- About Bookbinding -

The Merits of Machine Binding

IThis is the great merit of modern commercial bookbinding done by machinery that it is independent, that it has freed itself "from the trammels and the traditions of hand work, that it is no longer a savorless sham copying blindly, that it lives its own life. It recognizes the fact, obvious enough nowadays that we cannot all be as Heber, to whom Ferriar sang:

The folio Aldus loads your happy shelves,
And dapper Elzevirs, like fairy elves,
Shew their light forms amidst the well-gilt twelves.

In this change Great Britain and the United States have led the way, followed for once by France, and, after an interval, by Germany. It was in frugal Germany that "half binding" had its origin. Half binding is a money saving contrivance, which lordly book lovers have reprobated as equivalent to genteel poverty. The Jansenists used to keep the leather sides of their books free from ornament; and some sparing German carried this simplicity one step further, substituting paper for the plain surface of leather and using morocco and calf only for the back, and for a narrow but needful hinge on each side. To push this economy a little further yet was easy; and so it came to pass in the last century that the English binders altogether omitted the leather, and covered with paper both the sides and back. Strictly speaking, those books were not bound at all; they were merely cased that is, sheathed in boards. A casing of this kind was the most temporary of makeshifts. Every librarian knows how fragile are the paper and pasteboard which envelop the books of the last century. The back is prone to crack and to peel off, and the sides are prompt to break away; the method was as slovenly and as inconvenient as possible.

Early in this century the disadvantage of paper covered boards led to the use of plain glazed calico in place of the paper. There was at first no thought of decoration: the plain calico was substituted for the plain paper because it was stronger and did not chip and tear quite so easily; the title was still printed on a label of white paper, and pasted on the back of the volume. The exact date of this improvement is in doubt. I have among my Sheridaniana the third edition of Dr. Watkins's "Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of the Right Honorable Richard Brinsley Sheridan," printed for Henry Colburn in 1818, and both volumes are clad in glazed calico, with a slightly ribbed surface and of a faded purple tint. The date of the biography is that of the binding. "Constable's Miscellany," the publication of which was begun in 1827, said to have been the first collection regularly bound in cloth; the cases were covered in the simplest fashion with plain calico, and distinguished by a paper label. The edition of Byron's-. works in seventeen volumes published in 1833 is supposed to have been the first work issued without the paper label, and with the title printed in gold on the backs of the books; but certain volumes of a series of "Oxford English Classics" may perhaps have preceded this "Byron."