Directions: The following paragraphs may or may not be in the most logical order. Each paragraph is numbered in round brackets, and question 15 will ask you the most logical correct order of paragraphs 5, 6 and 7.
Passage
THE VANISHING CRAFT OF HAND BOOKBINDING
(1)
In a Vermont library's vault sits a psalter no catalog can fully explain. No ledger had recorded the book's 1 origin; only a faint smell of leather and paste. Its spine had been resewn at least twice. According to the head archivist, two itinerant binders are held responsible 2 of the repairs, 3 to have likely been resewing the volume during a single hard winter. One later opened a bindery in Boston; the other disappeared from the record.
(2)
In the few shops where masters still practice the older methods, the traditional hand bindery, together with the type foundry and the papermaking mill, 4 have been slipping toward the margins of the book trade. 5 As book production moved onto the factory floor in the nineteenth century, the crafts that had once served it began to fade: hand typecasting, hand marbling—and now hand binding itself.
(3)
6 Historians of the book trade 7 say that over the past two decades, a growing number of nineteenth-century volumes have been stripped and rebound for 8 those original clasps and gilded boards, often to satisfy collectors in London and New York, where such fittings are prized as marks of age.
(4)
[1] In the United States, the number of full-time hand binderies has fallen by roughly half since 1950 to 9 far more than three hundred today, according to trade surveys. [2] The spread of cheap paperback production and the loss of skilled apprentices 10 is driving small shops out of business. [3] Binderies that cannot compete on price often close within a decade. [4] 11 And, increasingly, the counterfeiting of hand-sewn work is compounding these pressures.
(5)
The Bindery Standards Council, 12 that governs the fine-binding 13 profession, certifying only work stitched entirely by hand. Yet a handful of large workshops that sew their pages by machine may still market the results as "bench-bound." Most such bindings reach private collectors, where they are used as a substitute for hand-sewn work, prized as a mark of craftsmanship, and 14 are being used to justify steep prices.
(6)
Never before has the hand-bound book been so easy to imitate. Librarians and collectors are urging clearer labeling and pressing for an end to vague terms like "bench-bound."
(7)
The loose use of the term "bench-bound" is feeding collector demand for truly hand-sewn books and is blurring the line between machine work and genuine craft.
