Every craft has its tools and, as becomes quickly apparent to anyone interested in the binding or conservation of books, this craft has a lot of them. While it’s very easy to become mystified by the shinier offerings in the binder’s arsenal – brass rolls and finishing tools, at least six different kinds of press, not to mention the materials available – I’ve found that the more time I spend at the bench, the more I come to appreciate the humbler instruments at our disposal: when you’re reaching for something a dozen times a day, a great workhorse can make an enormous difference, and I’ve yet to find an addition to the studio as simultaneously useful and unglamorous as the knocking-down iron.
Typically between eight and twelve inches long by between three and five inches wide, and shaped like a very squat upside-down capital T, the knocking-down iron truly doesn’t look like much. Nonetheless, during my studies, the knocking-down irons were the most coveted and hotly contested bits of equipment in the whole department.
Designed primarily to be fastened between the cheeks of a laying or finishing press, a knocking-down iron provides a very hard, smooth surface against which to hammer during tasks like closing-up lacing holes in boards, or knocking the swell out of sewn text-blocks. The flat face of the iron is, in all the examples I have seen, polished and uncoated. This means that any material being hammered against it will neither be marked nor pick up any imperfections in the surface. Traditionally made of cast iron, they are also unyielding and as such, will not give or distort as even a sturdy bench might if hammered with any force. Since cast iron is so heavy, the sheer heft of knocking-down irons makes them truly excellent weights. The crossbar by which the iron can be screwed into the press also forms a convenient handle, making this cumbersome metal block much more manoeuvrable.
Finding knocking-down irons to buy can be difficult. Whilst they can be commissioned or sometimes found second hand if you’re patient, to my knowledge the steel irons listed in the Russells Fine Leathers catalogue are the only ones currently being advertised as new. They were, however, readily available to purchase for binders in the mid-20th century. G.W. Russell & Son Ltd.’s Illustrated Price List of Tools, Materials and Appliances for Bookbinding and Marbled Paper Making, listed a small 6×3 inch iron priced at three shillings and sixpence which it specifically recommended for the teaching of intermediate students. The 1955 NJ Hill & Co. catalogue Everything for the Bookbinding and Allied Trades offered them in both small (8” x 3.5”) and large (12”x4.5”) sizes.
While knocking-down irons were commonly available tools in the 20th century, pinpointing precisely when they first came into use has proved difficult. The oldest reference I’ve been able to find places them considerably earlier than I might have anticipated: reproduced in Middleton’s A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique, is an image of a knocking-down iron originally published in the sixth volume of Johann Christian Hüttner’s Englische Miscellen (1802). This particular illustration also shows the knocking-down iron alongside the beating stone – a now defunct component of historical binderies which, like the knocking-down iron, served as a flat hard surface on which to hammer, although beating stones would have been larger and primarily used for beating sections flat after folding. This was a point of interest as initial discussion in the studio raised the possibility that knocking-down irons might have been an innovation intended to replace the beating stone when they went out of use, but the Englische Miscellen illustration suggests that they were, at least for some period of time, being used concurrently.
Going back further, however, the comprehensive list of tools and materials in the eighteenth-century memorandum book of James Coghlan (reproduced by Howard Nixon in the Journal of the Printing Historical Society in 1970), contains no reference to a knocking-down iron whatsoever – a point observed by Nixon himself in the article. There are, however, references to beating stones – one of ‘purbrick’ and another of dove marble, plus a block to put them on. Similarly, in Strickland Gibson’s Abstracts from the Wills and Testamentary Documents of Binders, Printers, and Stationers of Oxford from 1493-1638, there are multiple references to beating stones and hammers but no apparent mention of knocking down irons. Coghlan lived from 1731-1800, and as suggested earlier his accounts of his tools and equipment are exceedingly thorough and suggest he had a very complete collection. As such the absence of a knocking-down iron makes it seem likely that, at least in England, they didn’t come into widespread use until at least the latter half of the 1700s.
After several years of hunting, I’ve recently been lucky enough to acquire a knocking-down iron of my very own. Whilst to the unsympathetic eye, this fundamentally fairly simple chunk of cast iron may not seem wildly inspiring, it’s a joy to have on my bench – a fantastic multipurpose tool working by turns as a stable square for skewed boards, an extra hand where I need one, a hammering table, and in my opinion the greatest weight a conservator could ask for.
Em Stuart, November 2024