Navigate

Heraldry A&S Main Page

Back to Merouda.Com

Instructional Sites

Leather tooling: Simple instructions decorating leather, with some good links.

Binding: the gallery on this site showing photos of another book being bound as this one was.

Other Sites, Supporting Documents, and References

Writing-Tables and Table-Books: (PDF) A brief history of bound, blank tables from the British Library.

Writing Surfaces: The Matter of Texts: Another PDF; a brief discussion of blank-tables and a few pictures of c. 1600 bound blank-tables.

Ivory Writing Tables: Waxed tablets, mentions that tables were often held together by a strip of parchment, among other things.

The Craftman's Handbook: An astonishingly useful book; you might want to buy it. For this article, mentions coated papers and parchments that may be written upon with a metal point and erased with  light moisture.

Blind Tooling: While this site shows many examples of period book bindings decorated with blind tooling, this section deals with blind tooling specifically. From Princeton U.

Medieval Leatherworking Techniques:  I. Marc Carlson's survey of period methods.

V&A Access to Images: Search for  museum item number M.74:1, 2-1982 to see a late 17th c. English pocket notebook with a stylus.

Bifolium - A piece of parchment/paper which is folded to create two leaves.

Heraldic Arts and Sciences:
Beyond the Banner and Shield
Part 11: A Blank-Tables Book  

Prior to the advent of the last centuries, paper/parchment was a commodity that was used with care. It could be expensive and difficult to get, and so what one had one generally used for final products. However, poetry has to be composed, letters have to be drafted, and even to-do lists have to kept. What, then, did an educated person prior to 1600 use to collect his or her thoughts?

Most people in the SCA are familiar with the wax tablet or tables. This is a device, usually of wood or ivory, that has been slightly hollowed and filled with wax; the user then inscribed what he or she wanted to write into the wax surface. However, around the beginning of the 16th century, another sort of table became popular.

This table consisted of a series of parchment sheets coated with gesso and bound into a booklet. This could be written upon with ink or metalpoint and subsequently cleaned with a damp cloth, sponge, or even fingertip once the information was no longer needed. According to a variety of records, they came in many shapes and bindings, from the merely functional to the very elegant. Not many have survived through the centuries, in large part because they were used until they could be used no more and discarded. However, again, according to the records of a variety of Stationers, they were plentifully stocked and bought through the end of our period and into the next centuries.

I do own a wax tablet; however, as I am primarily a late 15th-mid 16th c. kind of persona, I decided that I would prefer to have a blank-tables book.

Making the tables themselves was easy: I coated acid-free bristol board with layers of gesso, alternating a layer of vertical with a layer of horizontal brush application. I let each layer dry completely between applications; when finished drying, I cut them to the size of the bifolium. Most of the surviving blank-tables books are palm sized; however, I decided to make mine quite a bit larger. Gathered and sewn, the signature is approximately 6.25 inches wide by 7.75 inches long.

The cover required more work. I had on hand a variety of already dyed leather scraps, and a memory of a class in leatherworking that I had taken years and years ago from Leif Haakonson. The leather panels were extremely stiff, almost as if they'd been hardened, and I knew from experience that they made good boards for a single signature binding. I cut them down to size, tested the viability of tooling already dyed leather on the scraps, and, when the impressions looked good, decorated the front panel.

Happy with the cover, I then turned my attention to the actual binding; see the "Binding" link for a gallery essay on stitching a single section binding with leather boards and bookcloth.

Initially, I planned to use plain bookcloth for the quarter binding; however, since I've still got plenty of Northshield trim left, I decided to make the bookcloth with the trim. While quarter-bound books are seen in period, I have found no examples of a period binding consisting of an embroidered quarter-bound spine combined with tooled, cuir boilli-type leather board. Embroidered bindings tend to cover the whole book; quarter bindings tend to consist of a leather spine and wooden boards. Bindings that use leather as the case itself instead of as a cover for boards tend to be limp bindings. That said, this particular binding fits well within the period aesthetic, and I am happy with the way the binding turned out. 

