VOLUME ONE OF THESE THREADS NO.2 Archival Products NEWS · “Djs in the Library—Dust Jackets that is, Not the Music Makers” by Margit Smith. For more information about dust jackets,

So if the reason for using a colored threadwhen sewing a book together by machine wasto identify the operator of the machine forquality control purposes, I had a few morequestions that came to mind. Did that meanthat the same operator, using their assignedorange-yellow thread, could have sewn ourcopies of The Best Plays of 1951-52 and TheBest Plays of 1960-61, nearly 10 years apart?Maybe not, but it was an intriguing ideanonetheless. But even more incredible to con-template is the possibility that my copy ofArthur Compton’s memoir, which was pur-chased at a second-hand bookstore, near theUniversity of Chicago, could have been sewnby the same person as the copy that belongs toWellesley’s library. After so much time and dis-tance, for those two copies to be in my handat the same time, is nothing short of amazing.

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank everyone who took thetime to try to answer my questions aboutmachine sewing and/or who recommendedpeople to contact:

Susi Barbarossa, Weissman Preservation Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

LBS/Archival Products1801 Thompson Ave.P.O. Box 1413Des Moines, Iowa 50306-14131-800-526-5640515-262-3191Fax [email protected]

archival.com

VOLUME 14

NO.22007

Upon opening the first signature of abook to check the integrity of itssewing, I noticed that the thread

used for one of the stitches was a differentcolor from the rest. Instead of neutral, nearlyinvisible off-white, this one was a vivid blue-green. (Fig. 1) Puzzled, I checked the last signature. It, too, had one blue-green stitch at the same sewing station, though the rest of the stitches were the usual colorless thread.I checked several other signatures, and all ofthem were the same. Why was this thread different? Had the whole book been sewntogether at one station and then finished bysewing the rest of the stations with regularthread?

Since the sewing on that particular bookseemed secure and did not appear to need anyreinforcement, I shook off my questions, filledout a treatment slip, checked the book into theConservation Unit, and shelved it with otherbooks that needed similar repairs. I didn’t thinkof it again until the next time a book camethrough with a different thread color at onestation—only this time it was yellow. Not a

Archival Products

NEWSOne of These Threads is Not Like the Others, or,What’s Special about this Sewing Station?by Emily K Bell

O N E O F T H E S E T H R E A D S – c o n t i n u e d

Books sewnwith one differently colored threadcame up soinfrequentlythat I was stillsometimes surprised to seethem and tooka moment toremember thatI had seen thephenomenonbefore.

Figure 2: My copy of Lorna Doone has a bright orangethread—the question is: Why?

Ginger Clark, Curtis Brown, Ltd., New York, NYSam Ellenport, Harcourt Bindery, Boston, MAAlice Goff, Student at University of Michigan School of Information, Ann Arbor, MITracy Lamphere, Grimm Book Bindery, Madison, WILauren LeBlanc, Alfred A. Knopf Publishers,New York, NYKatherine McCanless Ruffin, Wellesley CollegeMariana Oller, Wellesley CollegePaul Parisi, Acme Bookbinding, Cambridge, MASteve Smith, Wellesley CollegeRobert Woodman, Infoscitex Corporation,Waltham, MA

Emily K. Bell is Senior Library Associate in Conservation atthe Margaret Clapp Library at Wellesley College in Welles-ley, MA. She can be reached at [email protected] or byphone at (781)283-3595.

Addendum to Archival Products NEWS, Volume 14, No. 1,

“Djs in the Library—Dust Jackets that is, Not the Music

Makers” by Margit Smith.For more information about dust jackets, their value

and care, I recommend the very informative article byScott Brown: “The Anatomy of Dust Jacket Restora-tion.” Fine Books & Collections. May/June 2007, p. 40-45. Brown covers in detail serveral issues I touched onin my article, including the ethics and practical aspectsof dust jacket repair/restoration/preservation; he alsonames individual restorers and their work.

Margit J. Smith is Head of Cataloging and Preservation atthe Copley Library, University of San Diego, San Diego, CA92110. She can be reached at [email protected].

Figure 1: A book with one blue-green thread among theusual nearly-invisible white stitches caught my attention.

7

A pull quotefrom the storywill be enteredhere. A pullquote from thestory will beentered here.

America. This fact suggested yetanother possibility for the purpose ofthe colored thread. If the publishersent the printed pages out from itsown bindery (if it had one) and con-tracted with a separate company todo the actual binding, could thethread color be used by the binderyto identify the client?

An issue of an annual publicationhad a colored thread in it, so Ichecked other years of the publica-tion to see if there was any patternto the thread color or position. Theseries was “The Best Plays of…”, anannual review of plays published bythe Dodd Mead company. I exam-ined as many years of the periodicalas I could that had not been over-sewn and rebound. There was notmuch of a pattern, although therewere several years where a thread inthe peach-orange-yellow color familywas used. It may have been enoughfor the binder to identify the booksthey were binding for that particularpublisher. On the other hand, oncethe book was bound, the threadwould be obscured by the cover, so itwould no longer be useful for quickidentification purposes.

