In Bookbinders at Work, Mirjam Foot describes and quotes from “primary sources for bookbinding practice that have hitherto not been much explored: descriptions by binders and interested observers of how books were bound.... [she uses] these contemporary witnesses to try and show what binders did, how they did it and why, what their life was like and what their place and significance was in the European book trade in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”