By Deeds of Peace

While looking through photographs from my undergraduate years, my eye was caught by a gilt centerpiece tool to the front board of a binding that contains a late sixteenth-century English scribal manuscript. The manuscript in question, formerly in the collection of Thomas Phillipps, is a copy of George Cavendish’s biography of Thomas Wolsey. It has now been beautifully digitized in its entirety here, and has been assigned the shelfmark MSS CODEX M0385 CB.

More particularly, I noticed that the tool in question is that to which David Pearson’s wonderful 2023 book on Cambridge Bookbinding (available from Oak Knoll) assigns the reference of 57H (Pearson Sixteenth c14). In other words, the binding probably comes from Cambridge.

Pearson states that the tool was often applied blind to bindings of printed books from the 1570s and 1580s, but adds that it was also used to gilt-stamp at least one binding, now in the library of Bury St Edmunds Cathedral.¹ The present manuscript would therefore be a second example of the tool’s use as a gilt centerpiece.

The binding’s connection with Cambridge perhaps makes it vaguely less unlikely that the John Milton to whom (as the Stanford catalogue notes) certain receipts pertain is the most famous man of that name. But the dates do not match Milton’s time at Cambridge, which, if memory serves (it is late on a Saturday night, and I cannot be bothered to check), ended in 1632. So I somewhat doubt that it is that John Milton; but then, of course, I know nothing that could equip me to say anything even slightly helpful about the matter.

The gilt corner fleurons do not appear identical to any of those noted in Pearson’s reference, and I would therefore be most grateful to hear from readers who know of other instances.

1. David Pearson, Cambridge Bookbinding 1450–1770 (Ann Arbor, 2023), p. 237. ↩︎

The ‘Unidentified Stamps’ section of the British Armorial Bindings database¹ contains over a hundred tools that remain to be pinned down. This is to tentatively suggest an association for the stamp described here, on the basis of a book currently in my collection bearing the same.

Its title page is inscribed ‘S.M. Connell’ or ‘J.M. Connell’.

To my eyes, both names plausibly accord with the stamp. Further evidence would, however, be required to make a conclusive association between the stamp and a particular owner.

1. ↩︎

I have lately been reading portions of Ronald Storrs’s Orientations (1937) in a desultory manner. Unusually, between pages 588 and 589 of the said edition there is a plate that has been configured for easy removal. To that end, the plate’s inner edge has been perforated like an old-fashioned sheet of postage stamps.

A remarkable tertiary, parenthetical caption advises the reader—or, perhaps, Customs Inspector—as follows.

‘This disagreeable illustration is included to show students of Near Eastern Politics something of the tone of the unlicensed local press. It can be torn off without injuring the book, in whose text it is not mentioned.’ (!!!) (Emphasis added.)

The illustration itself, not wholly unamusing, is a ‘Blasphemous Greek cartoon’ of Storrs and other Cypriot officials.

I should be most grateful to hear from readers who know of books containing similarly perforated plates, especially such as go unmentioned by the texts themselves.