Part 5

We have perhaps said enough to indicate the variety of the work shown at the Galliera Museum, its high attainment in the field of design, and its still higher achievement in the matter of craftsmanship. One impression remains very clearly, that there were two distinct classes of exhibitors, the professional binder, so to speak, and the artist intent on producing decorative material for bindings. The first looks at a book as a thing to bind and handle, and is restrained in his methods by the use and purpose to which it is to be put. The second considers it as a surface to decorate, by means of painting or the aid of any other of the arts. The modelled work of Lepère, above alluded to, is an instance of this; so also is that of Mdme. Vallgren, which likewise consist of panels that are let into bindings prepared for that purpose by Marius and others. Admirable in their way, they would be equally effective as decorative objects framed upon a wall, and can but be considered a fantasy in connexion with books. Bibliomania in France is responsible for much that is disastrously eccentric and decadent. It is a form of vanity in which collectors vie with each other, and involves an expenditure not only on books but on bindings that would now seem to have reached the limit of extravagance. But such eccentricity is less than it was, and need no longer fill the eye to the exclusion of what is really finely conceived as well as exquisitely executed. If Paris still produces too many bindings of the bizarre and overdecorated kind, we can still go to her for the masterpieces of simplicity and for flawlessness of material faultlessly treated. Some day even the best binders may cease to support _l’art nouveau_ by the force of their skill and energy, but will rather confine themselves, as in the past, to the simple dignity that distinguished bindings in the best periods, and to the accomplishment of that fine restraint which must always be the high-water mark of bookbinding as a fine art.

EDITION BINDING[6]

Of late years, with that revival of craftsmanship, according to the gospel of Ruskin and William Morris, already dwelt upon, there has been a rush into all the departments of manual dexterity needing for successful achievement the guidance of artistic feeling. The result of this has been that there is a tendency to exaggerate the importance of the ornamental and the decorated, to the exclusion of not only simplicity but, let us say frankly, of plainness and the undecorated surface of flawless material. The over-elaboration of the decorative arts must inevitably produce a reaction sooner or later, very quickly for those who prefer restraint, more slowly for the majority of the public, to whom ornament is always synonymous with art. For such as these fashion counts for much; and it is in the hope that those who lead taste in the matter of edition bindings may find a scope for their enterprise on somewhat new lines that I ask consideration for this chapter.

After all, the costly bindings achieved for wealthy amateurs must always constitute but a small portion of the output of bound work. There will remain the cloth or leather-covered book in greater or smaller editions, for which covers are made in quantities by machinery, separately from the book, and for decorating which metal dies are cut and stamped by means of an embossing press, either with or without the addition of colours or gold leaf. It is of this class of work that I propose to treat, giving first a brief account of the stages through which it has passed in modern times, then showing how it was dealt with, though on a much smaller scale, in the early days of printing, and finally offering some suggestions for its more varied and, as I think, more artistic treatment in the future. This treatment would necessitate the employment of leather; but there is no reason why the less expensive kinds of skins should not be used, not perhaps for books issued in large numbers, but for small editions where a little extra outlay could be easily recovered on the published price of the work. Roans made from the best sheepskins, which are the hides of Scotch sheep, would not be a costly material, and would give good results in the embossing press. Pigskin is a very suitable material for the better class of bindings on which stamps are to be used, and is both strong and comparatively inexpensive, considering the size of the skins. Vellum, again, might be occasionally used for small editions; it blocks well, and is most effective with but little ornament. At one time much in demand for bindings, it ceased for many years to be used at all in England, except in account-book manufacture, when it was generally stained green. It has lately come into fashion again, chiefly for limp work, through the initiative of William Morris, who introduced it on most of the works issued by him from the Kelmscott Press; and both the Doves Press and the Ashendene Press have continued to employ it. To observe its suitability for blocking, either when used limp or on boards, we have only to turn to the coats-of-arms which frequently decorated it on the books of the great collectors of past times. There was a very fine specimen of vellum, ornamented in black, shown at the Burlington Fine Arts Exhibition in 1891. But before considering in detail how edition bindings were treated in the days when, comparatively speaking, books were few in number, we will get some idea of their treatment in more recent times, starting with the last century.

