To guard the leather crossbands and linen thread from exposure and wear, it then became customary to cover the spine of the book with a wide, vertical strip of leather. Later, for better appearance and greater protection, the leather covering was extended partway onto the boards (the so-called “half-binding” of the medieval period) and then all the way. Thus was developed and perfected the bound book: a collection of folded sheets sewn together flexibly and protected between covers. Its physical structure was largely the creation of monastic craftsmen of the early Middle Ages, just as its literary content throughout that period was most often religious scripture or comment. _BOOKS CAN BE BEAUTIFUL_ Speaking only of quality of materials and workmanship, a book may be bound just as well in a simple cover as in an ornate one. Fine binding does not require adornment. It does require the services of a man of high skill and matching integrity, whose handiwork will inevitably display the quiet beauties of intrinsic quality. But in the hands of men who possess the spark of creative artistry, bookbinding can be more than pure craft work. Although the binder’s decorative tools are forever prefixed, each to reproduce its own set and simple pattern, they are infinitely flexible in the ways they can be combined. It is not the tool that makes a binding beautiful or ugly, but the hand that holds the tool—and even more the mind and eye that guide the hand. The history of bookbinding is studded with the names of men who were true artists in leather. For them the most rewarding commission a customer could give was a simple order to dress some work of lasting worth in a binding of appropriate beauty. In the Middle Ages all books were rare and valuable. Each volume was entirely lettered by hand and its pages were customarily “illuminated” with elaborately drawn initial letters and gilded marginal decorations. The binding of such a book was likely to be as painstakingly ornate as were its pages, and a few bindings were quite valuable in themselves. Before full leather covers became standard, the boards of some manuscript volumes—especially for a church altar or a royal library—might even be encased in beaten gold or silver and encrusted with enamel and semiprecious stones. The invention of printing from type, as everyone knows, had extremely far-reaching consequences on the spread of public education and enlightenment. It had also some effects that were not so desirable. In the didactic phrase of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, “Printing brought small books, cheap books, ugly books.”