The New Testament
London: Robert Barker, 1633
The whole booke of Psalmes
London: Imprinted for the Company of Stationers, 1633
BSS.201.C33.15
By kind permission of Bible Society

Bindings can be ingenious and amusing, particularly the so-called dos-à-dos design (from the French for ‘back-to-back’), in which two separate books are bound together: the fore edge of one is adjacent to the spine of the other, with a shared lower board serving as the back cover of both. Especially common in England during the seventeenth century, and often with embroidered bindings—as in this early seventeenth-century example—this format often joins together the Psalter and New Testament. The embroidered binding, incorporating carnations and pansies of silver thread and coloured silks, with the page edges gilded and patterned, was likely made soon after the texts were printed.