Up to, roughly speaking, about 1825, books of the type of dictionaries, classics, school books, and books of reference were mostly bound in roan or sprinkled sheep; while books of history, poetry, and novels were issued in drab or olive-coloured paper boards, with a printed label pasted on the back, or the full title printed on the back and sides, as in the case of Walker’s _British Classics_ (1818). It was very rarely that anything but a dull colour was used, though Whittingham’s _British Poets_ (1816) had a dark Venetian red paper, and the class of literature known in those days as gift-books or annuals occasionally appeared in vellum-coloured paper, stamped with gold. The more valuable of these, however, filled with choice steel engravings and prepared for the Christmas market, were bound in morocco and silk, and issued under such titles as _The Keepsake_, _The Bijou_, _Friendship’s Offering_, _The Book of Beauty_, _The Landscape Annual_, and so on. Such books commanded a large sale, even in those days; and a writer on the subject, in the first volume of _The Bookbinder_, mentions Finden’s _Tableaux_, two thousand imperial quarto volumes, full bound in best morocco, gilt. The paper-covered boards, which clothed the larger number of the books of that time, had a way of cracking at the hinge, and so becoming disconnected, a difficulty which was got over about 1822 by covering the back with calico or cloth. As an illustration of this step we may take Scott’s _Waverley Novels_. The _Novels and Tales_, in twelve volumes, appeared in 1819 in pink paper, with white labels; the _Historical Romances_, in six volumes, followed in 1822, in blue paper, with pink cloth back and white paper labels; and _Novels and Romances_ in 1824 in the same fashion. The next step was that of covering books entirely with cloth, introduced by Mr. Archibald Leighton, one of the most enterprising and successful of modern binders, whose business capacity and energy secured for him the patronage of the chief publishers of the day. He bound for Murray, Pickering, Colbourn, Tilt, Charles Knight, Moon, Boys, Graves, and many others, and died prematurely in 1841, leaving to his family a well-established business which, under a somewhat varying character, has remained in their hands up to the present time.

In the _Bookseller_ of July 4, 1881, there is an interesting account, by Mr. Robert Leighton, of the invention of bookbinders’ cloth by his father, and of how the subsequent embossing of it came about. The exact date of cloth binding he is not able to state, but says that he has in his library a volume, presented to his father by the author, bound in smooth, red cloth, with a paper label. The publishers’ names are Lackington, Hughes, Harding and Lepard, and the date on the title-page is 1822. There is every reason to believe that it is one of a number similarly bound in that year. In those days the white calico was bought in London, sent to the dyers to be dyed, and thence to Mr. John Southgate, of 3 Crown Court, Old Change, to be stiffened and calendered. The embossing of bookbinders’ cloth was suggested by Mr. Archibald Leighton to the late Mr. de la Rue, and was carried out so admirably by him, with the appliances he possessed for embossing paper, that his process remains still comparatively unaltered. The desired pattern was engraved on a gun-metal cylinder, and transferred in reverse to one made of compressed paper, strung upon an iron spindle and turned in the lathe to the exact circumference of the gun-metal one, and these two being worked together in a machine, and the pattern transferred from one to the other, the cloth was passed between them and received the impress of the pattern engraved on the metal cylinder.

In this way the whole of the cloth used by Messrs. Leighton was for many years embossed upon their own premises. The cylinders were only fourteen or fifteen inches wide, and the machine was turned by manual labour and heated by red-hot irons, which were placed in the gun-metal cylinder and replaced by others when cold. In those days it was customary to engrave special cylinders for books of importance, and you may still occasionally meet with stray volumes of _The Penny Cyclopædia_ or Knight’s _Pictorial England_, and such like popular works, with embossed cloth covers so prepared. Mr. Pickering was the first person for whom Mr. Leighton bound books in cloth, and either his ‘Aldine Poets’ or the ‘Diamond Classics’ were the first books on which it was put. The first person to undertake the embossing of bookbinders’ cloth on cylinders a yard wide was Mr. Law, of Monkwell Street, and for years he embossed all the cloth sold by Mr. James Leonard Wilson, of St. John Street, who had followed Mr. Leighton’s methods in the preparation and sale of the cloth. Mr. Wilson sold his business to Messrs. Duffield, who established a manufactory of bookbinders’ cloth at Hoxton, and so improved it that for years he held practically a monopoly of its output. The exact period when gold-stamping was first applied to cloth is clearly marked by the publication of Lord Byron’s life and works, in seventeen volumes, by Mr. John Murray, of Albemarle Street. The volumes were published monthly, and had a sale of about 20,000. They were bound in green cloth, and the first volume was issued in 1832, with a green paper label on the back, matching the cloth in colour, on which was printed in bronze the title and a coronet; on the second and succeeding volumes the paper label was dispensed with, and the coronet and title were stamped in gold upon the cloth itself. Mr. Henry George Bohn, in a letter addressed to the _Art Journal_, says that his father, John Henry Bohn, a German bookbinder, established about 1795 in Frith Street, Soho, had a special reputation for gilding on the silk linings of books, as well as calf-graining, tree-marbling, and other special processes, all of which he himself made acquaintance with when a boy. ‘In later life,’ he continues, ‘the knowledge of the peculiar dressing used for gilding on silk enabled me to communicate to Mr. Leighton the means of getting cloth prepared so as to take gilding by heated machinery at the rolling or stamping press, which a leading trade firm said was impracticable. The process, however, after a few weeks’ experiments conducted by the late Mr. James Leonard Wilson, was successfully accomplished; and Mr. Leighton thereupon wrote to me triumphantly announcing the fact, and undertaking in consequence to bind in gilt cloth several thousand volumes at half the price I should previously have had to pay, on account of the necessity of having to add leather backs for taking the gold by hand tooling. The book was Martin and Westall’s _Bible Points_, which I brought out in 1832. What to me at the time seemed an accomplishment of little moment has now become of such importance to cloth binders that, could the discovery have been patented, it would have yielded a considerable income.’

