Forty years ago when I first wrote about the Scales Binder, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 190 stood out from the other books there listed on a number of grounds. It was the grandest of the manuscript books that this binder laid hands on; it was also the oldest. The covering is also unique in his repertoire; it is not the dark brown calf that he used on all the other books, but a lighter brown hide that I tentatively identified as goatskin. The decoration is also atypical. Instead of the various overall patterns (some with central cut-leather panels) used on all his other bindings, it had two concentric frames, each frame enclosing repeated impressions of a different tool, with single corner tools at the extremities; the tools used in the frames on the front board are reversed on the back. The book also has the remains of the clasp fittings on the upper board, and two large trilobal hasps of copper-alloy with repoussé border on the lower. The fifteenth-century binding had lost its spine and was rebacked in the late seventeenth century, possibly by the Oxford binder Richard Sedgely at the behest of Thomas Tanner, who left the city in 1698. If the binding was already in poor condition, its survival is evidence of his antiquarian interest in the book as such. It finally came to Bodley by Tanner's bequest in 1736.

When I first saw it, over 200 years later, the lower board had become detached and the upper was held not by its sewing supports but by the residual strength of the rebacking leather.