Nicholas Pickwoad - The History of Bookbinding
22.09.2011
The Ligatus Research Centre of the University of the Arts London, dedicated to the history of bookbinding and use of electronic technology to further research into the subject, has for the last 6 years held a summer school in different European countries, and this year the location was the city of Venice, as rich in its bibliographical as its artistic heritage.
Hosted at the Istituto Ellenico, the summer school ran two week-long courses, The History of European Bookbinding 1450-1830 and Identifying and recording bookbinding structures for conservation and cataloguing. This year for the first time the course was run under the aegis of the University of Udine.
Four afternoons of the first five-day course, The History of Bookbinding, were spent in visits to Venetian libraries the Biblioteca del Museo Correr, the Biblioteca Marciana and the Biblioteca di San Francesco della Vigna.
During these visits the 12 students, who came from Belgium, France, Italy, Ireland, Quatar, Russia, the United States of America and the United Kingdom, were shown a wide variety of books, and the final visit, to the Biblioteca di S. Francesco della Vigna, proved one of the highlights of the week. The variety of different types of binding available from its collections, with examples from a wide range of European countries from the fifteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, gave the students the opportunity to see material which many of them had not seen before.
The books, which included some very rare and ususual bindings, illustrated many of the themes addressed in the theoretical lectures that occupied the morning sessions during the week, looking at both the structures and materials of bindings made at all levels of cost over a period of four hundred years. The generous welcome extended by Fr Rino Sgarbossa and his staff and facilities of the magnificent new library made the visit a pleasure for all concerned.
Professor Nicholas Pickwoad
C/o Convento S. Francesco della Vigna - Castello 2786 - 30122 VENEZIA - tel. 041.5235341 - fax 041.2414020