- About Bookbinding -

Book Binders Outlook

Much as one might expect a precious metal to enrich a tome, there is more than a hint of Teutonic heaviness in most of these carved leather covers, girt with solid silver clasps, and armed with chased medallions. The occasional attempts of American silversmiths at book-decoration are lighter and more graceful. I have seen more than one prayer-book, the smooth dark calfskin of which was shielded by a thin shell of silver pierced with delicate arabesques. But this is almost an accidental return to a method of ornamentation long past its usefulness and appropriate only when every book was a portly tome bound in real boards, and reposing in solitary glory on its own lectern. The future of bookbinding does not lie in any alliance with silversmithery.

Just where the future of bookbinding does lie is very difficult to declare. Cosmopolitan commonplace is the characteristic of much of the work of to-day. Craftsmen of remarkable technical skill are content with conventionality and they go on indefinitely repeating the old styles, - Maloli and Grolier, Padeloup and Derome, - styles which were once alive, but which have long since been void of any germ of vitality. To persist in using them is like refusing to speak any language but Latin. For a man alive today a living dialect, however impure, is better than a lifeless language, however perfect. There are not wanting signs of a reaction against the banality of modern bookbinding.

One of them is the instant success of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson's innovations. Another IS the return to silver-mounting. Yet a third, curious only, and infertile, is the decoration of a book-cover with enamels, either incrusted or applied. The Germans have taken to letting a monogram, ornamented or metal, into the centre of a book-cover; but nothing seems to be gained by this which a mosaic of leather would not have given. The late Philippe Burty, the distinguished French art-critic, and book-lover with the keenest liking for novelty, had a copy on Dutch paper of PouletMalassis's essay on "Ex-Libris "; he enriched it with other interesting book-plates; he inserted a few autograph letters; he had it bound by R. Petit in full morocco, with his monogram at the corners; and in the centre of the side he let in a metal plate on which his own book-plate was enameled in niello. This singularly personal binding is reproduced in M. Octave Uzanne's volume on " La Reliure Moderne," where we find another of M. Burty's experiments, a copy of M. Claudius Popelin's "De la Statue et de la Peinture" (translated from Alberti), also bound by Petit, and also identified by the owner's monogram, and having, moreover, in the centre of the side, an enameled panel made by M. Popelin himself for his friend's copy of his own book.

Burty had in his collections other volumes distinguished by enamels; and there were in the Grolier Club exhibition a set of books belonging to Mr. S. P. Avery, and quite as much out of the common as Burty's. Mr. Avery has sent certain volumes of the "Bibliotheque de l'Enseignement des Beaux-arts" to the authors, asking each to indicate the binding which he thought most consonant with his work; so Mr. Avery has" La Faience," of M. Theodore Deck, decorated with panels of pottery, one of them being a portrait of the author executed at his own ceramic works; and he has Sauzy's ", Marvels of Glass-Making," with covers containing glass panels enameled in colors. These ventures belong among the curiosities of the art; they are to be classed among the freaks rather than with the professional beauties.