Bookbinder’s hammer

Bookbinder’s beating hammer (English, nineteenth(?) century) (Bodleian Library)

The first action of a bookbinder was to fold the printed sheets of a book and then to beat the folded quires with a beating hammer. This 5.2 kg beating hammer would have been used to compress the folded quires in small groups with care being taken not to ‘set off’ the ink from any freshly printed sheets.