From some point after its incoporation to the early 80s, the Library Association of Portland, which later became Multnomah County Library, operated its own bindery. Besides visually and texturally uniting runs of periodicals and sets of reference books on the shelves, the bindery, together with the mending department, breathed new life into well-read books.

Some of these books are easy to spot on the shelves. A solid-colored buckram spine with a stamped-on call number tells you the book has been rebound. For most, pull them off the shelf and you’ll find a repeating geometric or floral pattern adorning the cover. Many also are plain, and I find more than a few strikingly beautiful.

I’m starting a collection. My favorites so far contain intricate symmetries.

Or they have singular designs.

Or they just look cool on a book.

Based on the evidence I’ve collected so far, decorated buckram cloths were used starting in the late 1950s up until the mid 1980s.

I’m not sure that these books tell a story besides the ones between their pages, but there are at least three stories I think you can tell and include these books.

One is the history of the local library and the book trade. Certainly the Library Association of Portland didn’t operate the only bindery in town. There are binderies operating today. What happened to the art and craft of binding in the 20th century?

Another is simply the story of the designs themselves. There is geometry here, but also Art Deco, flowers, and an echo of Mayan glyphs.

The third story is the shift in library policies and values from preserving a bruised book to replacing it, and even sometimes replacing it with a different book on the same subject. I don’t know that one is always better than another, and there is something painful and messy about seeing the stitches in a rebound book.

There isn’t a whole lot you can tell from the covers themselves, but the longtime staff have been nice enough to explain where to look for markings and stamps in the books that indicate when the book was bound. For example, the book’s acquisition date was often stamped or written on the page after the verso (I don’t know what its called), and the bindery date was stamped on the verso itself. Sometimes you’ll find a bindery number instead, and this can also be on the title page.

In this example, the book was acquired February 18, 1958 and visited the bindery just 27 months later.

You really can’t know why the book was rebound - was it so heavily used it fell apart, or was it shoddily put together in the first place? “c.1″ in a call number today would suggest multiple copies and high use, but in 1958, it may have just meant that extra copies were only anticipated, and cataloging staff put it in the book in the first place to save the trouble of having to add it later.

I don’t know. But I love these books, and I am going to keep trying to find out about them.