To get a different perspective onthe question, I turned to a commer-cial binder, Paul Parisi, president ofAcme Bookbinding in Charlestown,MA. He explained that in the courseof oversewing a book for a librarybinding, a different thread colorcould serve as an indicator of whatparticular machine was being usedfor the sewing, as well as who wasoperating the machine. An individualoperator could be assigned a specificcolor for the purpose of quality control. If a consistent problem wasidentified that was the result of a

specific operator or machine, then itwould be possible to fix the problemeither with retraining or with repairor adjustment of the machine.Because of the structure of an over-sewn book, the thread would not be visible once the book had beenbound, so there would be no harmin having one of the threads be a different color from the rest. In thecase of a book sewn through thefold, the thread is not hidden bybinding the book and so it is morenoticeable in the finished product.But could it nevertheless be used as a quality control measure?

Looking for confirmation, I contacted some binderies (listed asbook manufacturers, trade binders,or edition binders) whose websitesoffered the option to have bookssewn through the fold. Tracy Lam-phere, bindery manager at theGrimm Book Bindery in Madison,WI, agreed with Paul Parisi’s sug-gestion that the thread could beused to identify the person sewingthe volume. She said that it was nota practice that they used at theirbindery, since she believed that theircustomers would not want to seetheir books with different colors ofthread. Instead they had a practice ofmarking the spine with a coloredmarker after sewing—a differentcolor for each person operating themachines. This had the effect ofidentifying the operator withoutbeing visible once the book had beenbound. A colleague of hers con-firmed that the colored thread was a common practice in other binderies,where it had been done “for thou-sands of years”—an exaggeration,we’re sure, but it certainly soundedlike a definitive answer to me.


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pale, pastel yellow, but a bright lemon yellowthat jumped off the page. Later, I noticed onewith an orange thread. (Fig. 2) And one withgreen. And one with a deep maroon. I couldnot discern an obvious pattern, such as alwaysusing the same sewing station. The type ofbook did not always suggest that I shouldexpect to see a splash of color when I checkedthe sewing—it was not, for example, only engi-neering books or economics books or art books.

Books sewn with one differently-coloredthread came up so infrequently that I was stillsometimes surprised to see them and took amoment to remember that I had seen the phenomenon before. Since at the time I wasassessing the condition of about 500 books amonth, including checking that their sewingwas intact, it became clear to me that whateverpractice results in these anomalous threads isrelatively rare. So why does it occur at all?

Along with other members of the Preserva-tion department at the University of Maryland,

I took a trip to Wert Bindery in Grantville, PA.It was the first time that I had visited a com-mercial bindery, so it was the first time I saw a Smyth-type book sewing machine in action.It was fascinating, after having sewn severalbooks by hand, to see that it really was possibleto automate the process and finish sewing anentire book in a matter of minutes. Themachine used several needles at once, eachthreaded with its own spool of thread, and wasfed each signature by an operator who manuallyfound the center of the signature and placed it over the arm of the machine. (Fig. 3 and 3A)Watching the process, I dismissed my first theory about why one thread might be a differ-ent color—there was no reason to sew one ofthe stations all the way through the book tohold it together before finishing the rest of thesewing. In fact, such a thread would be moreof a hindrance than a help, and would notspeed up the process at all if all the stations ina signature could be sewn at once in a matter of seconds. Clearly holding things togetherwas not the answer. Now I knew how onethread could be different from the rest, but I still did not know why.

When I next thought to ask people about it, I had just started a new job at WellesleyCollege in Wellesley, MA. The Book Arts program director, Katherine McCanless Ruffin,postulated that it might be a way to tell whichend of the book was the head or tail, so that it could be cased in correctly without having to open the textblock to check the text. Thismade sense to me, as I had seen other markingson the spines of books that were clearlydesigned to indicate at a glance that somethingwas amiss. For example, spine edges of signa-tures could be marked with a black square or


2

Figure 4: Black rectangles on the folded edges of thesesignatures line up to form a diagonal line when they aresewn together in the correct order.

Figure 3: A Smyth-typesewing machine, withfour spools of thread, inaction at Wert Binderyin Grantsville, PA.

Figure 3a: A diagram of a Smyth sewing machine, showinga different spool of thread for each of the six sewing needles. From Palmer, Elbridge Woodman. A Course inBookbinding for Vocational Training. New York: EmployingBookbinders of America, Inc., 1927.

3

rectangle in such a way that when the signatureswere in the correct order, the squares wouldline up in an unbroken diagonal across thespine. (Fig. 4) If a signature was in the wrongorder, or in the wrong orientation, it would beimmediately obvious from looking at the spineof the sewn book. So why not use the coloredthread as an indicator of which way was up?Then I remembered that in one of the booksthe colored thread was right in the middle ofthe sewing stations—not at all helpful for indi-cating that the textblock is about to be casedin upside down. (Fig. 5 and 5A) So, keepingthings oriented probably was not the answer,either.

Steve Smith, the preservation librarian atWellesley, was reminded of the inked edge ofthe end of a roll of cash register receipt paper.Perhaps the thread was dyed towards the endof the spool, with different colors indicatinghow close the end was—starting with green or blue, then yellow, then red as the endapproached. Perhaps, but I had never noticedmore than one color, or undyed thread at thebeginning of a book and dyed thread at theend. It was a reasonable possibility, but I wasnot convinced. It seemed too improbable thatI had just missed all those books that shouldbe out there with more than one color ofthread at that sewing station. Was the end ofthe thread the answer? I kept digging.