This Mr. Robert Leighton, who thus wrote of his father’s invention, was himself the pioneer in the use of steam machinery in bookbinding, and he adopted in his own business nearly all the machinery which has since become indispensable to the wholesale binder. He was also the first to use steam power for blocking in gold; the first to use aluminium, and black and coloured inks for cloth cases, examples of which he showed in the exhibition of 1851. He had a great reputation for the designs of his cloth bindings, which he devised in conjunction with his artist cousin, John Leighton, known as Luke Limner, a good instance being the pleasant and appropriate covers for Mrs. Jameson’s _Legends of the Madonna_ and _Legends of the Monastic Orders_. The two Leightons, father and son, thus inaugurated and furthered the great revolution in the art of edition binding associated with the employment for the purpose of specially prepared cloth, and its decoration by means of steam-blocking in gold and colours. It was natural that such an invention should lead to abuse; and in a short time, unfortunately, there was so much gilt ornament that a strong reaction took place, and, while cloth as a material for the cover continued to be used, it was either left plain or had a single bordering line in gold, with or without the title likewise in gold upon the sides. More recently colour printing upon cloth has been revived with excellent results in many cases, especially where an artist who understands the power and limitations of the blocking process has been employed upon the designs. Many of these are entirely without gold, and give representations of scenes taken from the books with excellent impressionist effect. One may mention as instances in England the novels published by Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, such as _In Our Town_, _Her Majesty’s Minister_, _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_, _The Hebrew_, and many others of the same firm, one of whose members gives special attention to the successful production of cloth covers. The bindings of books issued by Mr. John Lane are also frequently very successful, though it is not so easy to keep in touch with the output of American work on similar lines. Messrs. Puttenham have produced some excellent examples of taste in colour printing, notably _The Romance of the Colorado River_, _Puerto Rican_, _Lights of Childhood_, and _The Romance of the Renaissance Chateaux_, in which the castle of Langeais is shown in black on a grey cloth. The same house publish likewise one or two books bound in plain cloth, with a photographic print on the cover, which seemed a pleasant variation not in use over here; while _Twenty-Six Historic Ships_, also issued by them, is a most satisfactory example of blocking with white foil on a blue ground. At Messrs. Appleton’s are to be found several specimens of bookbinders’ cloth which do not come over here at all. We have but little variety in the nature and preparation of our cloth; while in America it is treated in many different ways, which naturally give very varied results in the blocking-press.

Messrs. Gay and Bird issue some effective colour printing on _In South Africa with Buller_, and an attractive example of a loch and mountain scene in four sombre colours on _The Story of Gösta Berling_. There is little doubt that the most artistic effects are got by using very few colours in harmony rather than in contrast with the cloth. Gold is much more sparingly used for cloth work than formerly, and with far better taste. _Paris in its Splendour_, published by the last-named firm, is an interesting example of the different effects that can be obtained from the gold by varieties of matted ground in the block; while in _Walden_, issued by Messrs. Houghton and Mifflin, the cloth of the cover represents the design, the gold being confined to suggesting the background, with a decidedly original result.

This, then, is the position of cloth binding at the present time as shown by the leading publishers’ work. The technical processes are probably as perfect as such things can be, the drawings are frequently the work of artists, there is far more restraint than formerly both in the matter of design and the employment of colour, while the taste in colour schemes is often as good as possible, and a great advance on that shown a decade or two ago. We do not think that in that special branch of edition bindings there is any great advance to be made or novelty to be assumed, though no doubt we may expect a wider diffusion of the taste that we have noted in the best work and an increasingly small number of book covers inferior in design, colour, and general effect.

