The rebinding of incunabula

This thesis provides a chronological narrative of the major trends in the history of rebinding incunabula. There is currently very little academic literature that focuses on the practice of rebinding as a subset of book history, largely because it is regarded in bibliographic circles as a wholly negative practice. This paper argues that rebinding is actually an important component of a book’s historical record, and it achieves this through contextualizing popular styles of rebinding within the political, cultural, and financial shifts that influenced their development. These shifts in style provide insight into how the value of incunabula fluctuated with each successive generation. For this project, approximately one hundred incunabula from the collections at the University of Iowa were catalogued and referenced. Their bindings were localized and dated, and their provenance histories reconstructed through material clues. Through studying the bindings in conjunction with major bibliographic events of the last five hundred years, patterns begin to emerge that demonstrate how certain events directly and indirectly influenced the practice of rebinding. This inquiry will hopefully encourage further research into the history of rebinding and help establish it as a valid subset of bookbinding scholarship.