As an experiment to reach a broader audience – and to make use of popular technology – the Conservation Department has mounted digital images of our mother-of-pearl bindings on Flickr, an image and video hosting website. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. It is the ideal place to post a discrete group of images quickly and inexpensively.

As many of you will remember, we had a mini-exhibit of these beautiful bindings this past winter. Little is known about them. They appeared on American books only briefly – from 1850 to 1855 – at a time of increasingly elaborate book cover decoration. All of the books shown in the exhibit were published in New York by only a few companies. Most of the covers were a form of “papier maché ware,” a very popular technique at the time used to produce many household items such as trays, snuff boxes, table tops, daguerreotype cases, and even furniture. We have 38 mother-of-pearl bindings, and every one of them is shown on the Flickr site. We are hoping to post some other groups of binding images in this same way. Next up: Pre-ornamented cloth bindings.

If you would like take a look, click on the link below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26007315@N08/sets/72157605142031847/