Mariana Oller, a Special Collections librarianat Wellesley, had two very different guesses.The first was lack of concern combined with a desire to avoid being wasteful—most con-sumers wouldn’t ever notice the thread in theirbooks, especially if glue had seeped throughthe sewing holes during the spine liningprocess and stuck the pages together in thegutter, hiding the threads entirely. So whywould the binder care if one of the threads wasa different color from the others? If it was thethread that was available, why not use it up?But there was something that seemed so deliberate about the practice that I was loth toaccept disinterest as the answer.

Mariana’s second suggestion was that itcould be a way for the binder to “sign” theirwork. On high-end leather bindings, thedesigner of the binding or the bindery itselffrequently incorporated a signature motif intothe design. This indicated to people in theknow who was responsible for the creation of a particular binding. In early publisher’s clothbindings this was also common (Fig. 6) and inmodern publications, the publishers have sym-bols and motifs that they imprint on the spinesor covers of the book to indicate who they are.Could the color of the thread be a simple, verysubtle way for the binder to “sign” their work,as a separate contributor from the publishinghouse that produced it?

Now seemed like a good time to return tothe books to see if I could find any more cluesto help narrow down the search. Like manypeople who work in libraries, I have a good-sized collection of books at home, so I startedwith my own books. Several of them are hard-


Figure 5 and 5a: This brown thread in the center sewingstation probably would nothelp to indicate if the textblock was about to be cased in upside down.

Could the color of thethread be asimple, verysubtle way forthe binder to “sign” theirwork, as a separate contributorfrom the publishinghouse that produced it?

Figure 6: This elaboratelytooled publisher’s clothbinding proclaims that itwas published by FrederickWarne & Company of Lon-don and New York.

6


The BestPlays of... Date of pub. Publisher

Colored ThreadPrinting/ Binding Information

Color Location

1894 – 99 1955 Dodd Mead, NY nonethrough 1963, dk. blue cloth, paper

labels on spine and front cover

1899-1909 1944 Dodd Mead, NY none

1909-19 1934 Dodd Mead, NY yellow at headprinted by Quinn & Boden Co. Inc.,

book mfrs., Rahway, NJ

1921-22 1934 Dodd Mead, NY none3rd printing, Murray Printing Co.,

Cambridge, MA

1923-24 1924Small, Maynard,

Bostonnone

Murray Printing Co., and Boston Bookbinding Co., Cambridge, MA

1938-39 1939 Dodd Mead, NY yellow center of 5


1945-46 1946 Dodd Mead, NY pale peach 2nd from tail

1948-49 1949 Dodd Mead, NY purple2nd from

head

1949-50 1950 Dodd Mead, NY purple 2nd from tail


1951-52 1952 Dodd Mead, NY orange-yellow 2nd from tail

1952-53 1953 Dodd Mead, NY peach 2nd from tail

1953-54 1954 Dodd Mead, NY peach center of 5

1954-55 1955 Dodd Mead, NY blue center of 5

1955-56 1956 Dodd Mead, NY orange-yellow center of 5

1956-57 1957 Dodd Mead, NY pale pink center of 5

1957-58 1958 Dodd Mead, NY yellow 2nd from tail

1958-59 1959 Dodd Mead, NY green center of 5

1959-60 1960 Dodd Mead, NY peach at tail




1963 through1979

Dodd Mead, NY none New format (size, color, cloth type)

1979-80 1980 Dodd Mead, NY dark green at tail Another new format (size, color, cloth type)


1981 through1987

Dodd Mead, NY n/a adhesive structure

1987 through1992

Applause n/a adhesive structure

1992 throughpresent

Limelight n/a adhesive structure

Table 2

...in the courseof oversewing abook for alibrary binding,a differentthread colorcould serve asan indicator ofwhat particularmachine wasbeing used forthe sewing, aswell as who wasoperating themachine.

5

cover books that are sewn through the fold(although not as many as I had expected—toomany of them were adhesive structures) and a few have one thread that is a different colorfrom the rest. After looking closely at them,some commonalities appeared. They were allprinted between 1940 and 1960. Althoughthey were from several different publishers(Dodd Mead, Harper & Brothers, Scribner’s,Norton, and Oxford), they were all publishedin New York. Of the six examples, five werefiction books and one was a memoir written bythe scientist Arthur H. Compton and pub-lished in 1956, when stories about working onthe Manhattan Project at the University of

4

Chicago could have been fairly popular read-ing. So was the phenomenon most commonamong the large publishing houses in NewYork City from the Second World War to the1960s? Perhaps, but it was a very small andskewed sample (most of my books are fiction,except for the textbooks I accumulated as a sci-ence student). On the other hand, it did give anarrower timeline and a geographic focus.

