Bookbinding in the context of "Hardcover"

A treasure binding or jewelled bookbinding is a luxurious book cover using metalwork in gold or silver, jewels, or ivory, perhaps in addition to more usual bookbinding material for book covers such as leather, velvet, or other cloth. The actual bookbinding technique is the same as for other medieval books, with the folios, normally of vellum, stitched together and bound to wooden cover boards. The metal furnishings of the treasure binding are then fixed, normally by tacks, onto these boards. Treasure bindings appear to have existed from at least Late Antiquity, though there are no surviving examples from so early, and Early Medieval examples are very rare. They were less used by the end of the Middle Ages, but a few continued to be produced in the West even up to the present day, and many more in areas where Eastern Orthodoxy predominated. The bindings were mainly used on grand illuminated manuscripts, especially gospel books designed for the altar and use in church services, rather than study in the library.

The vast majority of these bookbindings were later destroyed as their valuable gold and jewels were removed by looters, or the owners when in need of cash. Others survive without their jewels, and many are either no longer attached to a book, or have been moved to a different book. Some survive in major libraries; for example, the Morgan Library in New York City, the John Rylands Library in Manchester, the British Library in London, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. As the carved ivory reliefs often used could not usually be recycled, these survive in much larger numbers, giving a better idea of the numbers of treasure bindings that once existed. Other examples are recorded in documentary sources but though the books survive the covers do not. The Book of Kells lost its binding after a robbery, and the fate of the missing cover of the Book of Lindisfarne is not recorded.

A book is a written work of substantial length by one or more authors. They can be distributed in various forms including as printed books, audiobooks, and electronic books (ebooks). Books are broadly classified into fiction (containing invented content, often narratives) and non-fiction (containing content intended as factual truth).

The term can also refer to the physical or electronic object that contains such a work. Modern printed books are typically composed of many pages bound together and protected by a cover. This is known as the codex format. Codices have been created for centuries and were used even before printed books were available to create manuscript books by hand. Older formats include scrolls and clay tablets.

The codex (pl.: codices /ˈkoʊdɪsiːz/) was the historical ancestor format of the modern book. Technically, the vast majority of modern books use the codex format of a stack of pages bound at one edge, along the side of the text. However, the term codex is now reserved for older manuscript books, which mostly used sheets of vellum, parchment, or papyrus, rather than paper.

By convention, the term is also used for any Aztec codex (although the earlier examples do not actually use the codex format), Maya codices and other pre-Columbian manuscripts. Library practices have led to many European manuscripts having "codex" as part of their usual name, as with the Codex Gigas, while most do not.

A Torah scroll (Hebrew: סֵפֶר תּוֹרָה, romanized: Sefer Torah, lit. 'Book of Torah'; pl. סִפְרֵי תוֹרָה, Sifrei Torah) is a handwritten copy of the Torah, meaning the five books of Moses (the first books of the Hebrew Bible). The Torah scroll is mainly used in the ritual of Torah reading during Jewish prayers. At other times, it is stored in the holiest spot within a synagogue, the Torah ark, which is usually an ornate curtained-off cabinet or section of the synagogue built along the wall that most closely faces Jerusalem, the direction Jews face when praying.

The text of the Torah is also commonly printed and bound in book form for non-ritual functions, called a Chumash (plural Chumashim; "five-part", for the five books of Moses), and is often accompanied by commentaries or translations.

A book is a written work of substantial length created by one or more authors. They can be distributed in various forms such as printed books, audiobooks, and electronic books (ebooks). Books are broadly classified into fiction, containing invented narrative or other imaginary content; and non-fiction, containing content intended as factual truth.

The term may also refer to the physical or electronic object containing such a work. Modern books are typically printed in a codex format, composed of many pages bound together and protected by a cover. Before the wide adoption of the modern printing press, codices were used to create handwritten manuscripts. Older writing mediums include scrolls and clay tablets.

A lost literary work (referred throughout this article just as a lost work) is a document, literary work, or piece of multimedia, produced of which no surviving copies are known to exist, meaning it can be known only through reference, or literary fragments. This term most commonly applies to works from the classical world, although it is increasingly used in relation to modern works. A work may be lost to history through the destruction of an original manuscript and all later copies.

Works—or, commonly, small fragments of works—have survived by being found by archaeologists during investigations, or accidentally by laypersons such as, for example, the finding Nag Hammadi library scrolls. Works also survived when they were reused as bookbinding materials, quoted or included in other works, or as palimpsests, where an original document is imperfectly erased so the substrate on which it was written can be reused. The discovery, in 1822, of Cicero's De re publica was one of the first major recoveries of a lost ancient text from a palimpsest. Another famous example is the discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest, which was used to make a prayer book almost 300 years after the original work was written. A work may be recovered in a library, as a lost or mislabeled codex, or as a part of another book or codex.

A book cover is any protective covering used to bind together the pages of a book. Beyond the familiar distinction between hardcovers and paperbacks, there are further alternatives and additions, such as dust jackets, ring-binding, and older forms such as the nineteenth-century "paper-boards" and the traditional types of hand-binding. The term bookcover is also commonly used for a book cover image in library management software. This article is concerned with modern mechanically produced covers.

Calfskin or calf leather is a leather or membrane produced from the hide of a calf, or juvenile domestic cattle. Calfskin is particularly valuable because of its softness and fine grain, as well as durability. It is commonly used for high-quality clothing, shoes, wallets, and similar products, as well as traditional leather bookbindings. In these contexts, just "calf" is commonly used. Fine calfskin is one of the skins used for vellum and parchment manuscripts.

In Spanish, the word is Ternera/Novillo, referring to leather from animals less than three years old. Chickenskin, despite its name, is a form of calfskin made using the skin of unborn calves.

A pamphlet is an unbound book (that is, without a hard cover or binding). Pamphlets may consist of a single sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths, called a leaflet or it may consist of a few pages that are folded in half and saddle stapled at the crease to make a simple book.

In the "International Standardization of Statistics Relating to Book Production and Periodicals", UNESCO defines a pamphlet as "a non-periodical printed publication of 5 to 48 pages, excluding covers, published in a specific country and available to the public," while a book is "a non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages, excluding covers." These definitions are intended solely for UNESCO's book production statistics.