- About Bookbinding -

The Technique of the Craft part 5

Probably the same state of affairs exists in other arts. I remember that in 1867, when I was but a boy, I had a chat in Naples with Signor Castellani, the antiquary and goldsmith about the fluctuations of the art of the silversmith. He told me that he had more than one workman then in his shop of greater skill than Benvenuto Cellini, of a more certain handicraft. These workmen could reproduce any of Cellini's legacies to posterity, little masterpieces of goldsmithery and enameling, and they would make a better job of it than the great Italian; for the modern imitations would show a finer technical skill than Cellini's, and reveal fewer defects and blunders and accidents than the marvelous originals. But copy as accurately as they might, the modern workmen were wholly incapable of originating anything. In Cellini there was a union of the head and the hand, of the artist and of the artisan, while in Castellani's men the hand had gained skill, but the head had lost its force. The handicraft had improved, and the art had declined. There were now very expert artisans, but there was no indisputably gifted artist.

In solidity of workmanship and in dexterity of handicraft, the art of the binder has advanced in this century; but not in design. The finishers of our time can repeat all the great artists of the past, but they cannot rival them in invention, in fantasy, in freshness, and in charm.
To say this is not to assert that the art IS III its decadence, or even that it is in any way going backward; but that it is not going forward one might venture to hint. The nineteenth century is now in its last decade, and it has not yet developed a style of its own in bookbinding - if it has in any other of the decorative arts. The men who bound for Grolier and Henry II. lived in the sixteenth century; the Eves and " Le Gascon" lived in the seventeenth; and even in the eighteenth century there was Derome, with his lacework borders borrowed from, or at least inspired by, the graceful wrought-iron work of the contemporary French smiths. But the most beautiful bindings of the nineteenth century are in the main imitations of those of the centuries preceding. Often the style is a doubtful and tasteless eclectic, perhaps not unfairly to be stigmatized as bastard and mongrel.

There is hardly to be detected even a vague effort after a style. Sometimes imitation develops into adaptation, and a new style is evolved slowly out of combinations and modifications; but in the art of binding we have not seen many signs of any such process now going on. Almost the only external influence which has been allowed to affect the accepted formulas is the Japanese; and the example of these surpassingly adroit decorative artists has not been sufficient to destroy the sterility from which the art of bookbinding is suffering. Its effect, at most, has been to increase the freedom of drawing, and to encourage a more realistic treatment of natural objects.

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