I took the books to work to see if by anychance I could compare them to other copiesof the same editions that were owned byWellesley’s library. There were only two in thestacks that were identical editions to my books,but fortunately they were two particularly useful

pairs. One was Compton’s memoir with abright orange thread at the sewing station clos-est to the head of the book. The library’s copyhad the exact same color thread at the samestation as my own copy, seemingly confirmingmy notion that this whole phenomenon couldnot be just an accident but that there must besome purpose to the colored thread. (Fig. 7)The second book was a novel by Mary EllenChase entitled The Lovely Ambition, bound ina turquoise cloth cover. My copy had a brightturquoise thread at the second sewing stationfrom the head of the book, matching the colorof the cover so well that Steve Smith postulat-ed another reason for the thread: to identifywhich cover a group of text blocks should becased. Even if the color did not match perfect-ly, it might be enough to distinguish one bookfrom another. But upon opening the library’scopy of The Lovely Ambition, I was surprised tofind that not only did it not have the samecolor thread, it had no distinguishing thread atall—every stitch was the same off-white color.(Fig. 8) Further examination showed that therewas a small difference between the two books.Although they were the same edition, theWellesley copy was from the first printing andmy copy was from the fifth. I had to revise myassumption that books would be printed andbound by the same company no matter whichprinting run they came from.

I kept looking for colored threads everytime I checked the sewing of a library book tosee if more patterns were unveiled, especiallywhen comparing two copies of the same book.At first, it looked like some of my tentativeconclusions were holding up. The books foundwere from the same general time period, butthere was no relationship between the color ofthe thread and the color of the binding. Thenmore recent books with colored thread werediscovered, such as a book about Le Corbusierfrom 1981, so my putative time period wasexpanded. In some cases, such as The Face ofthe Third Reich by Joachim Fest, two copies ofthe same book had different colors of thread in

them, but further examination revealed theywere from different printing runs and so werenot bound at the same time. In another case,Forbidden Neighbours by Charles Abrams, twobooks with the same printing and bindinginformation—what appeared for all intentsand purposes to be identical copies of the samebook—had two different colors of thread indifferent locations. (Fig. 9, Fig. 10, and Fig.11) Not knowing what to make of this, Ilooked for information from other sources.

Searching for written information aboutmachine sewing, I found a book from 1927, ACourse in Bookbinding for Vocational Training, amanual for teaching bookbinding classes intechnical schools. Although the text of themanual did not mention a use for coloredthread, the book turned out to be relevant inanother way. It had a pale green stitch in themiddle sewing station, so clearly the use of colored thread had begun before the 1940s.Although the book was published in New Yorklike the other examples, it was not publishedby a major publishing house but rather a smalltrade publisher: Employing Bookbinders of

O N E O F T H E S E T H R E A D S – c o n t i n u e d O N E O F T H E S E T H R E A D S – c o n t i n u e d

Title AuthorDate

ofPub.

PublisherColored Thread

Printing / Binding InformationColor Location

Ballet in America

Amberg,George

1949Duell, Sloan and

Pearce, NYlight

purplehead of 5

joint publication of The New AmericanLibrary of World Literature, Inc.; printedgray cloth binding

The legacy of Chopin

Holcman,Jana

1954PhilosophicalLibrary, NY

yellow2nd fromtail of 4

red paper-covered hardcover with blackprinted silhouette on front cover & titleon spine

The WilliamCarlos Williams

reader

Williams,Willam Carlos

1966New Directions

Publishing Corpo-ration, NY

turquoise2nd fromhead of 4

yellow cloth w/ black lettering on spine& blind stamped glyph on front cover

The Ideas of Le Corbusier on

Architectureand Urban Planning

Le Corbusier(JacquesGuiton)

1981George Braziller,

Inc., NYbrightblue

center of 5sewn paperback, printed & laminatedpaper cover, “Designed by Dana Levy”

The Face of the Third Reich

Fest,Joachim C.

1970Pantheon Books(division of Ran-dom House), NY

burgundy2nd fromtail of 5

manufactured by The Book Press, Brat-tleboro, VT; black cloth binding with redand silver stamping; 2nd printing;Wellesley copy


Fest,Joachim C.


purple2nd fromhead of 6

manufactured by The Book Press, Brat-tleboro, VT; black cloth binding with redand silver stamping; “First American Edi-tion”; Northeastern copy

ForbiddenNeighbours

Abrams,Charles

1955Harper & Broth-

ers, NYpurple

2nd fromtail of 4

first edition, A-E; blue-green cloth coverw/ gold lettering on spine; Wellesleycopy

ForbiddenNeighbours

Abrams,Charles

1955Harper & Broth-

ers, NYturquoise tail of 4

first edition, A-E; blue-green cloth coverw/ gold lettering on spine; NortheasternUniversity copy

A Course inBookbinding for Vocational

Training

Palmer,Elbridge W.

1927Employing Book-binders of America,Inc., NYa

pale blue-green

center of 5

“Printed and Bound…by Kingsport Press,Kingsport, Tennessee”; navy blue clothcover with blind-stamped title on frontcover and gold titling on spine

Table 1

Figure 8: One copy of Mary Ellen Chase’s The LovelyAmbition has a turquoise thread matching its coveringmaterial beautifully, but a copy from the first printing ofthat edition does not.

Figure 7: Two copies of Atomic Quest, Arthur Compton’smemoir, with bright orange threads at the sewing stationclosest to the head of the book.

Figure 11: …eventhough they appear tobe otherwise identical.

