Lebenserinnerungen eines alten Kunstbuchbinders by Paul AdamReview by: Lawrence S. ThompsonThe Library Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct., 1953), pp. 306-307Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4304253 .

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306 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

ford, Cushing Eells, Myron Eells, Selucius Garfielde, W. H. Gray, Edward Huggins, Co- lumbia Lancaster, Edward Lander, Archibald McKinlay, W. I. Marshall, H. H. Spalding, J. G. Swan, F. F. Victor, and Elijah White.

174-191 EVANs, ELWOOD, 1828-1898

Eighteen further groups of addresses, letters, reminiscences, journals, notebooks, scrapbooks and typescripts of published and unpublished histories. All but two of the Evans categories are in the Miller collection.

263 HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY Seventy-five official and confidential letters writ-

ten by Sir James Douglas, Roderick Finlayson, Dr. John McLoughlin, and others, to Dr. William Fraser Tolmie, in charge at Nisqually, and a few to his predecessors at Nisqually, A. C. Anderson and Angus McDonald, 1841-1859.

165 pp. 18-32i cm. With typewritten transcript.

The book was designed by Carl Purington Rollins and is printed in bold type on good paper. The compiler is entitled to gratitude for the large amount of information supplied with regard to the men whose letters, diaries, and documents are included. This adds much to an understanding of the documents listed. A helpful map is included to show the various forts, trails, and cutoffs established by the early Western travelers. Yale may well take pride in presenting this catalog of manuscripts in her Western Americana collection. It is a beautiful piece of bookmaking, and its value for scholars and librarians should lead to other similar catalogs and perhaps hasten the day when a national union list of manuscripts will become a reality.

CHARLES W. SMITH

University of Washington Library Seattle, Washington

Das Fachwissen des Buckbinders: Vorberei- tungsbuck fuir die Fachpriufugen im Buch- bindereigewerbe. By HEINRICH LiJERS. Re- vised by GUSTAV MOESSNER. 5th ed. Stutt- gart: Buchbinder-Verlag, n.d. Pp. 752.

The fifth edition of Lijers, the basic text for German bookbinders, has appeared five years after the original compiler's death on August 20, 1946, at the age of fifty-seven. A student of the late Paul Adam and a binder and teacher of no little repute, Lilers was not one of the

great practitioners of the craft, but his de- tailed and meticulous Fachwissen has made his name as famous as that of artists such as Wiemeler and scholars like Kyriss.

Gustav Moessner has prepared the new edi- tion with the assistance of such able techni- cians as Adolf Paolucci, Dr. Pratschko, Erich Siegel, and Hans Zehender. The great majority of the 835 illustrations (photographs and draw- ings) are in the earlier editions, while pictures of recently developed machines come from the manufacturers, from the Allgemeiner Anzeiger fur Buchbindereien, and from Bookbinding and Book Production. While every effort has been made to preserve the original text and Luer's own ideas, the book has been carefully edited with a view to its suitability for postwar con- ditions. The greatest care has been taken to describe all new machinery in all countries.

The first chapter, "Zur Geschichte des Bucheinbandes," should more properly be called "Zur Geschichte der Technik des Buch- einbandes"; and as such it is a valuable sup- plement to the literature of the history of binding. Other chapters describe the funda- mental backgrounds of the craft; types of bindings; use of decorative papers; special work of the binder; materials; tools and machines; estimates and calculations; sketches, designs, and lettering; surfaces, bodies, and measurement; examinations for bookbinders; and business training for bookbinders. Edition binding is given as much attention as hand binding, but the special problems of library binding as we know them in the United States are not considered separately.

This book is and will long remain the basic German work in the field. While it would serve no purpose to translate it into English, a similar volume in English, adapted to our peculiar needs, would be an invaluable refer- ence work for all who deal with books and documents.

LAWRENCE S. THOMPSON

University of Kentucky

Lebenserinnerungen eines alten Kunstbuch- binders. By PAUL ADAM, with foreword by ERHARD KLETTE. 3d ed. Stuttgart: Max Hettler Verlag, 1951. Pp. 171. DM 12.

