thumb|The process of sewing a green and white secondary endband over a white primary endband. Front beads are visible. An endband is a cylindrical band sewn and/or glued to the head and tail of the spine of a book. It is slightly raised above the bookblock. An endband along the top edge of the book is called a headband, and one along the bottom edge is called a tailband. Sewn endbands, or 'true' endbands, are sewn into the gatherings of the bookblock and perform a mechanical function. They strengthen the sewing of the bookblock and sometimes the joint as well (the connection between the spine
thumb|The process of sewing a green and white secondary endband over a white primary endband. Front beads are visible. An endband is a cylindrical band sewn and/or glued to the head and tail of the spine of a book. It is slightly raised above the bookblock. An endband along the top edge of the book is called a headband, and one along the bottom edge is called a tailband. Sewn endbands, or 'true' endbands, are sewn into the gatherings of the bookblock and perform a mechanical function. They strengthen the sewing of the bookblock and sometimes the joint as well (the connection between the spine and cover boards). Endbands can also be used to shape the spine. Sewn endbands never occur on 'perfect' bindings (paperbacks), and are today mostly practiced in book arts, conservation settings, and traditional book binderies.
== Terms == Book binding terms vary by time period and location. Christopher Clarkson first used the word ‘endband’ in 1967 to speak about medieval book binding. The following terms are used by Conservation Wiki (operated by the American Institute for Conservation, also called AIC Wiki), Ligatus (full name The Language of Bindings Thesaurus), and J.A. Szirmai's book The Archeology of Medieval Bookbinding (London, 1999).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).