Dr. Joseph Marshall writes: This is a binding of black goatskin, gilt tooled all over in the distinctive eighteenth-century Scottish style, with border rolls, a central panel, and various ‘herring-bone’ designs radiating like spokes from the centre. The spine is tooled to saltire design, the turn-ins and board edges are also tooled, and there are gilt endpapers signed ‘Apolonia Maiestderin’, possibly the name of the German workshop where they were manufactured. Inside the front board is a leather label indicating that the book was a wedding present on the marriage of Sarah Thomson to Robert Cross in Glasgow in 1738. Manuscript notes record the fortunes of Sarah’s family.
Eighteenth-century Scotland made a unique contribution to the art of book-binding through the development of the ‘wheel’ and ‘herring-bone’ bindings. This large, elegant and balanced binding in excellent condition contains design elements from both styles. In terms of the overall aesthetic quality, nothing equivalent is to be found in our existing binding collections. There are also individual tools which we have not been able to trace elsewhere, such as that used to make the ‘filling’ of the half-pear shapes. The sheer variety of tools used is extraordinary:stars, flowers, rounders, leaves and spear-heads. This acquisition is now central to our binding collections as an example of Scottish work at its very best.
