The Ingenuity And Beauty Of Creative Parchment Repair In Medieval Books

Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel (medievalbooks.nl/) has been investigating how bookmakers found creative solutions around damaged parchment - thin membranes of cow and sheepskin used for printing books between the fifth and thirteenth centuries before the rise of paper.
Parchment was extremely delicate and costly to manufacture well, so it should come as no surprise that medieval scribes had a host of ideas to work around bad parchment, from webs of silk embroidery to cheeky illustrations, the blemishes were incorporated right into the physical texts.