The Whole Art of Bookbinding, Containing Valuable Recipe for Sprinkling, Marbling, Colouring…

FIRST EDITION, [12], 60p., half-title present, original marbled boards, neatly rebacked, slim 12mo in 6s, Oswestry: for the author by N. Minshall, 1811.

The first edition of the first English bookbinding manual, published more than a century after the earliest continental one. 

“It is very much a working bookbinder’s notebook” (Pollard and Potter), and gives instructions for sprinkling and marbling, gilding, tooling in gold, etc. Its author may be one of three candidates: Minshall the printer, Henry Parry, copyright holder for the book, or W. Price, a binder at Oswestry from c.1804-31. Of the three Parry seems the most likely; the Oswestry volume was registered at Stationers’ Hall in the name of Henry Parry, so it would be a remarkable coincidence if he were not the author. [Pollard and Potter, 89; Middleton 12.]