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Scaleboard bindings were a quintessential 17th and 18th century American binding style. An abundance of local wood led to the use of thin, planed boards of oak, maple, birch, and ash (called scaleboards) to protect the text block, rather than expensive and imported pasteboard. American scaleboards were typically cut with a horizontal grain and were used to cover schoolbooks, religious texts, tracts, and pamphlets; their earliest American usage dates back to 1635.
Scaleboard bindings were typically small, economical, and meant for every-day use. They were bound by stabbing the text block, speeding-up the binding process and reducing the cost of the finished book. Decoration was fairly plain: most were untitled, flat spined, tight back books, covered in full sheep- or calf-skin, stained a dark brown and blind tooled with simple panel decorations. Later scaleboard bindings were typically bound in quarter leather with paper covering the rest of the boards, such as the one on display here.Label Type
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The scholar's arithmetic; or, Federal accountant ... The whole in a form and method altogether new, for the ease of the master and the greater progress of the scholar.
Daniel Adams
J. Prentiss, New Hampshire (1819)
Sidney F. Huttner Collection
2017.13.2
Quarter calf, partially worn away, with fragments of the paper sides, over very thin wooden boards with horizontal grain (perpendicular to the spine). The corners of the boards are chipped, a common defect in scaleboard bindings due to the thinness of the wooden boards.