Books

Materials commonly found in books

Many materials have been used in book production over the centuries.

Paper is essentially a felted sheet of cellulose fibres. During manufacture, a range of other substances are added to produce papers with infinite differences in quality, use, strength, texture, colour and surface. Paper is an enormously versatile and durable material: we have books dating back centuries which are still in good condition.

Wooden boards. The other side of these boards is covered with leather. Photograph courtesy of Artlab Australia

This is an example of millboard. Photograph courtesy of Artlab Australia

Board is a general term covering early wooden boards through to modern, machine-made boards such as pasteboard, millboard, strawboard and others.

Parchment and vellum are untanned animal skins. Their use continued in Europe even after paper was introduced. These materials are rarely found in contemporary books, but were used widely in early manuscript books. Vellum and parchment are manufactured by stretching the animal skins and treating them with lime, while scraping them to remove fats and hair.

This 13th century manuscript book was produced with vellum text block and wooden boards. Photograph courtesy of Artlab Australia, reproduced with permission from the State Library of New South Wales

This book is bound in dyed goat skin. The boards and spine have been tooled using gold leaf. Photograph courtesy of Artlab Australia, reproduced with permission from the History Trust of South Australia

Leathers are tanned animal skins. The tanning process gives a degree of chemical stability to the skin. Traditionally, leathers used for binding books were vegetable-tanned. This produced flexible leather with properties excellently suited for binding and decorating books.

Cloth is used in books in a number of ways:

• mull is an open-weave, cotton material stiffened with size. It is most often used as a first lining on the spines of textblocks;

• Jaconette or Holland cloth, a closely woven cotton or linen, is also used for linings and for strengthening folds of book sections; and

• bookcloths are made of closely woven fabrics with pigment fillers and sizes, and sometimes with paper linings to prevent the penetration of glue. Bookcloths can be embossed to create surface textures, and some are coated to prevent scuffing and soiling.

Bookcloths are produced in a range of colours and textures. Photograph courtesy of Artlab Australia

Thread, cords and tape are made from linen. Linen tapes are made from woven, unbleached linen, which is stiffened with size. Cords are made from hemp fibres, spun and combined to make different thicknesses.

This book was photographed during conservation treatment. The text block was sewn onto hemp cords. Note that the spine has been lined. Photograph courtesy of Vicki Humphrey

Various adhesives are used in bookbinding. They include:

• animal glue, which has been used for centuries. It is basically boiled-down animal skins, hooves and bones. It is used hot, and in most binderies the glue pot was kept cooking all day. Prolonged heating causes it to alter chemically and darken. Animal glue is essentially a poor-quality, impure gelatine;

• polyvinyl acetate—PVA—is an emulsion adhesive which has been used widely in recent years. It is unsuitable for most conservation applications because it is very difficult to reverse;

• starch paste is the favoured adhesive for paper repair; and

• glair, which is basically egg white, is used to fix gold leaf to the foredge and to the covers, for example, in the case of gold tooling.

Books can contain a range of inks and other media—iron gall inks, carbon inks, printing inks and watercolours.

These notes on materials are very brief, but serve to illustrate the variety of materials used in books. When used in books, these materials are in very close contact and will inevitably affect each other.