As lambs frolic in the fields ahead of Easter, and start appearing on restaurant menus, there is one thing at least that today's sheep need not fear.

In the Middle Ages there was nothing better suited to making a book than sheep and calf skin. Stillborn lambs were the best, being most pliable and soft, but anything from a ruminant was to the cutting-edge Medieval reader what the iPad is to the gadget classes.

So in demand were sheep and cows for vellum that it was once thought the rectangular contours of the book reflected their shape. This idea is now debunked, since earlier vegetable-based pages, such as papyrus, were also rectangular, but it shows how crucial animals were for the developing business of books. Fortunately for our hooved friends, creating vellum was a laborious process. One sheep produced only a double page. A large book - think Gone With The Wind - would have required the slaughter of a entire flock. It doesn't bear thinking about.

As Henry Petroski points out in his absorbing history, The Book On The Bookshelf, as production techniques evolved there came a time when book buyers "tended to have their own bookbinders the way we have today our own plumbers, doctors and stockbrokers". That was in the 1600s, when people like Samuel Pepys would have all their books bound at the same time, to make them look impressive (and expensive) on the shelf.

Modern readers keen to find their own private bookbinder might like to drop into the National Library Of Scotland. I did just that, last week, to see the exhibition of the 2013 Elizabeth Soutar Bookbinding Competition. Having neglected to read the small print, I arrived the day it ended, shortly after the exhibition cases had been emptied.

Sometimes, however, being late has its advantages. Very kindly, the conservator in charge of the entries led me into the bowels of the library where she and the conservation team work, and allowed me not just to see but to handle the books that had been sent in. They were, as you would expect, exquisite. The competition, which is open to EU members, is dominated by the Spanish, who this year accounted for 70% of entrants, and three of the four winners. Scotland needs to stage a fightback (although there could be no arguing with the judges' selection).

There are four prizes, for best creative binding and best craft binding in two categories, one for students, the other for everyone else. For me, the most eye-catching and tactile was Isabel Segura Boutry's covering of an old edition of Peter Pan, using blue and brown cowhide, inlaid with blue agate on the cover, which looked like a patch of sky or sea, and a disc of olive wood on the back. More magnificent, in part because of the open-leaved box it came in, was a starkly modern Nueva York, by Carolina Vine Lombilla, made of black caribou and grey suede, and painted with grey and white acrylic.

One exceptional binding, by Angel Peinado Ursino, was an eery green-bound edition of a work by poet Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, in which portraits of the characters adorn cover and back, emerging from the leather like ghostly cavaliers. The fourth winner was British student Richard Martin Beadsmoore, who took HE Bates's Through The Woods, and bound it elegantly in green goatskin, with a lightning flash of a tree on the cover, tooled in carbon and gold.

Those who - almost like me - missed this year's exhibition need not fret. All previous winners of the competition are held by the National Library, as in due time will be the latest. Since the prize began in 1993, and continued after Elizabeth Soutar's death in 2008 thanks to her bequest, there are already dozens of virtuoso bookbindings to view.

While some will be so lovely one will scarcely dare read the words they enclose, there are few more cheering examples of the book being treasured as it deserves. I doubt even Pepys would have owned anything so glorious.