Figure 10: …and another has a turquoise thread…

Figure 9: One copy ofForbidden Neighbourshas a purple thread…

The booksfound werefrom the samegeneral timeperiod, butthere was norelationshipbetween thecolor of thethread and thecolor of thebinding.

5

cover books that are sewn through the fold(although not as many as I had expected—toomany of them were adhesive structures) and a few have one thread that is a different colorfrom the rest. After looking closely at them,some commonalities appeared. They were allprinted between 1940 and 1960. Althoughthey were from several different publishers(Dodd Mead, Harper & Brothers, Scribner’s,Norton, and Oxford), they were all publishedin New York. Of the six examples, five werefiction books and one was a memoir written bythe scientist Arthur H. Compton and pub-lished in 1956, when stories about working onthe Manhattan Project at the University of

4

Chicago could have been fairly popular read-ing. So was the phenomenon most commonamong the large publishing houses in NewYork City from the Second World War to the1960s? Perhaps, but it was a very small andskewed sample (most of my books are fiction,except for the textbooks I accumulated as a sci-ence student). On the other hand, it did give anarrower timeline and a geographic focus.

I took the books to work to see if by anychance I could compare them to other copiesof the same editions that were owned byWellesley’s library. There were only two in thestacks that were identical editions to my books,but fortunately they were two particularly useful

pairs. One was Compton’s memoir with abright orange thread at the sewing station clos-est to the head of the book. The library’s copyhad the exact same color thread at the samestation as my own copy, seemingly confirmingmy notion that this whole phenomenon couldnot be just an accident but that there must besome purpose to the colored thread. (Fig. 7)The second book was a novel by Mary EllenChase entitled The Lovely Ambition, bound ina turquoise cloth cover. My copy had a brightturquoise thread at the second sewing stationfrom the head of the book, matching the colorof the cover so well that Steve Smith postulat-ed another reason for the thread: to identifywhich cover a group of text blocks should becased. Even if the color did not match perfect-ly, it might be enough to distinguish one bookfrom another. But upon opening the library’scopy of The Lovely Ambition, I was surprised tofind that not only did it not have the samecolor thread, it had no distinguishing thread atall—every stitch was the same off-white color.(Fig. 8) Further examination showed that therewas a small difference between the two books.Although they were the same edition, theWellesley copy was from the first printing andmy copy was from the fifth. I had to revise myassumption that books would be printed andbound by the same company no matter whichprinting run they came from.

I kept looking for colored threads everytime I checked the sewing of a library book tosee if more patterns were unveiled, especiallywhen comparing two copies of the same book.At first, it looked like some of my tentativeconclusions were holding up. The books foundwere from the same general time period, butthere was no relationship between the color ofthe thread and the color of the binding. Thenmore recent books with colored thread werediscovered, such as a book about Le Corbusierfrom 1981, so my putative time period wasexpanded. In some cases, such as The Face ofthe Third Reich by Joachim Fest, two copies ofthe same book had different colors of thread in

them, but further examination revealed theywere from different printing runs and so werenot bound at the same time. In another case,Forbidden Neighbours by Charles Abrams, twobooks with the same printing and bindinginformation—what appeared for all intentsand purposes to be identical copies of the samebook—had two different colors of thread indifferent locations. (Fig. 9, Fig. 10, and Fig.11) Not knowing what to make of this, Ilooked for information from other sources.

Searching for written information aboutmachine sewing, I found a book from 1927, ACourse in Bookbinding for Vocational Training, amanual for teaching bookbinding classes intechnical schools. Although the text of themanual did not mention a use for coloredthread, the book turned out to be relevant inanother way. It had a pale green stitch in themiddle sewing station, so clearly the use of colored thread had begun before the 1940s.Although the book was published in New Yorklike the other examples, it was not publishedby a major publishing house but rather a smalltrade publisher: Employing Bookbinders of

O N E O F T H E S E T H R E A D S – c o n t i n u e d O N E O F T H E S E T H R E A D S – c o n t i n u e d

Title AuthorDate

ofPub.

PublisherColored Thread

Printing / Binding InformationColor Location

Ballet in America

Amberg,George

1949Duell, Sloan and

Pearce, NYlight

purplehead of 5

joint publication of The New AmericanLibrary of World Literature, Inc.; printedgray cloth binding

The legacy of Chopin

Holcman,Jana

1954PhilosophicalLibrary, NY

yellow2nd fromtail of 4

red paper-covered hardcover with blackprinted silhouette on front cover & titleon spine

The WilliamCarlos Williams

reader

Williams,Willam Carlos

1966New Directions

Publishing Corpo-ration, NY

turquoise2nd fromhead of 4

yellow cloth w/ black lettering on spine& blind stamped glyph on front cover

The Ideas of Le Corbusier on

Architectureand Urban Planning

Le Corbusier(JacquesGuiton)

1981George Braziller,

Inc., NYbrightblue

center of 5sewn paperback, printed & laminatedpaper cover, “Designed by Dana Levy”


Fest,Joachim C.


burgundy2nd fromtail of 5

manufactured by The Book Press, Brat-tleboro, VT; black cloth binding with redand silver stamping; 2nd printing;Wellesley copy


Fest,Joachim C.


purple2nd fromhead of 6

manufactured by The Book Press, Brat-tleboro, VT; black cloth binding with redand silver stamping; “First American Edi-tion”; Northeastern copy

ForbiddenNeighbours

Abrams,Charles

1955Harper & Broth-

ers, NYpurple

2nd fromtail of 4

first edition, A-E; blue-green cloth coverw/ gold lettering on spine; Wellesleycopy

ForbiddenNeighbours

Abrams,Charles

1955Harper & Broth-

ers, NYturquoise tail of 4

first edition, A-E; blue-green cloth coverw/ gold lettering on spine; NortheasternUniversity copy

A Course inBookbinding for Vocational

Training

Palmer,Elbridge W.

