Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts: An adventure in books

IT’S almost impossible to believe it now, but in the middle of the 1820s, with the full permission of Trinity College, a bookbinder named George Mullen took a knife to the Book of Kells, slicing off the edges of pages and cutting away decoration that had been painstakingly created by monks 1,000 years before.

He did this simply to fit the manuscript into the new covers he had created.

The book was already a famous relic in Mullen’s time but that didn’t stop him. What’s more, there is no record of what he did with the offcuts — so, as Christopher de Hamel says in his superb book, if you have some old decorated strips of vellum lying around at home take good care of them, you could retire to a life of luxury on the proceeds.