The previous chapters dealt with the construction of the bookbinding: they highlighted the materials used to produce it and gauged how a binding sometimes reveals information about the manner in which the manuscript was used. The present chapter now turns away from the protective design of bindings and turns to modifications that were made by later readers and librarians. That is to say, both groups added logistical information—words and numbers—to the leather cover, usually with the help of pen and ink, but sometimes even with hammer and nail. By the end of the medieval period all sorts of useful information had made its way onto the binding. Some of it was aimed at library use, such as shelfmarks (or pressmarks), the equivalent of our library call number (read ahead to Chapter 17 to learn more about these). The present chapter explores the medieval roots of yet another—and very familiar—tool for finding a specific book: information related to the author and the text displayed on the book's spine and dust jacket. How did the outside of the medieval manuscript communicate what was hidden inside?

Text on Leather

Why make things complicated? The easiest way to identify a manuscript was to simply jot the title on the front cover, straight on the leather of the binding. The manuscript in Figure 48 contains Ovid's Metamorphoses. A fourteenth-century librarian wrote the author's name on the back of the book, using particularly dark ink: “Ovidius Majorus.” The location of this name, on the back, indicates that the book was stored with the front facing down, which was often the case in the medieval period. A later librarian wrote the French equivalent of the name right above it (“Ovid le grant”) as well as the shelfmark “CCI” (201), which probably linked the book to an entry in a library's catalogue.

Inscriptions like these show that our modern book titles are actually a medieval invention—although because of the lack of surviving original bindings it is hard to know when, precisely, this practice began. Curiously, while the Ovid manuscript was produced in the middle of the thirteenth century, it was not until over half a century later, in the fourteenth century, that the first of the quoted titles was added to its cover (the book is still in its original binding).