1927Employing Book-binders of America,Inc., NYa

pale blue-green

center of 5

“Printed and Bound…by Kingsport Press,Kingsport, Tennessee”; navy blue clothcover with blind-stamped title on frontcover and gold titling on spine

Table 1

Figure 8: One copy of Mary Ellen Chase’s The LovelyAmbition has a turquoise thread matching its coveringmaterial beautifully, but a copy from the first printing ofthat edition does not.

Figure 7: Two copies of Atomic Quest, Arthur Compton’smemoir, with bright orange threads at the sewing stationclosest to the head of the book.

Figure 11: …eventhough they appear tobe otherwise identical.

Figure 10: …and another has a turquoise thread…

Figure 9: One copy ofForbidden Neighbourshas a purple thread…

The booksfound werefrom the samegeneral timeperiod, butthere was norelationshipbetween thecolor of thethread and thecolor of thebinding.

3

rectangle in such a way that when the signatureswere in the correct order, the squares wouldline up in an unbroken diagonal across thespine. (Fig. 4) If a signature was in the wrongorder, or in the wrong orientation, it would beimmediately obvious from looking at the spineof the sewn book. So why not use the coloredthread as an indicator of which way was up?Then I remembered that in one of the booksthe colored thread was right in the middle ofthe sewing stations—not at all helpful for indi-cating that the textblock is about to be casedin upside down. (Fig. 5 and 5A) So, keepingthings oriented probably was not the answer,either.

Steve Smith, the preservation librarian atWellesley, was reminded of the inked edge ofthe end of a roll of cash register receipt paper.Perhaps the thread was dyed towards the endof the spool, with different colors indicatinghow close the end was—starting with green or blue, then yellow, then red as the endapproached. Perhaps, but I had never noticedmore than one color, or undyed thread at thebeginning of a book and dyed thread at theend. It was a reasonable possibility, but I wasnot convinced. It seemed too improbable thatI had just missed all those books that shouldbe out there with more than one color ofthread at that sewing station. Was the end ofthe thread the answer? I kept digging.

Mariana Oller, a Special Collections librarianat Wellesley, had two very different guesses.The first was lack of concern combined with a desire to avoid being wasteful—most con-sumers wouldn’t ever notice the thread in theirbooks, especially if glue had seeped throughthe sewing holes during the spine liningprocess and stuck the pages together in thegutter, hiding the threads entirely. So whywould the binder care if one of the threads wasa different color from the others? If it was thethread that was available, why not use it up?But there was something that seemed so deliberate about the practice that I was loth toaccept disinterest as the answer.

Mariana’s second suggestion was that itcould be a way for the binder to “sign” theirwork. On high-end leather bindings, thedesigner of the binding or the bindery itselffrequently incorporated a signature motif intothe design. This indicated to people in theknow who was responsible for the creation of a particular binding. In early publisher’s clothbindings this was also common (Fig. 6) and inmodern publications, the publishers have sym-bols and motifs that they imprint on the spinesor covers of the book to indicate who they are.Could the color of the thread be a simple, verysubtle way for the binder to “sign” their work,as a separate contributor from the publishinghouse that produced it?

Now seemed like a good time to return tothe books to see if I could find any more cluesto help narrow down the search. Like manypeople who work in libraries, I have a good-sized collection of books at home, so I startedwith my own books. Several of them are hard-


Figure 5 and 5a: This brown thread in the center sewingstation probably would nothelp to indicate if the textblock was about to be cased in upside down.

Could the color of thethread be asimple, verysubtle way forthe binder to “sign” theirwork, as a separate contributorfrom the publishinghouse that produced it?

Figure 6: This elaboratelytooled publisher’s clothbinding proclaims that itwas published by FrederickWarne & Company of Lon-don and New York.

6


The BestPlays of... Date of pub. Publisher

Colored ThreadPrinting/ Binding Information

Color Location

1894 – 99 1955 Dodd Mead, NY nonethrough 1963, dk. blue cloth, paper

labels on spine and front cover


1909-19 1934 Dodd Mead, NY yellow at headprinted by Quinn & Boden Co. Inc.,

book mfrs., Rahway, NJ

1921-22 1934 Dodd Mead, NY none3rd printing, Murray Printing Co.,

Cambridge, MA

1923-24 1924Small, Maynard,

Bostonnone

Murray Printing Co., and Boston Bookbinding Co., Cambridge, MA

1938-39 1939 Dodd Mead, NY yellow center of 5



1948-49 1949 Dodd Mead, NY purple2nd from

head

1949-50 1950 Dodd Mead, NY purple 2nd from tail



1952-53 1953 Dodd Mead, NY peach 2nd from tail

1953-54 1954 Dodd Mead, NY peach center of 5

1954-55 1955 Dodd Mead, NY blue center of 5

1955-56 1956 Dodd Mead, NY orange-yellow center of 5

1956-57 1957 Dodd Mead, NY pale pink center of 5

1957-58 1958 Dodd Mead, NY yellow 2nd from tail

1958-59 1959 Dodd Mead, NY green center of 5

1959-60 1960 Dodd Mead, NY peach at tail




1963 through1979

Dodd Mead, NY none New format (size, color, cloth type)

