Métiers (Diderot and d’Alembert 1751) with a small army of volunteers around the world [2]. In addition to the main seven-page article on bookbinding, there are a little over hundred other shorter articles that focus on various aspects of the binding process and tools, as well as other sets of entries on papermaking, board making, pigments, etc., that are just as relevant. The Diderot Encyclopédie, as it is often referred to for its primary editor, or simply the Encyclopédie, was one of the first modern encyclopaedias, with entries on a variety of subjects written by multiple authors rather than a single authority putting to paper everything he knew. It was devised as the French response to the two-volume Cyclopaedia or, a Universal Dictionary of

Arts and Sciences edited by Ephraim Chambers in 1728. While the initial project, proposed by the bookseller Le Breton to Diderot, was a simple translation into French, in the end their work comprised 17 volumes of 71,818 articles, and 11 volumes of images, published between 1751 and 1772. The non-bookbinding world continues to be fascinated by the Encyclopédie for its expression of Enlightenment ideals, despite heavy censorship from the monarchy and church. For those interested in books, the Encyclopédie offers a unique record of the way bindings were done in France, and in Europe in general (for more on the subject of eighteenth century binding, see Barber 1992; Eagen 1999; Foot 2006). Eighteenth-century French bindings are recognizable from afar: the leather type and colour, tooling pattern, title pieces, edge decoration, endbands, and marbled endpapers, almost always conform to the same rules of style (Figure 1). Before the mid-eighteenth century there was very little written western account of how to bind a book (Pollard and Potter 1984) and, by the nineteenth century, when descriptions of how to make a book were more common, the techniques had considerably changed (for example, Lesné 1820;