The program will begin at 09:45 and consist of a main talk by Matthew Collins, "Reading the Book by Ignoring the Words” (10:00), followed by lunch and a talk about bookbinding with Karen Limper-Herz entitled "Morocco or Grained Goatskin? Renaissance Bindings and their Imitations” (13:00), a comment by Soraya de Chadarevian, and ample time for discussion. 

09:45

Reading the Book by Ignoring the Words (Matthew Collins)

If you dig an archaeological midden, skin and fiber would seem to be in short supply. Instead, you find bones: fragmented bones, the last stages of the processing of animal carcasses. On a typical archaeological site zooarchaeologist are hard-pressed to accurately estimate the number of animals, so intensively are they processed after death.
Leather, typically from cattle or goat, covers the majority of books bound in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whilst parchment is the dominant medium for writing in medieval Europe. Within the legal system of Britain, sheep-skin parchment remained the primary medium for legal documents until the advent of the typewriter at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Look more closely at the leather book binding or a parchment leaf and you typically see hair follicles. Looking at examples from certain periods in the past with poor production standards, or even good parchment, you will even see fibers around the edge of flay-cuts. How useful are these fibers and follicles as a source of evidence to understand the production of wool textiles in the past?  I will discuss the opportunities for textile fiber analysis from parchment and leather. What are the challenges in the selective preservation of fibers, to what extent does the seasonality of slaughter impact on fiber quality, and does parchment reveal anything about the husbandry of flocks of sheep?

13:00

Morocco or Grained Goatskin?—Renaissance Bindings and their Imitations (Karen Limper-Herz)

Leather bookbindings are ubiquitous but are often taken for granted as mere protection for textblocks, unless they can be attributed to a binder or owner. For binding historians, the study of bookbindings was for a long time focused mainly on the identification of the tools used to decorate bindings. Conservators, on the other hand, largely concentrated on the study of structures and materials. The two are increasingly now studied together, but the precise identification of the type and origin of the materials that make up a binding is often difficult. This talk will compare examples of European Renaissance and 19th-century bindings from the perspectives of decoration, structure and materials used. It will draw out similarities and differences and highlight areas in which book historical and scientific research can and should come together.

Biography: Matthew Collins

Professor Matthew Collins holds a Niels Bohr Chair at the Statens Naturhistoriske Museum, Copenhagen and the McDonald Chair in Palaeoproteomics at the University of Cambridge.  His research explores the processes by which proteins undergo decay and how we can exploit new palaeoproteomics methods in the service of palaeontology, archaeology and cultural heritage. His work extends from the use of amino acid racemization to date Quaternary sediments, to the biomolecular records held in archives. Beginning as a Marine Zoologist hoping to work on fossil sharks, he stumbled through a career with the unwavering focus of a drunken goldfish, a summer internship in the Palaeontology Department at the Natural History Museum, then a PhD in Geology, followed by times in the Biochemistry and Chemistry Departments at Leiden, he picked up some microbiology and organic geochemistry in Bristol before landing the only job he was good for: a lectureship in Biogeochemistry at the University of Newcastle. There he became more and more interested in Archaeology so left after a decade to set up BioArCh, an interdisciplinary research centre in Biology, Archaeology and Chemistry at the University of York (BioArCh, geddit?).

Two years ago he joined Tom Gilberts Evogenomics Group at the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen where with Erico Cappellini he is trying to establish a research group developing the new field of Palaeoproteomics. He has now taken a 40% McDonald Chair in this eponymous subject at the University of Cambridge, commuting between there and Copenhagen. He spends a lot of time in airports, where (fittingly) this biography was written. 

Biography: Karen Limper-Herz

Dr Karen Limper-Herz is Lead Curator, Incunabula and Sixteenth Century Printed Books, at the British Library in London. She is Honorary Secretary and Vice-President of the Bibliographical Society of London and a faculty member of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, USA. Her research interests include the history of book collecting in 19th-century England and the history of European bookbinding. She regularly publishes and speaks about aspects of the British Library's collections and her areas of research in the UK and abroad.