An Encyclopaedia of Bookbinding and the Printing Trades

Three volumes, 1,046 pages, 4,790 entries. Every definition is reprinted verbatim from one of nine works on binding and printing published between 1683 and 1982, and closes with the siglum of the book it came from. The PDFs are free and the whole thing is also published as an open dataset. Nothing is gated and there is nothing to sign up for.

A bookbinder learning this trade in Indonesia has almost nothing to read. The vocabulary is English, the standard references are out of print or behind a library wall, and the terms that matter — oversewing, French joint, kettle stitch, rebacking — get translated differently by every person who tries. So we compiled the sources that are readable and put them in one alphabet.

This is not a book we wrote. It is nine books, set in one typeface, in one order, with the attributions kept. Where several authors defined the same term we kept all of them, which is why register and signature each appear eight times here, from 1841 through to 1982. Reading them in sequence is the closest thing there is to watching a craft argue with itself about what a word means.

The three volumes

B5, two columns, letter openers. Each PDF opens on its own bookmark panel — a letter opener for every letter, and beneath it a thumb index naming the first headword on a page roughly every five pages. Each also carries its full bibliographic record in its own metadata, and is linearized, so the first page paints before the rest has arrived.

Volume I
A – F

361 pages · 1,845 entries · 253 figures
Letters A, B, C, D, E, F

Download PDF 20 MB
Volume II
G – O

321 pages · 1,187 entries · 162 figures
Letters G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O

Download PDF 13 MB
Volume III
P – Z

364 pages · 1,758 entries · 225 figures
Letters P through Z

Download PDF 16 MB

The nine sources

Every entry closes with a siglum naming the work it was taken from. Eight of the nine are pre-1930 imprints from Project Gutenberg. The ninth is not, and is marked here and in every record of the dataset.

Siglum	Author	Work	Year	Entries
MOX	Joseph Moxon	Mechanick Exercises, Volume 2	1683	35
DAP	William Savage	A Dictionary of the Art of Printing	1841	753
MAB	James B. Nicholson	A Manual of the Art of Bookbinding	1856	106
AMP	Thomas MacKellar	The American Printer: A Manual of Typography	1866	215
BIB	Joseph Sabin	Bib-li-op-e-gis-tic	1889	39
ABB	Joseph W. Zaehnsdorf	The Art of Bookbinding: A Practical Treatise	1890	137
BCB	Douglas Cockerell	Bookbinding, and the Care of Books	1901	64
NBL	Arthur L. Bailey	Notes on Bookbinding for Libraries	1906	250
RE	Matt T. Roberts and Don Etherington	Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology See rights	1982	3,861

Those entry counts are the dataset's, not the books'. The printed volumes carry 4,790 entries and the dataset carries 5,460, because 414 terms were defined by more than one author and the books print one where the dataset keeps them all.

The same thing, for machines

All 5,460 entries as JSON Lines, one object per line, each carrying its source, that source's year, its rights status and its references already resolved against the 373-work bibliography. Published with an MLCommons Croissant descriptor and a Frictionless Data Package, so it can be read as a dataset rather than as a pile of files.

entries.jsonl 8.1 MBAll 5,460 entries, one JSON object per line. Start here.
entries.jsonl.gz 2.0 MBThe same file, gzipped. The server does not compress on the fly, so this is a real saving.
entries-public-domain.jsonl 3.1 MBThe 1,599 entries from the eight pre-1930 sources only. Use this if you need an unambiguous rights position.
bibliography.json 60 KBThe 373 works the entries cite by number, in the source edition's own numbering.
sources.json 4 KBThe nine source works with siglum, author, year, entry count and the full rights statement for each.
croissant.json 16 KBMLCommons Croissant 1.0 descriptor: field-level schema, checksums and distributions.
datapackage.json 12 KBFrictionless Data Package descriptor for the same files.
README.md 8 KBField dictionary, provenance, rights and how to cite it.

One property is worth knowing before you deduplicate. norm is not a key: 414 terms have more than one definition because more than one source defined them. Pull and break are each defined twice by authors 299 years apart. Group by norm and sort by source.year and the dataset stops being a glossary and becomes a record of how a vocabulary was written down across three centuries.

The printed set

The PDFs are free and always will be. If you would rather have it on a shelf, we bind it here, to order, in the workshop that publishes it. Both prices are for the complete three-volume set and both include shipping, wherever you are.

Complete set

$200

Shipping included

All three volumes, 1,046 pages, B5, sewn and cased by hand. Made to order, so allow time for binding as well as for the post.

Order the printed set — $200

Complete set, genuine leather

$400

Shipping included

The same three volumes bound in genuine leather. This is the work the rest of this site is about, applied to our own book.

Order the leather-bound set — $400

There is no checkout on this site. Both buttons open WhatsApp with the order already written out, and we confirm availability and delivery before anything is paid.

Rights, stated plainly

Two different situations, and we would rather say so than average them into one comfortable sentence.

Eight of the nine sources are in the public domain. They were published between 1683 and 1906 and came from Project Gutenberg. The 1,599 entries drawn from them can be read, copied, printed, quoted and passed on without asking anyone, including us.

The ninth is not the same case. Roberts and Etherington's Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books (1982) is a United States Government publication, issued by the Library of Congress and published openly in electronic edition by Conservation OnLine. It accounts for 3,861 of the 5,460 entries. We reproduce it on the understanding that a US Government publication carries no copyright. If you are a rightsholder who believes otherwise, please write to admin@hibrkraft.com and those entries will be withdrawn.

Every record in the dataset carries a rights_tier field and the full rights statement for its source, so the two are never confused by anything reading it. The public-domain subset is published as its own file for exactly this reason.

What we contribute is the compilation — the typesetting, the ordering, the normalisation, the resolved citations — and that is released under CC0 1.0. It covers our work of assembling this. It cannot and does not speak for the source texts above.

How to cite it

When you quote a definition, cite the author who wrote it and the year they wrote it — both are printed with the entry and carried in every dataset record. The 1841 definition of register is William Savage's and should travel with his name on it, not ours.

Anwar, Ibrahim, comp. An Encyclopaedia of Bookbinding and the Printing Trades. Bogor: PT Hibrkraft Kreasi Indonesia, 2026. https://hibrkraft.com/resources/encyclopedia/

Compiled and set by Ibrahim Anwar, ORCID 0009-0006-0425-4923. Each PDF also carries this record inside itself, as XMP metadata, so a file that travels away from this page does not lose its provenance.

Take it and use it

If you are learning to bind, repair or conserve books, this is the vocabulary the trade actually used, in the words of the people who used it. Read it, quote it, translate it, teach from it. If you find an error in the transcription, we would like to know — and if you want the same craft applied to a book of your own, that is what the rest of this site is for.

Istilah penjilidan dalam bahasa Indonesia

Last updated August 30, 2026