Leather bound book question

Cafe Society
1

My brother-in-law asked me to find a book, “The Art of War”, preferrably in a leather-bound volume to be given as a gift. I can find regular hardbound copies. Is there a way to see if this book was ever offered in a leather bound edition? I Googled, but got mostly companies that sell leather bound books in general, but not this one.

2

Saw this thread while looking for another old thread - sorry if this information is too late to be of help.

In terms of leather bound editions of the Art of War, it strikes me that you would have three options:

  1. Find an original leatherbound edition
  2. Find an edition that someone has rebound in leather
  3. Buy a nice edition and get it rebound in leather

for #1 and #2, try Bookfinder.com or AddAll.com, both are “meta” search engines - they search a broad set of rare book search engines, such as ABE, Alibris, Antiqbook, etc…Any dealer worth buying from will mention prominently if their copy is leather bound. The Harringtons in London (Adrian and Peter; apparently related - brothers? - but running different shops) both commonly take first editions or desirable copies of books and leather bind them (in some ways, this is heresy to rare book collectors who want everything as original as possible; one assumes they buy books where the text block is intact but the binding is compromised and they rebind them).

Leather bound books are all over the map price wise. Some really nice one can be had for very little $ simply because the demand is not there. The Harringtons typically charge an arm and a leg.

As for #3 - I have less experience with this area, but I would not think it would be difficult to Google around and find a variety of binders who would meet your needs at a variety of price points. Heritage books in LA does binding, but I believe it is of the Harrington type - fancy leathers and features. Not for the light of wallet…

Hope this isn’t too late to help. Best of luck.

3

Try The Easton Press. I know that they have one but it is part of their Military History set. I don’t know if you can order only a single copy. I have the catalog at home and will check tonight.

4

I used to teach a class in archival repair of books and this question came up. I found these sites:

http://www.casto-harris.com/laminati.htm

http://www.bookmenders.com/

A student of mine used Bookmenders for a family bible and was very pleased with the work done and the cost.

5

Thanks, I’ll check out these options.

6

I checked the Easton Press catalog last night at it looked like the Art of War was only available through the Military History set. You might want to try and contact them to see if they sell single copies of any of the books in their sets.

7

Easton Press is a gilt-edge book-of-the-month club, so I doubt you’ll have a lot of luck. Have you tried ebay to see if someone is trying to sell their Easton Press copy?