1979-80 1980 Dodd Mead, NY dark green at tail Another new format (size, color, cloth type)


1981 through1987

Dodd Mead, NY n/a adhesive structure

1987 through1992

Applause n/a adhesive structure

1992 throughpresent

Limelight n/a adhesive structure

Table 2

...in the courseof oversewing abook for alibrary binding,a differentthread colorcould serve asan indicator ofwhat particularmachine wasbeing used forthe sewing, aswell as who wasoperating themachine.

7

A pull quotefrom the storywill be enteredhere. A pullquote from thestory will beentered here.

America. This fact suggested yetanother possibility for the purpose ofthe colored thread. If the publishersent the printed pages out from itsown bindery (if it had one) and con-tracted with a separate company todo the actual binding, could thethread color be used by the binderyto identify the client?

An issue of an annual publicationhad a colored thread in it, so Ichecked other years of the publica-tion to see if there was any patternto the thread color or position. Theseries was “The Best Plays of…”, anannual review of plays published bythe Dodd Mead company. I exam-ined as many years of the periodicalas I could that had not been over-sewn and rebound. There was notmuch of a pattern, although therewere several years where a thread inthe peach-orange-yellow color familywas used. It may have been enoughfor the binder to identify the booksthey were binding for that particularpublisher. On the other hand, oncethe book was bound, the threadwould be obscured by the cover, so itwould no longer be useful for quickidentification purposes.

To get a different perspective onthe question, I turned to a commer-cial binder, Paul Parisi, president ofAcme Bookbinding in Charlestown,MA. He explained that in the courseof oversewing a book for a librarybinding, a different thread colorcould serve as an indicator of whatparticular machine was being usedfor the sewing, as well as who wasoperating the machine. An individualoperator could be assigned a specificcolor for the purpose of quality control. If a consistent problem wasidentified that was the result of a

specific operator or machine, then itwould be possible to fix the problemeither with retraining or with repairor adjustment of the machine.Because of the structure of an over-sewn book, the thread would not be visible once the book had beenbound, so there would be no harmin having one of the threads be a different color from the rest. In thecase of a book sewn through thefold, the thread is not hidden bybinding the book and so it is morenoticeable in the finished product.But could it nevertheless be used as a quality control measure?

Looking for confirmation, I contacted some binderies (listed asbook manufacturers, trade binders,or edition binders) whose websitesoffered the option to have bookssewn through the fold. Tracy Lam-phere, bindery manager at theGrimm Book Bindery in Madison,WI, agreed with Paul Parisi’s sug-gestion that the thread could beused to identify the person sewingthe volume. She said that it was nota practice that they used at theirbindery, since she believed that theircustomers would not want to seetheir books with different colors ofthread. Instead they had a practice ofmarking the spine with a coloredmarker after sewing—a differentcolor for each person operating themachines. This had the effect ofidentifying the operator withoutbeing visible once the book had beenbound. A colleague of hers con-firmed that the colored thread was a common practice in other binderies,where it had been done “for thou-sands of years”—an exaggeration,we’re sure, but it certainly soundedlike a definitive answer to me.


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pale, pastel yellow, but a bright lemon yellowthat jumped off the page. Later, I noticed onewith an orange thread. (Fig. 2) And one withgreen. And one with a deep maroon. I couldnot discern an obvious pattern, such as alwaysusing the same sewing station. The type ofbook did not always suggest that I shouldexpect to see a splash of color when I checkedthe sewing—it was not, for example, only engi-neering books or economics books or art books.

Books sewn with one differently-coloredthread came up so infrequently that I was stillsometimes surprised to see them and took amoment to remember that I had seen the phenomenon before. Since at the time I wasassessing the condition of about 500 books amonth, including checking that their sewingwas intact, it became clear to me that whateverpractice results in these anomalous threads isrelatively rare. So why does it occur at all?

Along with other members of the Preserva-tion department at the University of Maryland,

I took a trip to Wert Bindery in Grantville, PA.It was the first time that I had visited a com-mercial bindery, so it was the first time I saw a Smyth-type book sewing machine in action.It was fascinating, after having sewn severalbooks by hand, to see that it really was possibleto automate the process and finish sewing anentire book in a matter of minutes. Themachine used several needles at once, eachthreaded with its own spool of thread, and wasfed each signature by an operator who manuallyfound the center of the signature and placed it over the arm of the machine. (Fig. 3 and 3A)Watching the process, I dismissed my first theory about why one thread might be a differ-ent color—there was no reason to sew one ofthe stations all the way through the book tohold it together before finishing the rest of thesewing. In fact, such a thread would be moreof a hindrance than a help, and would notspeed up the process at all if all the stations ina signature could be sewn at once in a matter of seconds. Clearly holding things togetherwas not the answer. Now I knew how onethread could be different from the rest, but I still did not know why.

