In time the stomacher grew more rigid, being stiffened with pasteboard or buckram.
The habitually aloof Balenciaga admitted that he was appalled by the way Dior treated textiles — backing them with multi-layers of canvas, buckram, or tulle, rather than "letting fabric speak for itself," which was the pith of his own aesthetic credo.
His mission to correct its flaws with a nip and a tuck, an arcing seam, a buckram implant, a cushion of air between skin and cloth diminished his relevance, even as it enhanced his prestige as an anatomist.
I remember the day that this teacher handed me the jacketless hardback of "The Charioteer," with its dark-gray buckram boards.
She began by working on the institute's old buckram dress forms, reshaping them with cotton batting and surgical mesh, but one day she was handed a gown by Madame Grès that had started to tear, and was told to mend it.
He has spent literally several years at the Johnson Library, in Austin, Tex., painstakingly going through the red buckram boxes that contain Johnson's papers, and he has been the first researcher to open some of the most revealing files there.
Published by Test Centre, a lively London independent, in an edition of 300 copies, with 20 in buckram covers, it will not, presumably, be available from Amazon.
The problem with buckram and silk, though, not to mention embossed covers and card slip cases, is that they cost.
And then, when your Mum's birthday comes around – she loves George Eliot and has been on at you for ages to take the plunge – you give her a handsome presentation copy of the book, bound in buckram and silk, the sort of thing that the Folio Society does surpassingly well.
Some time ago, I read about a mother who, during wartime rationing, painstakingly removed all the buckram from any books she could lay her hands on until she had enough to make her small daughter a fairy costume.
Whitney, Dorothy Eden, or some other now forgotten best-selling author — that a bored thirteen-year-old might find on the shelves of a sleepy suburban branch library, bound in the waxy-feeling buckram of special library editions and with the title stamped on the spine in white Gothic Bold type.
