Ruth Lightbourne has written a wonderful post, Opening up the Covers, for the National Museum of New Zealand blog. Here's how it begins:
Opening up the covers of any antiquarian book is always exciting as you never know what you will find inside. Quite apart from the intellectual content of the text, a book might contain beautiful illustrative material or have a special provenance. It might have been beautifully bound or have hidden paintings (fore-edge paintings have been highlighted in an earlier post). It might be the very rare edition with the typographical error on a particular page, or it may have a fragment of a hitherto unknown medieval manuscript lining the spine or the insides of the covers.
There are many possibilities and it is these possibilities that delight the collector. This post focuses on some of the decorated papers incorporated into bookbindings in the Rare Book Collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library.
The possibilities delight us as well. So glad that Ruth has shared this with us all.
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