Franzband

I'm signed up to do a four day refresher course on French traditional laced-in (Franzband) bindings in a couple of weeks and, in preparation for the workshop, have needed to source and pull a commercially published book - something I've not done for a while. The book's technical details (size, number and thickness of sections, margin widths, paper grain direction etc) were important but nothing out of the ordinary for any publisher for whom getting the technical criteria right was as important as content and graphic design. That it's proved extremely difficult to find a book that met my specification is, for me, a reflection on the extent to which commercial pressures continue to contribute to the decline in quality of published works. Nothing surprising here of course but nonetheless disappointing.