I acquired some vintage bookcloth samples a few years back.  The person who sold them to me said they were useful as a source of fabric to repair old books, and I hope I didn’t look too horrified. Sure enough, there are some chunks missing out of some of the pieces, but the books still seem very full so I don’t think any pieces are completely gone.

I took photos of the cloths, because I thought you might enjoy looking at them. I photographed the book covers, the front sides of the fabrics showing identification marks, and sometimes the reverse side as well. I didn’t use a very professional setup – OK, I used a most unprofessional setup – the books are lying on two pieces of white kraft paper on a gray cutting mat. I corrected the color cast to get the background paper to look as neutral as I could, then adjusted the levels – mostly on the white side, except for the reverse of some dark samples to make the labels more legible. The pictures were then resized to about 8″ on the longest side at 200 dpi, and saved as jpg files at quality 10. If for some reason anybody needs a bigger or un-retouched photo, let me know. I figure this is good enough for entertainment purposes.

The first series is Columbia Royal Buckram, possibly from 1972

Continue reading to see all the great images of bookcloth you can’t get any more!