The Language of Bindings Thesaurus (LoB) is intended to provide a consistent and agreed terminology to be used by anybody working with historic books, such as conservators, palaeographers, cataloguers, librarians, historians, book collectors, rare book dealers. Offering this vocabulary in a layered structure, the thesaurus is developed to encourage further research in book history. It can be used as a reference to concepts to describe bookbindings unambiguously in all cataloguing activities. It can also be used as a didactic tool for learning about book structures and materials, the frequency of the occurrence of bookbinding components or other aspects connected with the book trade. This project has been partially funded by the AHRC.