Preservation Services
John Bradford
The Poetical Vagaries of a Knight of the Folding-Stick, of Paste Castle (Newark, NJ, 1815)
The first day I began work at Houghton Library, Curator of Rare Books Roger Stoddard and conservator Alan Puglia showed me this book. It is full of bookbinding poetry and inside jokes, with this delightful figure made out of bookbinding tools. Luckily the motto at the top of the page, “Keep Dark, Can’t Tell”, is no longer true: bookbinders nowadays share knowledge freely.
AC8.B72747.815p, Julian Palmer Welsh Fund, 1965