Headbands

Before I worked at BTD, I had never heard of a headband. Have you? Take out one of your lovelier hardbound books and look at the top of the spine. See that little strip of cloth that's between the signature pages and the spine itself? It's called the headband. It helps attach the edges of the folded paper to the spine, and keeps your book spine from cracking and the pages spilling out. There are even sample books that show you different headbands you can specify when you're designing a book, like these from Talas:

I recently received a fascinating catalog of books about bookmaking from Oak Knoll Press/Oak Knoll Books, and even though I knew about headbands, I was surprised to find an entire book devoted to them, titled Headbands: How to Work Them, and they're not talking about Pat Benatar or Jane Fonda, Bjorn Borg or Olivia Newton John.

Further googling about headbands yields some really interesting book conservation materials...worth a look!

Spineless

Perhaps more of a stretch than synchronicity, I was struck by the books—some of which had saggy, soggy bindings—in Robert Peary's summer home. I imagine the interiors are still readable. Another thing Arctic-related that struck me was a comment in Miriam MacMillan's book about being part of the crew on Donald MacMillan's schooner. That is, she referred to the considerable library on Arctic matters on the Bowdoin, the 88' long and 21' wide schooner designed for Arctic explorations. Now, the entire library could no doubt fit on a phone (Apple pods trump whale pods?). As for the Arctic, there's much less ice ice baby.

Spinal blocks

A trip to a well-tended (but overpriced!) used bookstore in Morristown inspired these shots of beautiful old spines.