In what direction, then, can we hope for any new departure? In order to answer the question, and complete the scope of this chapter, it is necessary to spend a short time in studying the bindings in which books were clothed when they were less numerous, and during a period when they reached what many think the high-water mark of successful decoration.

The work of the early printers was issued in trade bindings just as publishers’ work is now sent out, but in those days stationers combined the craft of binding with the business of bookselling. The earliest of all were decorated by building up designs from dies, these being arranged in pattern schemes which Mr. W. H. James Weale was the first to analyze and set forth in the catalogue of the fine collection of rubbings of bindings which he presented to the National Art Library of South Kensington in 1894. These schemes were taken from the covers of manuscripts from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, but the same kind of arrangement, though not so elaborate, may be seen on the earliest printed books; also witness the illustrations to the monographs on early Oxford and Cambridge bindings issued by the Bibliographical Society. Small books were stamped with a panel on the sides, and these often had the initials or mark of the binder, which have led in many instances to the ascription of particular bindings to the stationers who issued them, though a still greater number still remain to be identified. The blocks were generally small, and were used sometimes one on each side between a bordering of roughly drawn lines; sometimes two together were placed upon one side, and connected with lines or some simple device; and occasionally on large books four panels were arranged in rows of two. The material of the binding was ass’s-skin, pigskin, calfskin,—though not the fragile kind now associated with the name—and vellum, but chiefly the three first. The stamps or blocks used were cut in intaglio, either on hard wood or on metal, producing the impression in cameo; the design was often both strong and delicate in treatment, the impression after all these years showing great artistic vigour and inventiveness. Indeed, nothing can be more excellent than the dragons, gryphons, and other mythical animals in the pear-shaped, triangular, circular, or square dies arranged within the pattern schemes of the very early bindings. It is known exactly how these stamps were used upon the bindings; it is probable that, when panel stamps were used, the leather was thoroughly wetted and the book then placed in a screw press, under a block of wood or metal, for the length of time needed to obtain a clear impression. In _Marques Typographiques_ by Silvestre, there is a printers’ mark, used by Petrus Cesar Gaudanus, otherwise Pierre de Keyser, of Ghent, between 1516 and 1547, which represents a book undergoing pressure in a printers’ press; and Josse Bade, likewise a stationer and printer of Paris, who died in 1535, used a somewhat similar one. Though there is obviously a book in the press, the picture may relate to a process not connected with binding; but in any case it probably represents what must have been the procedure used in impressing the stamps. These dies passed from one workshop to another, and none of them are extant to my knowledge in England, though the heraldic blocks used on books in the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. were decidedly numerous and of great artistic merit. In the Netherlands these designs were the binders’ property and protected as such, but in England, where the binders were not organized into separate guilds, this was not the case, and piracy was everywhere prevalent.

On many of the blocks there appear two indentations or holes about a quarter of an inch in diameter, situated within the border at the top and bottom of the panel. The precise purport of these is unknown, and many plausible theories have been invented to account for them. One such suggests that they were stop buttons to prevent the stamp from sinking too far into the leather, but it is more probable that they indicate the heads of nails or pegs which fastened the carved block or metal stamp to another piece of wood. Sometimes the impressions made by them are almost imperceptible, at others there has been an attempt at concealment by carrying the ornament across. Many of the subjects pictured on these stamps were of a religious character: thus the Baptism of Christ, Saint John the Baptist, the Crucifixion, Our Lady of Pity, the Ara Cœli, and the different saints and apostles, are all represented upon these early book covers. For an account of them, and for a general history of early stamped bindings, which contains also a certain amount of illustration, the interested reader cannot do better than procure the two volumes, published at half a crown by the Department of Science and Art, at South Kensington, entitled _Bookbindings and Rubbings of Bindings in the National Art Library of South Kensington Museum_, by W. H. James Weale. This class of binding has given rise to much dispute of an archæological kind, with which, happily, we are not concerned at the moment. Whether the stamps were of wood or metal, in what country they originated, their authorship as indicated by initials incorporated in the design, their _provenance_ as apart from the country in which they were in use, who was the inventor of the pattern roller,—all such questions we may leave aside, the point of interest being the fact of the stamp and its astonishing variety of character, for many styles were represented by it, all, with but few exceptions, of great merit and suitability to their end. For the present purpose, and as far as ornament is concerned, they may be classified somewhat as follows:—

1. Small Gothic dies with palmated leaves, animals, and so on, combined in design according to certain fixed patterns, such as those on the Bible written and bound in the monastery at Durham for Hugh Pudsey, bishop of that diocese from 1153 to 1195, and other books in the same cathedral library.