The memoirs of Paul Adam constitute vir- tually a history of hand binding in Germany

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REVIEWS 307

from 1870 to 1930. For more than a half- century Adam was an acknowledged leader in the craft, a teacher who trained many out- standing binders of our own generation, and the owner of a curious and inventive mind that was responsible for a number of improve- ments in the art of hand binding. At the same time Adam flourished precisely when the tran- sition of bookbinding from a pure handicraft to a semimechanized industry was taking place. These significant changes inspired him to a professional awareness that led him to found the bookbinders' national organization in Ger- many, the publishing of several basic text- books, and much productive research in the history and traditions of the craft.

The various facets of Adam's career are so numerous that only some of the more striking ones may be noted here. In Dusseldorf, where he spent his best years, he discovered the rich- ness of the Islamic tradition of binding in the fine collection of oriental books in that city. In many other German libraries he was able to identify hitherto unrecognized bindings of considerable beauty and historical importance, and he was in part responsible for the meticu- lous attention which German research libraries now devote to cataloging their historic bind- ings. In the field of restoration and preserva- tion he developed new methods barely in time to save countless rare bindings from the rav- ages of modem steam-heated buildings.

Adam's Lebenserinnerungen also yield an in- timate picture of daily life during the period of Germany's greatest material prosperity. His childhood in Breslau, his experiences as an itinerant journeyrnan in the late sixties, his mature years in Dusseldorf, and his work as a teacher in many places (including a sojourn in Lwow just before World War I) contain ob- servations on manners and customs of his times which will be as useful to the historian as to the student of bookbinding.

Adam died in Dusseldorf on July 27, 1931, at the age of eighty-two. In the preface to this third edition of the Lebenserinnerungen (first published in 1927), Erhard Klette describes Adam's gravestone in Dusseldorf. In addition to the name and dates, it bears simply the words, "Das dankbare Buchbinderhandwerk."

LAWRENCE S. THOMPSON

University of Kentucky

Talks on Book-collecting, Delivered under the Authority of the Antiquarian Booksellers' As- sociation. By P. H. MUIR, E. P. GOLD- SCHMIDT, SIMON NOWELL-SMITH, JOHN CAR- TER, HOWARD M. NIXON, ERNEST WEIL, and IFAN KYRLE FLETCHER. Edited by P. H. MUIR. London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1952. Pp. ix+105. 12s. 6d.

A B C for Book-Collectors. By JOHN CARTER. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952. Pp. 191. $3.00.

"But is there a language of book-collecting?" asks Simon Nowell-Smith in the first of these little books. The answer is the books them- selves, always urbane, sometimes witty, never frothy, never dull. There is, indeed, a language of book-collecting, and each book in its way seeks to make learning that language pleasant.

The essays in Talks on Book-collecting were selected from a series of lectures organized to acquaint young booksellers with "certain ac- cepted theories and practices of their trade" and to show that the interests of booksellers and book-collectors are often the same. The Talks deal, that is to say, with the first sense in which Nowell-Smith thinks there is a language of book-collecting: "the metaphorical and col- loquial sense in which we speak of two men 'talking the same language.'"'

The book opens with P. H. Muir's rather thoughtful sketch of the way in which book- collecting has widened both in its subjects and in its appeal from the simple days of the early Roxburghe Club, "when if every book-collector did not need to be a duke, at least no duke worthy of the name was not a book-collector," until today it takes as its subject every phase of life and may attract men in every station. Later essays consider more specific sides of the busi- ness: collecting in special areas such as manu- scripts, bindings, science, and the theater; and special terms and developing fashions in book- collecting.

The authors are all authoritative and their contributions are uniformly informative. But the information is seldom new. Bits of knowl- edge are strewn about with a studied casualness which hopes to amuse and, in the process per- haps, instruct. It seems that as a book-collector the common man, no less than his predecessor, the noble duke, is only an amateur with a hobby.

Carter's A B C makes a more useful contribu- tion. The author tackles what Nowell-Simon

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