When I next thought to ask people about it, I had just started a new job at WellesleyCollege in Wellesley, MA. The Book Arts program director, Katherine McCanless Ruffin,postulated that it might be a way to tell whichend of the book was the head or tail, so that it could be cased in correctly without having to open the textblock to check the text. Thismade sense to me, as I had seen other markingson the spines of books that were clearlydesigned to indicate at a glance that somethingwas amiss. For example, spine edges of signa-tures could be marked with a black square or


2

Figure 4: Black rectangles on the folded edges of thesesignatures line up to form a diagonal line when they aresewn together in the correct order.

Figure 3: A Smyth-typesewing machine, withfour spools of thread, inaction at Wert Binderyin Grantsville, PA.

Figure 3a: A diagram of a Smyth sewing machine, showinga different spool of thread for each of the six sewing needles. From Palmer, Elbridge Woodman. A Course inBookbinding for Vocational Training. New York: EmployingBookbinders of America, Inc., 1927.

So if the reason for using a colored threadwhen sewing a book together by machine wasto identify the operator of the machine forquality control purposes, I had a few morequestions that came to mind. Did that meanthat the same operator, using their assignedorange-yellow thread, could have sewn ourcopies of The Best Plays of 1951-52 and TheBest Plays of 1960-61, nearly 10 years apart?Maybe not, but it was an intriguing ideanonetheless. But even more incredible to con-template is the possibility that my copy ofArthur Compton’s memoir, which was pur-chased at a second-hand bookstore, near theUniversity of Chicago, could have been sewnby the same person as the copy that belongs toWellesley’s library. After so much time and dis-tance, for those two copies to be in my handat the same time, is nothing short of amazing.

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank everyone who took thetime to try to answer my questions aboutmachine sewing and/or who recommendedpeople to contact:

Susi Barbarossa, Weissman Preservation Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

LBS/Archival Products1801 Thompson Ave.P.O. Box 1413Des Moines, Iowa 50306-14131-800-526-5640515-262-3191Fax [email protected]

archival.com

VOLUME 14

NO.22007

Upon opening the first signature of abook to check the integrity of itssewing, I noticed that the thread

used for one of the stitches was a differentcolor from the rest. Instead of neutral, nearlyinvisible off-white, this one was a vivid blue-green. (Fig. 1) Puzzled, I checked the last signature. It, too, had one blue-green stitch at the same sewing station, though the rest of the stitches were the usual colorless thread.I checked several other signatures, and all ofthem were the same. Why was this thread different? Had the whole book been sewntogether at one station and then finished bysewing the rest of the stations with regularthread?

Since the sewing on that particular bookseemed secure and did not appear to need anyreinforcement, I shook off my questions, filledout a treatment slip, checked the book into theConservation Unit, and shelved it with otherbooks that needed similar repairs. I didn’t thinkof it again until the next time a book camethrough with a different thread color at onestation—only this time it was yellow. Not a

Archival Products

NEWSOne of These Threads is Not Like the Others, or,What’s Special about this Sewing Station?by Emily K Bell


Books sewnwith one differently colored threadcame up soinfrequentlythat I was stillsometimes surprised to seethem and tooka moment toremember thatI had seen thephenomenonbefore.

Figure 2: My copy of Lorna Doone has a bright orangethread—the question is: Why?

Ginger Clark, Curtis Brown, Ltd., New York, NYSam Ellenport, Harcourt Bindery, Boston, MAAlice Goff, Student at University of Michigan School of Information, Ann Arbor, MITracy Lamphere, Grimm Book Bindery, Madison, WILauren LeBlanc, Alfred A. Knopf Publishers,New York, NYKatherine McCanless Ruffin, Wellesley CollegeMariana Oller, Wellesley CollegePaul Parisi, Acme Bookbinding, Cambridge, MASteve Smith, Wellesley CollegeRobert Woodman, Infoscitex Corporation,Waltham, MA

Emily K. Bell is Senior Library Associate in Conservation atthe Margaret Clapp Library at Wellesley College in Welles-ley, MA. She can be reached at [email protected] or byphone at (781)283-3595.

Addendum to Archival Products NEWS, Volume 14, No. 1,

“Djs in the Library—Dust Jackets that is, Not the Music

Makers” by Margit Smith.For more information about dust jackets, their value

and care, I recommend the very informative article byScott Brown: “The Anatomy of Dust Jacket Restora-tion.” Fine Books & Collections. May/June 2007, p. 40-45. Brown covers in detail serveral issues I touched onin my article, including the ethics and practical aspectsof dust jacket repair/restoration/preservation; he alsonames individual restorers and their work.

Margit J. Smith is Head of Cataloging and Preservation atthe Copley Library, University of San Diego, San Diego, CA92110. She can be reached at [email protected].

Figure 1: A book with one blue-green thread among theusual nearly-invisible white stitches caught my attention.

Documents

VOLUME ONE OF THESE THREADS NO.2 Archival Products NEWS · “Djs in the Library—Dust Jackets that is, Not the Music Makers” by Margit Smith. For more information about dust jackets,