Too little attention has been paid, in this country at any rate, to the fact that some knowledge about early bookbinding is essential to the student of early printing. At first the printer was also a stationer and bookbinder, and the three occupations were hardly clearly defined or definitely separated within the first hundred years after the invention of printing. Books always required some kind of binding, and the early printer sold his books to the purchaser ready bound, though copies seem always to have been obtainable in sheets by such as wished them in that state. The binder ornamented his books in certain ways and with a limited number of stamps, and there is no reason why a careful study should not make his binding ornamentation as easily recognisable as his woodcuts or his type. Of course the majority of early bindings are unsigned, and therefore it is not often possible to assign particular bindings to particular men; but comparison may enable us to attribute them to particular districts and even to particular places, so that they may often afford additional evidence towards placing books which contain no information of their origin. A very little attention paid to a binding might often result in most valuable information, and with the destruction of the binding the information disappears. Many years ago there came into the hands of a certain Mr. Horn a very valuable volume consisting of three block-books, the _Biblia Pauperum_, the _Ars Moriendi_, and the _Apocalypse_, all bound together, and in their original binding, which was dated. Incredible as it may seem, the volume was split up and the binding destroyed. Mr. Horn asserted from memory that the date was 1428; of the first three figures he was sure, and of the last he was more or less certain. Naturally the date has been questioned, and it has been surmised that the 2 must have been some other figure which Mr. Horn deciphered incorrectly. The destruction of the binding made it impossible that this question could ever be set at rest, and a very important date in the history of printing was lost absolutely. In the last century no regard whatever seems to have been paid to old bindings, the very fact of their being old prejudiced librarians against them; if they became damaged or worn they were not repaired, but destroyed, and the book rebound. Nor did they fare better in earlier times. Somewhere in the first half of the seventeenth century all the manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library were uniformly rebound in rough calf, to the utter destruction of every trace of their former history. Casley, in his catalogue of the manuscripts in the Royal Library, specially mentions a curious old binding, with an inscription showing that it was made at Oxford, in Catte Street, in 1467. Even the special note in the catalogue did not save this binding, which, if it had been preserved, would have been one of the earliest, if not the earliest, dated English example.