Christopher Clarkson’s Bibliography

Abstract

Over the years, after his forming experience at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence (BNCF) in response to the infamous 1966 Arno flood, Christopher Clarkson produced a significant number of publications about book conservation and archaeology of the book. His writings contain many of his fundamental ideas, investigative methodologies, and innovative terminology. Even the concept ‘book conservation’ came out of Chris’s reflections during his time along the river Arno (Bell & Clarkson, 2001: 75). In his PhD dissertation about ‘English fifteenth-century book structures’, Hadgraft (1998) outlines many of the terms advanced by Clarkson, the majority of which have become widely adopted by bookbinding scholars the world over. This bibliography attempts to bring together the extensive production of works published by Clarkson. It is based on Chris’s own bibliography that appears online on his website (Clarkson, 2017), integrated with the many citations brought to the readers’ attention by the authors of the papers in this volume, and with other citations found in the literature. In the section About Christopher Clarkson, we have entered some publications about Clarkson. In this list, one can find the digitized conservation laboratory archive of the Flood at the BNCF, where many reports and letters illustrating the response to the disaster at the library mention Chris. The section is followed by Obituaries. In the main list, we cover a number of unpublished reports and materials. This is by no means a comprehensive account of his unpublished work. We have set up this bibliography as a shared online Zotero library: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2455205/christ opherclarksonjpc_bibliography. We encourage anyone with information about items that are missing from this list, especially unpublished reports, to come forward and contribute to Clarkson’s bibliography.