- About Bookbinding -

Book Binders Outlook part 2

Another book of Burty's (now owned by Mr. A very) has an exceptional interest - an interest perhaps rather literary than rigidly artistic. It is a copy of the original edition of Victor Hugo's scorching satire, "Napoleon Ie Petit," published in 1853, a few months after Napoleon had broken his oath and made himself emperor; this copy (made doubly precious by three lines in the poet's handwriting) was bound in dark green morocco, and the side was hollowed out to receive an embroidered bee - a bee which had been cut from the throne of Napoleon III in the Tuileries a few days after the battle of Sedan. This is the very irony of bookbinding. A copy of "Les Chatiments" was bound to match. Future collectors will find these bees of Burty even harder to acquire than those which mark the books of De Thou.
Unusual, not to say unique, as such an opportunity must be, there is here a hint for the book-lover not by him to be despised. Here at least is an exceptional binding. Here at least we leave the monotonous iteration of the cut-and-dried. Here is a method of establishing a relation between the subject of the book and its exterior not hitherto attempted. For nine books out of ten the conventional binding suffices, Jansenist crushed levant for the costly volumes, simple half morocco for those less valuable. But for the special treasures, for the books with an individuality of their own, why may we not abandon this barren impersonality and seek to get out of the regular rut?

M. Octave Uzanne has avowed that he would prefer to have a copy of the "Legende des Siecles" clad soberly in a fragment of the dark-green uniform which Hugo wore the day he was received into the French Academy, to the same volume bound with the utmost luxury by the best binder of the time. Perhaps it is carrying this fancy a little too far to bind the Last Dying Speech and Confession of a murderer in a strip of his own hide properly tanned, or even to cover Holbein's "Dance of Death" with a like ghastly integument; but I confess I should find a particular pleasure in owning the copy of Washington Irving's "Conquest of Grenada," which Mr. Roger de Coverly bound "in Spanish morocco from Valencia" for the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in London in 1889.

In his "Caprices d'un Bibliophile," published in 1878, M. Octave Uzanne urged book-lovers to seek out a greater variety of leathers. The French are not afflicted with what Dickens called "that underdone pie-crust cover which is technically known as law-calf," and which is desolately monotonous; nor have they ever cared either for sprinkled calf, as dull and decorous as orthodoxy, or for "tree marbled calf," much affected by the British. That the French do not take to tree-calf is proof at once of their taste and of their wisdom. Mr. Matthews declares that he does not recommend tree-calf, and M. Marius-Michel speaks of the process of marbling it with acids as "a diabolic invention," since it rots the leather -as every one knows who has the misfortune to own books bound in this fashion half a century ago. The French, with a full understanding of the principles of bookbinding, have confined their attention almost wholly to calf and to morocco, eschewing even the pleasant-smelling Russia-leather, which becomes brittle, and has a tendency to crack, unless it is constantly handled, whereby it absorbs animal oil from the human fingers.

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