Comment by kasey_junk
4 hours ago
Books in the 17th and 18th century often didnt get bound by the publisher. They were done by independent binders for _custom_ orders. You’d see whole libraries with the owners binding/cover standards rather than per book.
Books in that time were _luxury_ goods. Most people could not afford them. One of the ways that was changed was to introduce cheap, mass produced bindings that were lower quality than the bespoke artisianal bindings done by specialist craftsmen.
You can still get custom bindings done. There exists whole niches on the internet of crafters that will take a production run book and strip its binding and make you extremely high quality and custom bindings and covers.
Learning this fact is what got me interested into binding my own books!
With how the quality of things seems to have been degrading over the years (either real or just me getting older and experiencing the impermanence of all things) I've been trying to adopt an attitude of "if this practice existed before the industrial revolution, I can _probably_ do it" and it's been really great to learn how things were made before they had to be mass produced as cheaply as possible.
I worked in an academic library that rebound pretty much every book they acquired. One of the biggest in the world, too.
My wife worked for a company that specialized in rebinding paperbacks for schools and libraries. It makes more economic sense to do that for niche use cases rather than make all print runs more expensive.
Yeah it depends on the library and collection. If it’s a general-purpose library, probably a pretty limited portion of the collection. If it’s a grad school library with a low-turnover collection, like the one I worked in, that’s totally different. The college I worked for had dozens of libraries and their use cases were all pretty different.
Nowadays, academic libraries are moving their books to archival storage. New publications are electronic only. You need to be a formal member of the university community to access it, unlike in times past when any member of the public could stroll the aisles of physical books and journals.
Most academic libraries have large archival collections anyway, and the extent to which they de-emphasize their patron-facing stacks varies dramatically between institutions. Same with who can access them. You just can’t generalize like that.
One of my relatives is one of those micro publishers. Selected works are printed and bound to extremely high standards and materials in a way that their customers are willing to pay 1k-25k+ per book. These editions only have a couple of prints and are mostly made to customer requests.
There is a market for these type of books, albeit a very small one.
The Czech National libraries do that for newspapers, magazines and other periodicals - they bind the copies they get automatically for preservation to big books, so they can be better stored in their archives.
Apparently it is getting harder to find people who can do that as most schools no longer have book binding as a course you can study.
You don't even need custom bindings —- library bindings are a thing, even if they cost significantly more then a typical hard cover binding.