Contemporary hybrid imitations with a Greek-style exterior over Western European sewing
structures are known in France and Germany, though not in England. According to an
analysis by the conservator and bookbinding historian Nicholas Pickwoad, “these wooden
boards are rare if not unique evidence of a sixteenth-century English attempt to produce an
alla greca binding. Amongst the characteristic external features of Greek-style bindings were
grooves cut into the head, tail and fore edges of the boards and a fastening system which used
pins inserted into the edge of one board over which metal rings were hooked, attached by
leather straps to the other board. Both features are found on these boards . . . The quartered
oak used for the boards . . . was typical of English bindings . . . There is no surviving
evidence of the material used for the sewing supports, but the existence of leather wedges or
pegs to secure the slips from the (now missing) sewing supports and the surviving cord end-
band cores indicates an English provenance and is in itself an extremely unusual
technique . . . It is difficult to date such boards with any precision in the absence of decora-
tion, but the use of tongued mitres and trimmed-out turn-ins, evidenced by the knife-cuts
visible around the outer edges of the inside of the back board, indicate a date in the first half of
the sixteenth century, and quite probably in the first quarter of the century.”
The inscription “de bibliotheca Johannis Langi Erphurdiensis” in Volume 2 is also found in
a copy of the 1498 Aldine Aristophanes at the Royal Library in Stockholm, and tentatively
ascribed by Collijn to the Erfurt reform theologian and Greek scholar Johann Lang (circa
1486-1548);
cf. Katalog der Inkunabeln der Kgl. Bibliothek in Stockholm 92. See also
Contemporaries of Erasmus II, 287-88.
