Princeton
University
Library

Hand Bookbindings

Endleaves, sometimes called endpapers, are blank leaves or sections sewn in at the beginning and end of the textblock. These endleaf sections might consist of a simple single-folded sheet, but more commonly they are made up of several leaves, with the outermost one usually adhered to the inside of the board as the last step in the forwarding process. This latter leaf is called the "pastedown," and the other sheets are referred to as flyleaves. It is common to find no endleaves at all in bindings from the manuscript and incunabula period. Into the sixteenth century, especially in English work, the outside endleaf was sometimes not pasted down, leaving the inside of the boards exposed. As a cost-saving measure for cheaper editions, a binder might use waste material for the endleaves, instead of a clean sheet of paper or parchment. The technique of marbling paper had been practiced in the Islamic world and the Far East for some time before it was introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century. Marbled paper quickly became the most common type of decorated endleaves found in European bindings. The two examples here are in eighteenth-century bindings from England and France. In more expensive bindings, endleaves were often altered to include inner leather joints and doublures. A doublure is a piece of leather (or sometimes paper or silk) that covers the inside of the board, but is not part of the endleaf section. The final two examples are a nineteenth-century French binding with leather doublures and marbled paper flyleaves, and a twentieth-century binding from the Monastery Hill Bindery in Chicago with elaborately onlaid leather doublures and silk flyleaves.