Barbara A. Shailor

A really wonderful introductory text for anyone interested in bookbinding, illumination, or scripts, as well as different types of manuscripts and codices. I bought this for a class and am glad to have purchased it because it will make a handy reference. It's so short that I definitely recommend it as a starting point for anyone getting into the field. It goes very well with Raymond Clemens' book, "Introduction to Manuscript Studies."

This has a little bit of everything related to books - bindings, parchment, techniques, styles, page layouts, scripts, tools, history, you name it. My favorite is the picture of a girdle book. (This was actually a textbook for a class I took in college.) It's a good book to have around when a question comes about some aspect of scribing that you haven't done before/aren't really interested in for it's own sake, and thus don't have full books about it. (Such as bookbinding for me.)