JOHN BASKERVILLE DEDICATED most of his life to making letterforms and, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, to all aspects of book production, from letter-founding to printing. It may be wondered, therefore, whether his interest also extended to the techniques and materials required for the binding of his books. Although Baskerville generally sold his books in sheets—that is unbound—several commentators, including his bibliographer Philip Gaskell, suggest that Baskerville worked closely with a specific, but unidentified, bindery. This suggestion is based upon evidence which indicates that a group of Baskerville volumes share similar binding features, namely: the use of a specific trough-marbled paper as endleaves; the use of his own type on some spine labels; and a series of finishing tools used for gold-tooling the leather covers. William Barlow, a private collector of Baskerville editions based in the USA, describes the binding used on his personal copy of the 1762 Prayer Book as: ‘the most spectacular of all the so-called “Baskerville bindings” … in red morocco with a tooled border, which seems a trademark of these bindings, a centre lozenge-shaped group of ornaments, and a heavily tooled spine’. A similar example is found on a duodecimo edition of the same book printed in 1762 (Figure 23).

However, the exact characteristics of the ‘Baskerville bindings’, as well as the context of their creation, have never been fully explored and the finishing tools employed in their binding have never been reproduced in the literature. In the first instance, therefore, this chapter presents the specific decorative and structural features of this group of bindings in order to make them more easily identifiable and to understand the history of their production; to which end this chapter includes images of the most frequent and distinctive finishing tools, thus providing a first means of identification.