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While it is clear that the bibliographer should offer a detailed description of the original wrappers, publisher's cloth bindings, and cases offered for sale by the publisher, it is less apparent whether these all belong in a section on binding. If the wrapper has been transcribed elsewhere in the account, only a description of the paper (thickness, pattern, and color) is placed here.

Cloth cases belong in the binding section only if they form part of the ideal copy of the number or volume. Thus cloth cases sold separately by the publisher, not being an aspect of ideal copy, should be noted at the end of the description, along with indexes, title-pages, and other such matter distributed separately from the number or bound volume.[35]

It can be difficult to determine the status of a bound volume in publisher's cloth. Some light is shed on this topic in John Carter's description of "Binding from Parts" in Binding Variants in English Publishing 1820 — 1900 (1932). Carter describes the practice of subscribers taking sets of books issued in parts to booksellers, who would "either return them to the publisher, who would have the job done by his regular binder, or else have the case sent down and the actual binding done by a local

binder" (74). Carter suggests that the involvement of local binders results in variation in the "colour and quality" of endpapers and in the trimming of edges (74); thus bibliographers who observe significant variation in these and other matters of binding (such as variations in the margin, which Carter mentions as a feature of bound-up volumes of books originally issued in parts [77]) among copies of a volume might have reason to doubt that the binding was handled by the publisher, whereas "endpapers printed with the publisher's advertisements indicate that the copy was bound by the publisher's binder . . ." (81). Further complications arise if both a volume issued by the publisher and volumes constructed by other parties exist:

with a book issued in parts there would be two distinct binding operations. First, a wholesale binding of those sets of sheets which have either never been wrappered or, being wrappered for part-issue, had not sold: these would constitute the publisher's issue in volume form, appearing on completion, or more usually just before completion, of the part-issue.

Then there would be the more or less desultory business of stripping sets of parts returned by subscribers, as they came in, and putting them into the publisher's cases which awaited them; parallel with which would be the single copies of small lots done to a bookseller's order by the local binder. (75)

The collection of external evidence such as advertisements for bound volumes, along with the examination of multiple copies (checking for stab holes, remnants of wrappers glued to sheets, or other evidence of previous binding), is necessary to sort out such instances.