Introduction
Much emphasis in modern book selling and collecting has been put on the protective
box. Boxmaking is broadly divided into two categories: private
and institutional. Many of the old pristine antiquarian standards
have been taken out of the market in the last fifteen to
twenty years and are in private hands or public institutions.
The books which remain for sale are often of lesser quality
and require a box both for protection and shelf presence.
Modern ‘firsts’ must have every ‘point’ and paper edge protected
to retain and, hopefully, increase their value. In the institutional
world, however, a slightly different phenomenon exists. Large
institutions have been tasked with greater and greater amounts
of books in need of preservation/conservation. Due to the
amount of material in collection, receding manpower and budgets,
and diminishing restoration/conservation skills, many institutional
collections have resorted to the box or protective enclosure
as a stopgap for proper restoration/conservation. This approach does buy a little
time for the object, but sooner or later the contents will
require attention.
There are many types of protective enclosures, but the most common one produced
today is the clamshell box with squares. Like its British
cousin, the ‘drop-back’ box (without squares), it’s a derivative
structure of the Solander box, invented by Dr. Daniel Solander
at the British Museum during the latter half of the 18th
century. Unlike Dr. Solander’s wooden boxes, most modern
clamshell boxes are made from binder’s board.
Large or thick clamshell boxes, however, should still be made from low-lignin
content wood. It’s important to realize that the walls of
the trays of a binder’s board clamshell box will be weaker
as the depth of the trays increases. This weakness is not
necessarily overcome even with double-wall construction and
lapped joints. A deep binder’s board tray will eventually
fail due to the sag of the walls and the delamination of
binder’s board at the joints. Properly jointed or pinned
wooden construction can allay this weakness due to the rigidity
of the lumber, and non-layered makeup of wood at the joints.
Wooden box construction generally follows the same procedures
as the binder’s board clamshell with only a few additional
considerations.
It is important, therefore, to make clamshell boxes with as dense (and calendared)
a board as available. The general grain direction, as in
a book, should be head to tail. It’s preferable to measure
a box’s components using the book itself. Even machine-made
books are rarely square so simple measurements with a jig,
ruler, or even vernier caliper rarely reflect the true dimensions
of a book.
Clamshell-style boxes lend themselves to a great deal of variation. They can
be very simple with square lines and minimal decoration to
emphasize the materials used, or they can be elaborate constructions
in full leather, with concave foredges, rounded spines, back-mitred
headcaps and headbands.
The procedure described here is a sort of middling path of a quarter leather,
rounded spine box which
is fully lined in
Suedel. |