- About Bookbinding -

The Technique of the Craft part 6

The art of bookbinding has always been claimed by the French as peculiarly theirs, and it is not easy to deny the justice of the demand. Perhaps the position in which the art has found itself during the most of this century is due to the French Revolution, in the course of which, and of the long wars that ensued, the demand for fine work ceased abruptly. The trained workmen died off, the shops were broken up, and the tools were scattered and lost. Even the traditions of the art disappeared - and in every art which is also a trade the traditions represent the acquired force, the impetus. When the Empire came after the Consulate, and Napoleon wished to pose as the patron of the arts, bookbinding was dead in France. "I doubt if you could find anything more ugly than the books bound for Napoleon I., for Louis XVIII., for Louis Philippe," once declared M. Auguste Laugel, in a letter to the " Nation."

As it happened, the art which had been highest in France, and had then sunk lowest, had kept its humble level in England, and at the end of the last century had even had its only successful effort at originality there. The greatest name in the history of bookbinding in Great Britain is that of Roger Payne, an honest and thorough workman of some taste, and with a certain elementary appreciation of design. "His efforts were always original, never copied," and this is a very rare compliment to pay to a British bookbinder; and it is to this originality, as Mr. Matthews suggests, rather than to any great excellence in his designs, that he owes the exaggerated esteem in which he is held in England. When Matthew Arnold once said to Sainte-Beuve that he did not think Lamartine very important as a poet, the French critic replied, "He is important to us"; and so it is with Roger Payne-he is important to the British. If he is mentioned at all in French books, his name is usually given incorrectly.

Lewis was the leading English binder early in this century, in Dr. Dibdin's day. Perhaps it was owing to the influence of Dibdin, some of whose rhapsodically writing was translated into French, that the Parisian book-lovers began to send their precious volumes across the Channel to be bound in London. Thus the tradition of Roger Payne, the most original binder the British had ever had, helped to revive the traditions of the French binders, who soon surpassed again their British rivals, just as it was a follower of Bewick who revealed to the French the possibilities of the art of wood-engraving, in which the French ,have also become superior to the British.

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