CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION.

'INEM loquendi pariter omnes audiamus. The of bookbinding depends, therefore, as I have eavoured to show, upon a prolonged series of nute particulars; the whole of which must be naged with taste and skill, if the binder would ›duce a fine, and accomplished, work. Of these rticulars, those, which relate to that part of his ft technically known as 'forwarding,' are of greater portance, than those, which relate to the more tractive process of 'finishing.' Forwarding is the ructure of bookbinding; while finishing is merely he decoration of that structure. The first and fundanental condition of good forwarding is beyond the control of the binder, and consists in a proper choice of the paper upon which the book is printed. Unless the substance of the paper has been determined by the size and number of the quires, which is rarely the case of modern editions, it is impossible to bind a book in a proper manner. A book, of which the paper has allowed it to be well forwarded, should be solidly pressed, but not crushed or killed in the

pressing its sections should be sewn round the cords; and it should be furnished with boards, whose substance and squares are agreeable to its size and weight. The back should be of a nature, that will allow the book to open, to remain open, and to shut, with ease; the edges accurately cut; the boards lying solidly and evenly upon the body of the sections: while the joints, head-bands, and mitres should be formed with nicety and precision; and the binding, in these, as in all other, particulars, be strongly, and truly, made. If, in a well forwarded book of this kind, the colour of the end-papers and head-bands, the decoration of the edges, and especially the colour and texture of the leather, have been chosen with the same taste and judgment, which should have determined the other details of the forwarding, a very slight amount of tooling, either in blind or gold, is sufficient to render its binding a fine and satisfactory work of art: and of this, the little copy of Claudian, in the British Museum, which was bound for Baron de Longepierre, and is tooled with his device of the Golden Fleece, as well as some of the simpler bindings of Padeloup, are conspicuous examples. Even the most wealthy of collectors cannot hope to have any considerable number of his books more elaborately gilded than these.

The notion, that the ornament of the binding should symbolise, or in some way be expressive of, the contents of the book, has been traced to medieval times. At the close of a translation of Boccaccio's Falles of

Princes, by Dan John Lydgate, Monk of Bury, London, 1554, is a leaf entitled 'Greneacres, a Lenuoy vpon Iohn Bochas,' in which the translator thus addresses his book:

'Blacke be thy bondes & thy wede also

Thou sorrowefull Booke of matter dysespeyred:
In Token of thine inward mortall woe,
Which is so bad it may not be impeyred.
Thou owest not outward to be feared,
That inward hast so many a ruful clause,
Such be thine habite of colour as of cause.

'No cloth of Tissue ne veluet Cremesyne
But like the monke mourning vnder his hode
Goe weyle and wepe with woeful Proserpine
And lat thy teres multiplye the floode
Of black Lithey vnder the bareyn woode
Where she as goddess hath her Hermitage,
Help her to wepe & she wil gene the wage.'

But early instances of this kind are altogether exceptional; and we must turn to certain inlaid bindings, executed in France, during the last century, for any general illustration of the notion, that the decoration of a book should be expressive of its contents. By Roger Payne, this principle was observed, as I have shown, in a great number of his books: but it has remained, however, for the binders of a yet more recent time to pursue it to its logical conclusion; although rarely with conspicuous success, if the bindings figured in M. Octave Uzanne's work, La Reliure Moderne, are to be taken as representative

examples. At the present day, the notion has been carried to an extreme by some designers, who, affecting the fashion of the Décadents, appear to work in a spirit akin to that of Arthur Rimbaud's sonnet, which finds, in colours, the definite sensations of language.

Some of the bindings executed by Mr. Cobden Sanderson afford a good modern instance of how a design may find its suggestion in some passage or motive of the book, which it is intended to decorate. He has, himself, told us, how Tennyson's line, the ' grassy barrows of the happier dead,' suggested the bands of daisies with which he decorated a copy of 'In Memoriam': and how, in a similar way, the design upon a binding of ‘Atalanta in Calydon' was suggested by the subject of the poem, and especially by the dream of Althaea the mother of Meleager.

'I dreamed, that out of this my womb had sprung
Fire and a fire-brand, . . .

And I with gathered raiment from the bed
Sprang, and drew forth the brand, and cast on it
Water, and trod the flame bare-foot, and crushed
With naked hand spark beaten out of spark,
And blew against and quenched it ;

'These lines,' Mr. Sanderson adds, 'haunted me when I thought of the pattern of the cover, and came out, as will be seen, in the decoration. For the flame I used a seed-pod, which I had ready at hand,

and for the leaves a quivering heart, and I blent them together in the form of a brand that bursts on fire, as a branch bursts into flower," and I set them torch-wise around the margins of the green cover, green for the young life burning away.' Mr. Sanderson is not always careful to preserve this elaborate kind of connection between the book and the design of its binding: though, as he elsewhere adds, ' some subtle relation there may be, and, I think, should be, between the inside, and the outside, of a book, between its contents and ornamentation; and in my opinion, no one can produce a right design for a book, who knows nothing about the book. Still this relation is not a definite one, nor should it make itself too plainly felt in the design: in a word, it should not be allegorical or emblematical.'

Allusive ornament of this kind is rarely met with upon bindings, executed before the middle of the eighteenth century. Allusions to their owners, by way of cyphers, arms, or other heraldic devices, were, as I have shown, in common use upon gold-tooled bindings, since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Other allusive ornaments, such as the busts of Plato, Dido, or Caesar, were used in a general way; and, though not inappropriately, yet without any immediate reference to the book on which they occur. The custom of the early binders, in this regard, was to employ the styles, which were in vogue, alike upon religious, and secular, books; but such styles, during the sixteenth, and seventeenth,