Ethiopian Bookbinding Tradition

The history of the codex in the Ethiopian highlands stretches back over a millennium to the earliest centuries of the now ubiquitous book form. The legacy of Ethiopia's bound manuscript tradition - one of the longest continuously practiced in the world - has been carried forward by countless scribes, passing their skills down through generation after generation. This history is evident not only in the hundreds of thousands of bound manuscripts that survive, many still in active use, but also in those still being produced today. Ethiopian Bookbinding Tradition is the first major work to detail and to describe this tradition and the practices of the Ethiopian scribal bound book, providing a comprehensive technical study of its materials, structures, and techniques. It gathers and synthesizes the significant but dispersed and often inaccessible body of literature on the subject with further observations and analysis provided by the author. Through in-depth discussion and extensive illustrations, this book meets the long-overdue need to bring Ethiopian bookbinding into the spotlight as a significant tradition in its own right and to firmly establish it within the larger history of bookbinding.