On 22 and 23 November 2019, the State Hermitage hosted a conference on “The Art and Technologies of Bookbinding. The History and Practice of Bookbinding” that drew more than a hundred specialists from different cities in Russia and neighbouring countries linked by a professional interest in the history of the book, bookbinding and restoration. Presentations on a diverse range of subjects covered all the substantial issues in the present-day study of bookbinding.
Many talks contained summaries of observations of a number of individual aspects of binding, such as stamps for tooling leather or the decorative compositions on the spines of books that adorn 18th-century publications, the systematization of the collection of clasps for Cyrillic books of the 18th and 19th centuries. Others gave a general review of collections of bindings that formed historically, such as the book collections of Jacob Krause (now in the State Library of Russia) and General Alexei Yermolov (State Historical Museum), or the incunabula and post-incunabula in the collection of the State Hermitage.
Great interest was aroused by accounts of the detailed study and scientific restoration of bindings of individual volumes: a Gutenberg Bible (State Library of Russia), an altar Gospel printed in Moscow in 1644 (Museums of the Moscow Kremlin) or a 16th-century handwritten North Russian Gospel.
A considerable portion of the contributions were devoted to the topic of restoration and conservation, and also the technologies of making bindings, modern-day conservation approaches and materials for the phase storage of documents.
