Georgios Boudalis, "On the Edge: Endbands in the Bookbinding Traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean" (Legacy Press, 2022)

Mar 15, 2026

Georgios Boudalis, a book conservator and scholar of Eastern Mediterranean bindings, discusses the craft and variety of endbands. He explores their structural role, surprising textiles and colors, links to textile techniques, and how conservation uncovers hidden construction details. He also highlights rare, complex patterns that are hard to reproduce.

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ANECDOTE

Sinai Visit Sparked Endband Research

Work at St. Catherine's Monastery gave Boudalis access to largely unaltered manuscripts.
The collection's pristine condition let him observe original book structures rarely preserved elsewhere, sparking his endband research.

INSIGHT

Endbands Are Structural Connectors

Endbands are integral structural elements not mere trims of books.
In Eastern Mediterranean bindings endbands extend onto board edges and help connect the boards to the book block, a feature distinct from Western European practice.

INSIGHT

Endband Techniques Mirror Textile Edge Work

Book endband techniques often mirror textile edge finishes like twining, sumac, tablet weaving and twining.
Boudalis found identical textile techniques used for kilims and tablet weaving applied directly to book endbands from classical antiquity through centuries.

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On the Edge: Endbands in the Bookbinding Traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean by Dr Giorgios Boudalis (Legacy Press, 2022). The term endbands designates the two bands worked with thread(s) at the head and tail edges of the spine of a book. The techniques with which they are worked and the ways with which they are connected to a bound codex vary greatly over time and geography. The purpose of this book is to identify, classify and describe several of these different techniques used in manuscript books bound within different cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean from Late Antiquity until the 20th century. The book is richly illustrated with full-colour photographs and technical drawings explaining how these endbands were made and how they can be replicated.

The guest on the podcast was Dr Giorgios Boudalis. Dr Boudalis studied conservation of art in Florence and Athens, and Fine Arts in Thessaloniki, Greece, where he lives. In 2005 he completed his Ph.D. at the University of the Arts, London, on the evolution of Byzantine and post-Byzantine bookbinding, and he has since been researching and publishing on the topics of bookbinding history and manuscript conservation. Since 1997 he has been working in book conservation for public and private institutions and collections. His research focuses on the study of the manuscript book in the Eastern Mediterranean using physical, written and iconographical evidence, and he is especially interested in the making of the codex and its relation to other crafts and artefacts.

Since 2006 he has been teaching courses on various aspects of Eastern Mediterranean bookbinding structures both on an historical and technical level. He is a co-editor of the Language of Bindings Thesaurus of the Ligatus Research Centre, and he was a visiting scholar and an adjunct professor at Bard Graduate Center in New York where in 2018 he curated the exhibition, The Codex and Crafts in Late Antiquity, and published a book with the same title.

Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her current research focuses on cleaning gilded wooden frames using gels.

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