- About Bookbinding -
Bookbindings Old and New
Notes of a Book-Lover by Brander Matthews
Paper Covers part 3
Yet a score of years before the American metaphysician was born, a French metaphysician had published a book on the "Education of Daughters," in which he advised that the young be taught to read in cheerful fairy tales, so that the labor may be lightened. Fenelon even ordered that a well bound book be given to the child - a book with gilt edges and fine illustrations. But the treatise of the Archbishop of Cambrai had been written originally for his friends the Duke and Duchess of Beauvillier; and only in the households of the rich could the children be gratified and incited by "well bound books with gilt edges and fine engravings."
For the most part the little volumes prepared for the use and behoof of the young were but shabby things, often little better than chap books. The first edition of Goldsmith's "Goody Two Shoes" - if indeed it be Goldsmith's of a surety - is rudely manufactured; and so were most books for the young until within a quarter of a century ago. They were vilely illustrated; and they had colored covers crude and violent in outline and in tint.
Then it was in 1865 - Mr. Walter Crane began designing children's toy books in association with Mr. Edmund Evans, engraver and color printer. In 1870 was published "This Little Pig went to Market," with its strong, definite outlines, and its flat, bright colors, and with its cover as seemly, as decorous, and as decorative as any baby, however fastidious, might wish. In 1875 began another series of eight larger toy-books, with a uniform wrapper; among these were "Beauty and the Beast" and an "Alphabet of Old Friends." Then, in 1876, came "The Baby's Opera," and in 1879 "The Baby's Bouquet," and in 1886 "The Baby's Own AEsop," all attired in printed paper covers mounted on pasteboard, most harmonious in colour and inventive in design. And all these books and many more were devised by Mr. Crane not for the children of the rich only, not for the daughters of the Duchess of Beauvillier, but for the children of the poor, able to pay only a sixpence, it might be, for the beginning of the baby's library.
