quarter linings

A piece of sheet material which covers the spine and the spine edges of the boards under a full, half or quarter cover. A quarter lining may be cut to the height of or shorter than the boards, or be turned-in at head and tail. On an inboard binding, a quarter lining might perhaps be thought of as a primary cover, but as they are never found without some sort of cover over them, and are often found without turn-ins and even cut short of the full height of the boards, it is more logical to think of them as a lining to the cover, hence the term 'quarter lining'. Quarter linings of paper were frequently used on British paper-covered inboard publishers' or edition bindings of the last quarter of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. A similar component was also used as a spine piece on some of the British versions of German three-piece cases of the second and third decades of the nineteenth century and may also be found on the earliest bindings covered in bookcloth in the 1820s.