- About Bookbinding -
Bookbindings Old and New
Notes of a Book-Lover by Brander Matthews
The Merits of Machine Binding part 4
In comparing many modern books to select illustrations and examples for this paper, I have been led to the conclusion that there is more thought given to book decoration in the United States than in Great Britain. There are not a few beautiful book covers to be found in the shops of British booksellers, but not so many; I venture to think, as might be collected from American publishers. And the reason of this, I take it, is partly that the British are borrowers of new books rather than buyers, and partly that the British still desire to have the books worth owning bound finally in leather, and they therefore still look upon the cloth case as merely a temporary convenience. The American reader, for the most part, accepts the cloth binding as a permanency; and the American publisher is moved, therefore, to expend more time and attention on the decoration of the books he offers for sale.
Consider, for example, the gaudy cover which the British publisher put on Mr. Du Chaillu's "Land of the Midnight Sun," and compare it with that prepared by Mr. E. A. Abbey for the American edition. A true book lover would be in haste to get Mr. Du Chaillu's entertaining work out of the British cloth case; but he would feel it absurd to wish to rebind a copy adorned with Mr. Abbey's cover. He would be ready to echo Hawthorne's protest against those who "strip off the real skin of a book to put it into fine clothes."
Again, take Mr. Vedder's remarkable edition of Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," for which the artist designed the cover-stamp. To rebind this folio, even in the most sumptuous crushed levant, is to deprive one's self of not the least interesting of the illustrations by which the American painter has interpreted the Persian poet. And what could be more ingenious or more characteristic than the Dutch tile which is seemingly set into the golden cover of the "Sketching Rambles in Holland" of Mr. George H. Boughton and Mr. E. A. Abbey?