Word.ws English Dictionary

bookmanship

bookmanship noun: skill in, or appreciation of, the editing and production design of books; being a connoisseur of books; love of books.

Noun

bookmanship (uncountable)

  1. Skill in, or appreciation of, the editing and production design of books; being a connoisseur of books; love of books.
    • As library school graduates appear only semiliterate in terms of the book as a physical, aesthetic object, such critics wonder what has happened to the role of bookmanship in library education.1980 April, Lawrence J. McCrank "Education for Rare Book Librarianship: A Reexamination of Trends and Problems" p.9 (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Graduate School of Library Science...
    • Bookmanship is a way of life: you live to acquire books.2009 Matthew Joseph Bruccoli, Judith Baughman F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Marketplace: The Auction and Dealer Catalogues, 1935-2006 p.xv (Univ of South Carolina Press, 2009) →ISBN
  2. Skill in using books; profiting from one's reading; erudition.
    • 1946 [2001] Holbrook Jackson The reading of books p.10 (University of Illinois Press, 2001) →ISBN
      Bookmanship is the art of adjusting literature to life.
    • The senior author of this article ... originated the concept of reference bookmanship to denote the ability to use reference books skillfully and creatively for the purpose of deriving the full information potential inherent in them.1978, “Reference books”, in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, volume 25, page 183

Examples of bookmanship in a sentence

  • With their fine bindings, steel engravings, and handsomely printed pages, the annuals were products of good bookmanship.2013, Kevin J. Hayes, Edgar Allan Poe in Context, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 184:
  • Even our modern services, I fear, are at times suspect in this respect, demanding degrees of literacy and bookmanship increasingly not found.1989 January, “Third Sunday in Lent: Unexpected Issues”, in The Expository Times, 100: pp.144-145:

Origin of bookmanship

From bookman + -ship. Compare penmanship.

Questions about bookmanship

What does bookmanship mean?
Bookmanship means skill in, or appreciation of, the editing and production design of books; being a connoisseur of books; love of books.
How do you use bookmanship in a sentence?
With their fine bindings, steel engravings, and handsomely printed pages, the annuals were products of good bookmanship.
What part of speech is bookmanship?
Bookmanship is a noun.

Words near bookmanship in the dictionary

  1. bookmakers
  2. bookmaking
  3. bookmakings
  4. bookman
  5. Bookmans
  6. bookmanship
  7. bookmark
  8. bookmarkable
  9. bookmarked
  10. bookmarker
  11. bookmarkers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bookmanship (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bookmanship.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bookmanship. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.