15th century fighting manual

Here is what I made out of the pages Tomasz gave me to finish: (klick)
A Kopert with a velum cover, a flap-and-lace closure and simple stitching through the covers back.
This type of binding was often used for books that were supposed to be used by scholars for their studies, therefore they had to be small, lightweight and rather inexpensive to produce. The fighting manual of a guard captain would have needed a lightweight binding, too - and one not to costly...
So I thought a Kopert would be apropriate :-)


To make it a little more nice looking, I used blue instead of unbleached linen thread for sewing and wrapped red thread throught the visible blue threads on the back. There are only three sections (folded pages stacked into each other) to it, so the back is rather narrow, no space left there for any other type of decoration.


Inside, the sections middles are strenthened with strips of parchment. These were often cut from pages of books no longer used. To imitate this, I used a scrap of velum with a poem written on it by Anje (thanks a lot!!). Rather a shame to cut it up - but the scribes and bookbinders of the middle ages seemingly didn`t have these scruples. Sometimes these strenthening strips are a treasure hoard for librarians: A version of the Nibelungenlied was found cut up and used this way!


Giving back this little book to its owner was not really easy, the neat writing in two colours looks great, I definitely want one for myself :-)
Maybe not a book about swordfighting, though - something about beekeeping or animal husbandry would be nice...