The Vespiary Book Binding & Book Conservation

Recently, one of my favorite customers visited me with a treat from her collection.  Ronald Searle’s Slightly Foxed - but still desirable.

In it, Searle uses bookseller description language as his inspiration for clever illustrations.

Ordering from a bookseller’s catalogue without speaking the specialist language, is about as dangerous as trying to chat up the promised-in-marriage daughter of a Corsican tax inspector, and the retribution about as swift.

I’ve made an album of some of my faves on my flickr page .

At the end of his book, he provides a laugh-out-loud glossary of the terms, including some of the following:

Decorations, intricate - Hand tooled designs impressed on a binding, usually enhanced with gold leaf, by a bookbinder who did not know when to stop.

Blind-tooled - Decorations impressed on a book without gold leaf, to save a penny or two.

Faults, minor - Generally messy, with traces of previous owner’s breakfast

Head, dented - Volume that has been used to replace the leg of a sideboard

Notes, later - Boring manuscript exclamations penned some time after the original date of publication by a literary thug

Set, pleasant - three or four matching volumes littered with biscuit crumbs, bus tickets and enough fingerprints to attract the attentionn of Scotland Yard

Cracked (but holding) - Binding held by a thread

Cracking - Binding held by two threads