The Arcadian Library: Bindings and Provenance

Giles Mandelbrote was appointed Librarian and Archivist of Lambeth Palace Library in 2010, after working for some years at the British Library. Among his publications are Out of Print & Into Profit: A History of the Rare and Secondhand Book Trade in Britain in the 20th Century (2006), as well as the second volume (1640-1850) of The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (2006), edited jointly with K.A. Manley. More recently he contributed to and edited (with Barry Taylor) Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library's Printed Collections (2009). He is an honorary Senior Research Fellow of King's College, London, and one of the convenors of the annual London conference on book trade history. At present his research is mainly concerned with the book trade in early modern Europe and with book ownership and collecting in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England.


Dr Willem de Bruijn is a Research Associate at The Arcadian Library, London. He studied architecture in the Netherlands and in 2010 obtained a doctorate in History and Theory of Architecture from The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research focuses on the role of the book in architecture, where it has always been both a vehicle for the dissemination of ideas and an object of experimentation - graphic, material and spatial. De Bruijn has published a number of articles relating to his research and is currently working on a book that looks at the typographic ornamentation in Palladio's Quattro libri dell'architettura. He also practices bookbinding.


Dr John-Paul Ghobrial is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He works on exchanges between early modern Europe and the Middle East, with a particular interest in Eastern Christians. He is currently writing a book about the first Arabic account of the New World.



Alastair Hamilton, former C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute Professor of the History of Ideas at Leiden University and Professor emeritus of the History of the Radical Reformation at the University of Amsterdam, is the Arcadian Visiting Research Professor at the School of Advanced Study, London University, attached to the Warburg Institute. He has worked for many years on relations between Europe and the Arab and Islamic worlds, and his most recent publications include The Copts and the West 1439-1822: The European Discovery of the Egyptian Church (2006), An Arabian Utopia: The Western Discovery of Oman (2010), and The Arcadian Library: Western Appreciation of Arab and Islamic Civilization (2011).


Anthony Hobson is a historian of the book, with a special interest in Italian books and bindings of the period 1450-1550. He has published a trilogy on certain collectors and their bindings, and is working on a history of Italian bindings of this period.


P.J.M. Marks is a curator at the British Library, where her work includes expanding the Library's online image database of bookbindings, begun in 1996. She has published general works on the subject, including The British Library Guide to Bookbinding (1998), Treasures in Focus: Decorated Papers (2007) and Beautiful Bookbindings (2011).


Professor Nicholas Pickwoad is the Director of the Ligatus Research Centre at the University of the Arts London. His main interests are in the history of bookbinding and, in particular, the study of the structures and materials used to make ordinary books in the era of the handpress; he is working on an online glossary of bookbinding terms. His publications include: 'Bookbinding', in The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. V, 1695-1830 (2009); 'How Greek is Greek: Western European imitations of Greek-style bindings', in Vivlioamphiastis 3, ed. Niki Tsironis (2008);'The History of the False Raised Band', in Against the Law, ed. R. Myers, M. Harris and G. Mandelbrote (2005); and 'Tacketed bindings - a hundred years of European bookbinding', in For the love of the binding: A Festschrift for Mirjam M. Foot, ed. D. Pearson (2000).