Covering the Text: the Object of Bookbinding

Abstract

Binders have long contributed an important material dimension to any consideration of the polysemy of the book-as-object, and the heritage of the livre de peintre, or artist’s book, has left its mark on the bookbinder’s awareness of interpretive strategies for approaching the text. This article examines the practices of five contemporary French bookbinders whose diversity of creative styles only masks fundamental common preoccupations: the creation of decors that are harmonious and not competitive with the text, and the need to ally aesthetic pleasure in the finished decor with a structural integrity that preserves the book as an object of reading, not an object for viewing.