The last item I made for this project was the simple stylus, a goose feather holding a section of lead-tin, the same metals used to make a "lead point" in period. After creating the table pages, I tried walnut ink, graphite, tannogallate ink, and sumi ink on the pages. All performed well, but I found the leadpoint to be the most useful; it left no ghost writing and was not easily smeared (see some of the research comments here).

The materials you will need to create this project for yourself:

The blank-tables signature:

  • acid-free paper, bristol board, or vellum.
  • gesso--period gesso can be complex to make, modern gesso works just fine
  • brush
  • linen book binding thread
  • beeswax (to wax the linen thread for ease of sewing the signature)
  • needle
  • additional paper and linen tape (to make the binding anchor)
  • linen cloth
  • bone folder
  • ruler
  • awl

The book cloth:

  • acid-free paper
  • an adhesive: glue or binding paste (white glue will do; wheat paste or hide glue is more period.)
  • cloth

The tooled leather board:

  • stiff leather. Mine was already dyed; color yours as you will after the tooling.
  • sponge
  • water
  • marble slab
  • bone folder
  • ruler
  • pencil
  • tooling stamp
  • polyester hammer

The stylus:

  • feather
  • solid-core lead solder
  • scissors or snip

This is a fairly complex project. I have included links to instructions for single-section binding and leather tooling in the left hand column; the remaining processes are described throughout this article.  

Click on thumbnails to see larger pictures. I apologize for their quality; at the time I was constructing this, the only working image-taker I had was my scanner.

Two tools used in the creation of the table-book, a bone folder and a leather stamp.

The bone folder is used in creating firm, sharp folds when folding paper and so forth, but it was also used to score the lines on the leather cover. When gluing everything together, it was used to smooth and press surfaces.

The leather stamp was used in the tooling; it is a quarterfoil-shaped series of leaves. The leaves are the first bit of heraldic decoration: leaves for a Laurel.

 

 

The blank-tables signature prepared for binding. It consists of 4 bifolia (making 8 folia, 16 pages or writing surfaces), a linen strip, and a binding anchor. The binding anchor is made of paper and linen tape, to provide a strong base connecting the signature and the boards.

The linen is glued to the inside of the leather board, the anchor is glued to the outside of the board. The linen gives additional strength to the boards and forms an additional attachment for the signature. It is covered, in turn, by a bifolium of tipped-in, 100% cotton paper glued down over it.

The embroidered bookcloth, made simply to cover the spine. The strip is glued down to 100% cotton paper and dried under pressure.

While its function is primarily decorative, it does add some strength to the book anchor. It is a section of Master Drix's  "Northshield" trim bordered by yellow ribbon, thus completing the second heraldic element, the Northshield populace badge.

 

The tooled front panel; contrast on right image has been altered to allow you to see the pattern.

The center design is the tricked badge On a water bouget sable, two ermine spots Or. This is the badge I use to mark my property and to indicate my apprentices. I drew it upon the surface with a pencil and tooled it with the bone folder.

The whole blank-tables book assembled. Contrast has been altered on the right to make the pattern clearer.

The heraldic decoration as a whole consists of the quaterfoil-style leaves, the populace badge of Northshield, and my personal badge. It does a nice job of conveying the message: This belongs to Dame Merouda of Northshield.

 

An extremely simple stylus. I have exactly no metalworking skills and so have not yet taught myself to make a silver or other metal point. However, quills had been used in period not only to write, but also to make painter's brushes; the barrel of the quill would be cut and used as the ferrule of the brush. Further, there are extant examples of a metal point being inserted into a wooden or bone holder. In the spirit of these practices, I took a goose feather that was too small to use as a pen and inserted a cut of lead-tin solder into the feather, then trimmed the feather off as if it was a pen. It's a good compromise, I think, and it works perfectly.

{Elyse Boucher} {Arts and Sciences Top} {A&S Heraldry} {Poopie the Pirate} {Help Support This Site}