Cambridge Bookbindings : Garret Godfrey binding, ca.1520

George of Trebizond 1396-1486

Cambridge Bookbindings

<p style='text-align: justify;'><p>New techniques introduced into English bookbinding around the turn of the sixteenth century helped to speed up the processes. Late fifteenth-century bindings were usually decorated using many repeated impressions of small stamps. By engraving a design around the rim of a wheel-shaped tool mounted on a handle, and running this along the leather surface, it became possible to create a continuous line of ornament in one operation. These became known as rolls, or roll tools, and they were quickly adopted and used by English binders in the early decades of the sixteenth century.</p><p>The roll with the criss-cross pattern, in two short vertical runs in the central frame of this binding, was probably the first such tool to be used in Cambridge, in the first decade of the sixteenth century. It belonged to the workshop of Garret Godfrey (d.1539), one of two north-European stationers who came to Cambridge around the beginning of the century and came to dominate the book trade there during the following decades (the other being Nicholas Spierinck). Many hundreds of bindings from Godfrey’s workshop survive; some of his rolls, like the other one on this binding, are readily recognisable from the GG initials incorporated in the design.</p><p>Wooden boards covered with mid-brown calfskin, blind-tooled with rolls Oldham AN.f(1) and DI.a(1). The head and tailcaps are folded over the endbands and sewn through, the split sewing supports are of tanned leather, fragments of medieval manuscript are used as pastedowns (now loose, exposing the wooden boards), and there are remains of clasps.</p><p>Dr David Pearson</p></p>