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The gatherings are then collected together. In early books these would be tied together with cords and when the book is bound you can see the ridges on the spine where the cords are. Then the edges of the pages have to be cut with a knife. This produced a ragged edge which is a rather nice feature of older books. Sometimes you comes across books where the pages have not been cut. This was a bit of a give-away in a book at Charlecote that had been a present to Christina Cameron Campbell. It was Lyle’s Antiquity of man. She had signed her name Tina inside the cover but had clearly not managed to read the whole of the book. We all get presents of books chosen by others that do not particularly appeal!
Later the edge of pages would be cut by machine which gives a smooth edge. These books bound with cords are really tough. The gatherings are bound to the boards as shown on the right.

A cheaper way of producing a book was simply to glue the pages into the spine. At first the glues were cold glues but over time these dried out and the pages would fall out. I have brought an illustrated bird book from the 1830s where you can see this (there is also a copy in the Charlecote library). The DuPont Company invented the hot-melt adhesive binding process in the 1940s and this is what is used for producing paperbacks. These were first produced in 1931 by the German Albatross books. Penguin Books in England followed suit in 1935, and Pocket Books brought the trend to America in 1939.
David McConnell Smyth patented one of the first sewing machines made for bookbinding in 1868. He invented the technique of sewing through the fold in a gathering to create a strong binding. This technique is still used today and is known as Smyth Sewing. I had a visitor at Charlecote who was a book binder in the 1960s at Wolverton near Milton Keynes and he still made books with cords.

The boards of a book can be covered in a number of things. Many are covered in Leather because it was plentiful, flexible (pliable) and could be artistically tooled. The most common is calf.
Goatskin is also used when it is called Morocco. It has the advantage that it takes colour well. Vellum is the skin of a young animal : calf, lamb or goatskin.

It is the nature of the bindings that gives the beauty and attractiveness to old books making many of them sought-after collector pieces. Just look along the Charlecote shelves.