ENDBANDS FROM EAST TO WEST

How To Work T hem

Jane Greenfield & Jenny Hille

Third Edition of Headbands: How to Work Them

Revised by Jenny Hille

OAK KNOLL PRESS

New Castle, Delaware
2017
 Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Prefaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
General Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1. Coptic Endband . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2. Ethiopian Endband . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3. Islamic Endband . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
4. Greek Endband . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
5. Armenian Endband . . . . . . . . . . . 34
6. Endband with a Bead on the Edge . . . . . . . . 45
7. Endband with a Bead on the Spine . . . . . . . 52
8. Endband with a Bead on the Spine and the Edge . . . . 58
9. French Double Endband . . . . . . . . . . 62
10. Plain Wound Double Endband . . . . . . . . 68
11. Monastic Endband . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
12. Renaissance Chevron Endband . . . . . . . . 77
13. Italian Renaissance Endband . . . . . . . . . 80
14. German Braided Endband . . . . . . . . . . 88
Annotated Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Online Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
 Preface to the Third Edition (2017)

This little manual of endbanding instructions has now been used by binders and
conservators for thirty years. It is time to update and make a few changes to the
manual so that it can continue to serve our community for many more years. In this
new edition, except in the earlier prefaces written by Jane Greenfield, I am replacing
the word headband with the contemporary and less confusing term endband used by
most scholars, conservators and binders. A lot of new information about endbands
has surfaced over the years and some superb research on bookbinding structures, in
particular by J.A. Szirmai, has been published since the first edition of our book,
adding to the work of pioneers in the field such as Paul Adam, Theodore Petersen,
Berthe van Regemorter, Karl Jäckel and others.
The endbands in the manual have been regrouped based on their regional prov-
enance, beginning with all the endbands from the Eastern Mediterranean, followed
by those found in books from Western Europe. I have also completely reworked
the instructions for the Armenian endband based on extensive research with Sylvie
Merian, a scholar of Armenian book history. We examined together many Armenian
bindings in New York libraries in order to create a more accurate description of their
endbands. Maria Fredericks and Frank Trujillo of the Thaw Conservation Center,
The Morgan Library & Museum, and Mary Oey, now at the Library of Congress,
helped us test and improve the instructions for an article (Hille & Merian, 2011) and
I wish to thank them here. The Armenian and the Italian Renaissance endbands
with their many cores are the most difficult of all those described in the book. I never
imagined in the early eighties that the beautiful Italian Renaissance and Greek end-
bands which I discovered on models stored away in a cabinet at the Istituto Centrale
di Patologia del Libro in Rome and that I begged one of their conservators to teach
me would lead to the creation of this manual with Jane, and that the obsession would
be so long lasting and gratifying.
I wish to thank Oak Knoll for their many years of warm and ongoing support,
The Morgan Library & Museum for the Armenian endband photograph used on
the cover, as well as my friends and fellow conservators Judith Reed and Jerilyn Davis
and scholars Sylvie Merian and Georgios Boudalis in particular for their generous
help, advice and encouragement for this updated and revised edition which I am
dedicating to the late Jane Greenfield (1916-2008).

Preface to the First Edition (1986)

Headbands are fascinating, both from the point of view of their history and of their
construction. Most instructions on how to work them are sparse.
Twelve headbands are described in this book, with step-by-step drawings. We

4
 Preface to the Second Edition (1990)

hope that this will prove of interest to beginners and experienced binders alike.
The number of variants is so great that it would be impossible to identify and de-
scribe them all. Only the major types have been described, and only one way of doing
each presented. We haven’t suggested the suitability of these headbands for specific
uses or tried to evaluate their mechanical value. These judgments are up to the binder.
Jenny Hille learned some of the more unusual headbands abroad, and figured out
ways of doing others. We have worked out the descriptions together. Neither one of
us could have produced this book without the other.
We would like to thank Louise Carter for trying out these instructions (success-
fully) and for many suggestions that have made for greater clarity, Gisela Noack for
giving us very helpful advice, and Jerilyn Davis for seeing this book through the press.

Preface to the Second Edition (1990)

There is usually more than one way to work a headband, obviously some better than
others. Jenny Hille has given several workshops on headbanding since the book was
first published and, for her students, worked out an easier way to embroider a French
headband. This is the method described here, and is the main revision in this second
edition of Headbands.
Two chapters have been added, a Monastic headband and the Renaissance chev-
ron headband, as well as some information on cores.
Publishing the first edition ourselves has been a great pleasure for Jenny and me,
for it put us in touch with bookbinders all over the world. Although it seems vain to
say so, I think Headbands is a classic manual that will prove useful for bookbinders
today and in the future.
We are proud that Oak Knoll Books is publishing this second edition.