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John Ratcliff (or ''Ratcliffe'') of the seventeenth century is the first identifiable bookbinder in America, known for binding Eliot's Indian Bible in 1663.〔 〕 Ratcliff, who came from London, England, worked as a bookbinder in Boston, Massachusetts for about twenty years, from approximately 1662–1682. == Biography and career == Ratcliff, an experienced London bookbinder, was sent from England sometime between 1661 and 1663 for the purpose of binding copies of Eliot's Indian Bible.〔〔 〕 He moved to America with his wife and family, and lived and worked in Boston for about 20 years. Sometime around 1682, he left America and went back to England. According to historian Thomas James Holmes, Ratcliff may have returned to England because he was facing competition from younger bookbinders such as Edmund Ranger, who displayed superior workmanship. At the beginning of Ratcliff's career, he did plain bookbinding using leather from domestic sheep and calves. He decorated the covers with fashions of blind tooling typical of the time period. Later Englishman Ratcliff departed from the normal bookbinding practices and used higher quality and more sophisticated methods, including pasteboard covers instead of wooden boards, and imported Morocco leather instead of domestic leather. He also used marbled end papers instead of plain end papers and did gold tooling instead of blind tooling. The work of typical American colonial bookbinders was crude when compared to Ratcliff's. Ratcliff spent most of his working career doing bookbinding.〔 However, he also sold a few publications. One publication, printed for Ratcliff in Boston in 1682, was "Fast Sermon at Weathersfield." This 1678 sermon was written by Joseph Rowlandson of Lancaster, Massachusetts. Another publication, also printed in Boston in 1682 was, "A Poem dedicated to the Memory of the Reverend and Excellent Mr. Urian Oakes, the late Pastor to Christ's Flock, and President of Harvard Colledge in Cambridge" who died in 1681 at age fifty. Cotton Mather wrote the poem when he was nineteen years old as his first published work. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John Ratcliff (bookbinder)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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