It is surely no coincidence that it is to this period, the age of the private presses, that so much of the current renaissance in book design refers. The Designer Collection at Virago Modern Classics, the new Penguin English Library and Persephone’s much-admired endpapers all quote, to various degrees, the aesthetics of the inter-war period. That doesn’t mean, however, that there is any intention to return to those hand-made, home-spun days. None of the publishing professionals I spoke to really believed that their readers had somehow divided themselves into two distinct groups, those who use Kindles and those who spend their weekends on bookbinding courses. What the rise of electronic publishing has done, rather, is create a context in which the book’s two distinct incarnations – as beautiful object and as a set of vaporous pixels - are linked not by “or” but “and”.