cover that will extend over the lower part of the book and have a turkish knot on the end...

Way to go, I think I'm almost halfway through :-)

Girdle book (part 2)

Here are some fotos I recently took in St. Annen Museum in Lübeck:

 
Its the Altar of the "Gertrudenbruderschaft der Träger" (Gertrud brotherhood of the porters) from 1509 and it shows St. Anne and the Holy Kinship. Two of St. Annes relatives are carrying a girdle book :-)
Here you can see the two possible methods in "wearing" a girdle book - in your hand or tucked through your belt.

 A really nice details is the red colour of the cover the lady is wearing through her belt in comparison to the simple black cover of the other girdle book. Note the folds of the cover under the clasp - the leather extends the cover on all sides, not just on the lower part. This way the book is completely protected all around.
The little circular mounts on the front and back are also a protection besides beeing decorative: When you put the book on a table, only the mounts touch the surface, the leather (or in my case, even more important the silk) doesn't come in contact with it.

I already bought little mounts for the book from Lorifactor. Cute little brass flowers originally intended to be belt fittings, but they look just like the ones used for books :-) 

Girdle book (part 1)

Last weekend in Quakenbrück I had the time to work on some book projects while I was explainig medieval bookbinding techniques to the public.
As there is always some spare time while the book sits in the press and you have to wait for the glue to dry, I normally work on two or three books in turns.

This time, I worked on a small Rechenbuch I already mentioned in an older post and on a small girdle book.

Girdle books are a special type of medieval binding where part of the leather cover extends over the wooden boards and hangs down freely from the lower part of the book when reading. The end of this cover extentions is often gathered by a (turkish) knot which could be tucked under ones belt to carry the book around and still have ones hands free.
Besides rather plain prayer books for the lower clergy and merchants account books this type of binding was also in use in a more elaborate form for Books of Hours for well-to-do persons.
And this is what I'm working on at the moment - instead of a plain leather cover the girdle book will be bound in lovely fabric such as silk velvet or multicoloured damast silk (I haven't decided yet...).

The inner construction of the book is no different from that on a "normal" medieval one without the cover extentions. In fact a lot of girdle books were nothing more than a standart binding with leather covered boards and had an additional cover with extentions over the first one! Ecspecially for girdle books with a delicate textile cover this is very useful - if the textile fades or wears out, there still is the sturdy leather cover underneath to protect the book.

So I'm going to make a little leather bound book with some blind tooled decoration and then cover it with nice fabric so that nobody is ever going to see the decorated leather cover :-) Sounds a bit silly, but hey, this is what they did...

You can see the inner cover with decoration on the girdle book to the right - the open flap to show whats under the outer cover is a modern addition...

To give you a quick glimps on the progress:

This is me, taking a sip (it was really hot on sunday with the sun shining into the market stall / workshop) while sewing on the headbands. The sections (folded pages stacked into each other) are already sewn to the cords, the cords ends are pasted to the boards and the spine got its first layer of glue...

I'll show you all the dirty details in part 2 :-)