Leather straps binding the book together

This shows the cover page as it portrudes through the middle of the pages

          This book, or rather this manuscript, must have had a long line of people who worked on it from start to finish. It is technically a manuscript, since Bartolomeo Lelli wrote it by hand. Book creation starts with skinning the animals, they then traded this hide to craftsman that would transform this hide into what we know as parchment. However making a book simply out of parchment at this stage would be less desirable, it still needs a few embellishments to make writing and reading a little easier.

           Standard practice was to arrange the parchment together in stacks so that the flesh side was facing a flesh side and the hair sides were facing hair sides. This was done because the side of the parchment that held the animal’s hair was usually a dingy yellow not the white that the flesh side came out to be. This is not normally very noticeable however, because when you open the book both sides of the page are set to be either flesh or hair so one cannot distinguish the difference in color. If a hair and flesh side were paired together it jarres the eyes a bit. However if one needs to add more pages this pattern is naturally broken since it would not be possible to keep flesh with flesh and hair with hair. This is why my team and I believe that he left blank pages in the manuscript even though parchment is expensive and not something to be wasted. This way he could have gone back later if he needed to add something without breaking the pattern of hair and flesh.[1]

           The next step in book production would be to prick the quire. This was done with a stylus or an awl and rarely a star wheel to produce small almost invisible holes that acted as guides for the page. These holes were then used as points that would be ruled producing lines in the paper to keep writing more organized, much like ruled paper today. This book has these ruling done with some sort of stilus drug across the page producing lines in the page that are now nearly invisible. The advantage to using the stylus in comparison to other methods is that it creates furrows in the parchment on both sides thus reducing the amount of work.[2]

            Once the paper is completed the book must be bound together. Normally this includes sewing thongs to the pages of the book this can be seen in the picture to the left. The sewing usually runs down the spine of the pages and connects to thongs set at regular intervals producing a tight secure binding. To finish off the binding the cover was added, this was commonly made of boards of wood covered in leather however this book is bound with a palimpsest and lacks any sort of sturdy structure. The cover is two separate pages one for the front and one for the back. Since it is two separate pieces of parchment they meet in the middle of the book as little inch wide pieces of paper that protrude from the binding as seen in the lower photo.[3]

            All of this work was rarely done by one person or shop, so the book floated around from workplace to workplace until it was put together so that the owner could eventually fill the pages with writings. Looking at this book written by Bartolomeo Lelii one can tell even without extensive knowledge of Latin and paleography that this book is beautiful and unique in its own right.