Book excerpt: This book of the Sandar Lectures for 1949 confines itself to English blind-stamped bindings of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Oldham, an authority on his subject, here describes his methods of study, and accounts for many groups of bindings that may be attributed to particular craftsmen or binderies. Oldham's experience includes all important English collections, His book devises a method of ornament-classification and description and is illustrated by 61 plates. A study of the tools used on blind-stamped bindings in England between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.