The Material that Binds or Judging a book by it's cover

There is an old saying that everyone knows, "You can't judge a book by it's cover." While that may be true for humans, for books it's not entirely true. You can tell many things from the cover and binding of a book, like what the book is going to be about, the expected quality of the book (not necessarily the story but the quality of pages and writing), and who might have bought the book.

Even in Ancient times you could judge some things. Let's look at a scroll for example. If it were held together by two pieces of wood, you could guess that it was important or had some value. If it wasn't held together by anything, it might be something completely unimportant (to them), like a note or list. However, for some forms of writing material, it would be hard to determine what they were for. One example would be stone or clay tablets. Since they don't have any form of binding or cover, it's hard to determine. However, the size of the table might help determine what it was used for.

When books started to be used, then this became much easier. The quality of the binding used on a book allows for people to make early judgements about a book. If the book has tons of detail with high quality material used to bind it, you could assume these things. It either belongs/belonged to a very rich person and might be very old. It would probably be a serious book, possibly a scientific book or a great work of literature. If the binding is like the multiple sci-fi and fantasy books that are on shelves today, then you would expect it to be of lesser quality then the former. However, this is where the problem comes in.

Like we saw last Monday, one book that appeared to be of very high quality turned out to have half of the pages missing, torn out for a safe hiding spot. Also, some modern books, despite being in the smaller portable format, may still contain high quality work. One example I can think of would be the "Game of Thrones" series, which many people consider to be one the greatest pieces of fantasy of all time. So while it's true you can't judge a book by it's cover, you can still make good judgements from it's binding.