Bookbinding in Italian

Il rimbocco is the strip of leather or cloth folded over the edge of the board and pasted down on the inside, and English calls it the turn-in — a name that records only the movement of the hand. The Italian noun sits on a verb that is still in daily domestic use, and that is what makes it worth a paragraph. Rimboccare is to fold something back on itself. Rimboccare le coperte is what a parent does at bedtime, folding the blanket back and pushing it under the mattress, and rimboccarsi le maniche is to turn one’s sleeves back before starting a hard job — which English says in exactly the same picture, « roll up your sleeves », and means exactly the same thing by it. So the binder at the board is not reaching for a technical term at all. He is doing to the leather what anyone does to a bedsheet and to a shirt cuff: turning the edge back on itself until the raw side stops showing. Learn the household verb and the trade word costs nothing.