The last page (or pages) of a "booklet" may have been left blank because the text did not fill the "booklet." A "booklet" in which the concluding text is complete may lack its last leaf (or leaves), suggesting that a blank
endleaf (or leaves) has been cut away when the "booklet" was bound up with others.
A range of issues were carefully considered: the best approach to repairing the damaged vellum folds; humidification to flatten stiff, distorted leaves; the appropriate style of sewing and sewing supports; which of multiple holes to use;
endleaf construction; the extent to which contemporary (that is, fifteenth-century) materials or techniques should be replicated; the physical functioning of the binding, its ease of opening and the action of the spine; the thickness and shape of the boards; the outward appearance of the volume, the covering material, the colour; (7) the reversibility of the treatment and the ethical implications of this kind of major intervention.
It is beautifully printed by DS Graphics, of Lowell, Massachusetts (the company's account-executive is a former SP president and a contributor to the volume), and handsomely bound, in Sierra natural-finish book cloth and Rainbow
endleaf paper, by Acme Bookbinding (Acme Bookbinding's Paul Parisi is another SP member).
Cambridge Magdalene College Pepys 2498 (Ancrene wisse) was owned by Stephen Batman, as was Cambridge Trinity College B 14 19 (Chastising, and various meditations on the passion), which also has the name "Elizabeth" written twice in a lovely script on folio 163 (the endleaf of the first book in this composite manuscript).
On an endleaf is an English version of the part of Rolle's Oleum effusum which is omitted from the partial translation in The pore caitiff (Doyle 1954: 19), and throughout the manuscript are marginalia (including many pointing hands) which suggest that this book was read with careful attention.
Similarly, in the Leeds Diocesan Archives manuscript of Love's Mirror on the endleaf (folio 116) is written "Christofer Mustchamp was christened the 24th of Jan' 1566.
The Introduction to Davies's catalogue of Inner Temple manuscripts has a section which discusses those manuscripts now in the collection but not acquired from Petyt, and this manuscript is included among the 'manuscripts from unknown sources'.(5) There is an inscription on an
endleaf (fo.
7.Q.2.21' (the text is Augustine's De civitate Dei (Venice, 1475), and Lydgate's verse are indeed copied there on an
endleaf).