4. Dutch Pierced Vellum Volume

Netherlands, 16c.
On: Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis.
Published: Antwerp, 1575
British Library, Shelfmark c46f5.

Pierced Vellum with red leather lining and gold tooling.

This Book of Hours exhibits the pierced vellum style, where small cuts were made in the vellum to show through to a colored lining (usually leather or silk) affixed to the cover. This style, which used the basic structure of the limp vellum structure, would have been fairly expensive due to the labor and care involved in its production. Pierced vellum seems to have originated around the middle of the 16th century and continued to be fashionable well into the 18th.