Foreign bookbindings added to the department of printed books from 1963 to 1974

Abstract

• IN volume 1, number 2 of The British Library Journal I discussed some of the English bindings acquired by the Department of Printed Books since 1962. This article followed others on acquisitions from 1941 to 1950, from 1952 to 1962, and in 1962, which appeared respectively in the British Museum Quarterly, xvii, 2 (1952); xxvi, 1-2 (1962); and xxvil, 3-4 (1964). Turning now to the foreign bindings, it will be found that they are almost all French, except for one German and two Italian examples. And the Italian bindings were made for an English king. In 1964 Mr. and Mrs. Ehrman gave us, through the Friends of the National Libraries, the first two volumes of Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino's Dell'istoria del Concilio di Trento published in Rome in 1664, and almost certainly bound in that city in gold-tooled red morocco. In the centre of an elaborate panel design are the arms of King Charles II composed from a number of small heraldic tools. It was only when the books arrived that the happy discovery was made that they were rejoining the third volume of the set, similarly bound, which had reached Bloomsbury with the Old Royal Library over two hundred years earlier.