Bernard van Noordwijk, a retired Dutch management consultant, has assembled an extensive collection of books with silver adornments. He is interested in small volumes of religious texts such as prayer books, missals, and hymnbooks, the sort of book that someone, usually a woman, would have carried to church. The books themselves—standard religious texts in most cases—are often not particularly valuable. European printers manufactured them in vast quantities, and they can be found in any good antiquarian shop. The silverwork on the bindings, however, makes them special as objects and as a record of European church fashions from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. They were bound and adorned centuries after books no longer needed to be chained to shelves for safekeeping, yet some of them incorporate chains into their design. The silver chains may have even allowed their owners to carry them like handbags. The books were anachronisms and impractical in one key respect: The metalwork prevented them from being stored with other books. Pulling them on and off the shelf would scratch and tear the covers of the adjacent volumes. Van Noordwijk believes the books were typically displayed on a mantelpiece when not in use.

While books adorned with silver were probably fairly common at one time, most of them have been disassembled because the silver is worth more than the book. In fact, that’s how van Noordwijk started collecting these books. Thirty-five years ago, he noticed that one of his wife’s silver bracelets appeared to be fashioned from a book clasp. Early binders mounted brass clasps or affixed leather ties to the edges of books to hold them closed when they weren’t in use. Before bookcases came into widespread use, books were often stored flat on a shelf or locked in a trunk. With time and use, the pages tended to warp slightly, preventing the covers from closing tightly. Eventually, this would damage the book and make it susceptible to dust and insect pests. The solution was to clamp or tie the book closed when it wasn’t in use. Before he realized that his wife’s bracelet had once been part of a book, van Noordwijk had never paid much attention to books with clasps fashioned from silver.

As often happens with collectors, once he knew what he was looking for, van Noordwijk soon spotted other books with ornamental silverwork still attached. The first example he found seemed too expensive, and he didn’t buy it. He continued to think about it, however, and eventually returned prepared to pay the asking price. The book was gone, sold to have its clasps made into knife rests, according to the shopkeeper. Thus began three decades of collecting to save silver-adorned bindings from being converted into jewelry or dining room accessories. The books, valued mostly for their silver content, typically cost a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Van Noordwijk’s efforts to preserve these endangered books will culminate in a February through June exhibition of his books at the Bijbels Museum (Bible Museum) in Amsterdam, where he is a guest curator. The examples that follow will be depicted, with many other books from his collection, in the illustrated exhibition catalog, which will provide the most extensive documentation of silver-adorned bindings to date.