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A binding is attributed to a specific workshop by its set of tools.

Before tooling, the leather is wiped with egg white.

A cold tool leaves no mark: tooling needs heat.

The binder held it at an angle, and it shows a century later.

Forty brass tools, each for a single element of a pattern.

Lithography gave large format and colour before anything else.

A slab the size of a sheet weighs about sixty kilograms.

There is no dry way to demonstrate lithography.

A slab never prepared for the next job, so the image stayed.

Printing without relief: a flat stone on which ink adheres selectively.

A watermark does not lie, because it was not made for the reader.

The mark went on one of the two moulds, so in a book it appears every other leaf.

The paper lies on a light table, the camera above it.

Paper from two different batches, joined in the mill itself.

The mill's mark shows only when there is light behind the sheet.

How many books appeared in a year was decided not by the press but by the compositor's hand.

The commonest element of a page is not a letter.

The bottoms of the commonest boxes are rubbed through to pale wood.

The commonest letter had its own extra box.

The commoner the letter, the larger its box. The lay is measured statistics.

A codex must open, hold its shape and not fall apart — all at once.

The books lay in stacks, and light reached only the topmost.

The section is shown on replicas made by a binder using the old technique.

The second was lost long ago, and over centuries the block has warped.