BOOK-BINDING.
There is a familiar anecdote of the ingenious author of ‘The Seasons,’ ‘Rule, Britannia,’ and other excellent pieces, that when he sent a well-bound copy of his poems to his father, who had always regarded him, not altogether unjustly, as a ‘feckless loon,’ that canny Scot handled the volume with unfeigned delight, and believing that his son had bound it, cried out admiringly, ‘Who would have thought our Jamie could have done the like of this?’ This particular copy has not been preserved, and it is therefore impossible for us to determine how far its bibliopegic merits justified the rapture of the elder Thomson, whose standard is not likely to have been a high one. Indeed, despite his rusticity, he was probably a better judge of poetry than of binding.
This noble craft has revived in our midst. Twenty years ago, in ordinary circles, the book-binder was a miscreant who, by the aid of a sharp knife, a hideous assortment of calf-skins and of marbled papers, bound your books for you by slaughtering their margins, stripping their sides, and returning them upon your hands cropped and in prison garb, and so lettered as to tell no man what they were. And the worst of it was we received them with complacency, gave them harbourage upon our shelves, and only grumbled that the price was so high as four shillings a volume. Those days are over. Yet it is well to be occasionally reminded of the rock from whence we were hewn, and the pit out of which we were digged. I have now lying before me a first edition of the essays of Elia which, being in boards, I allowed to be treated by a provincial called Shimmin, in the sixties. I remember its coming home, and how I thought it was all right. Infancy was no excuse for such ignorance.
The second-hand booksellers, a race of men for whom I have the greatest respect, are to blame in this matter. They did not play the part they might have been expected to do. They gave no prominence in their catalogues, which are the true text-books of literature, to specimens of book-binding, nor did they instil into the minds of their young customers the rudiments of taste. Worse than this, some of the second-hand booksellers in the country were themselves binders, and, for the most part, infamous ones.
One did, indeed, sometimes hear of Roger Payne and of the Harleian style, but dimly, and as a thing of no moment, nor were our eyes ever regaled in booksellers’ catalogues with facsimiles of the exquisite bindings of the French and English masters. Nor was it until we went further afield, and became acquainted with the booksellers of Paris, that this new world swam into our ken. It was a great day when a stray copy of a ‘Bulletin Mensuel’ of Damascene Morgand, the famous bookseller in the Passage des Panoramas, fell into the hands of a mere country book-buyer. Then he knew how brutally he had been deceived—then he looked with loathing on his truncated tomes and their abominable devices. The first really bound book I ever saw was a copy of the works of Pierre de Ronsard bearing the devices of Marguerite de Valois. The price was so far beyond my resources that I left the shop without a touch of envy, but the scales had fallen from my eyes, and I walked down the Passage des Panoramas as one who had awakened from a dream.
Nowadays it is quite different. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition did much, and the second-hand booksellers, in quite ordinary places, are beginning to give in their catalogues reproductions of noble specimens. Nothing else is required. To see is enough. There was recently, as most people know, a wonderful exhibition of bindings to be seen at the Burlington Fine Art Club, but what is not so generally known is that the Club has published a magnificent catalogue of the contents of that Exhibition, with no less than 114 plates reproducing with the greatest possible skill and delicacy some of the finest specimens. Mr. Gordon Duff, who is credited with a profounder knowledge of pigskins than any living man, has contributed a short preface to the volume, whilst Miss Prideaux, herself a binder of great merit, has written a general introduction, in which she traces the history of the craft, and duly records the names of the most famous binders of Europe. A more fascinating picture-book cannot be imagined, for to the charm of colour and design is added all the feeling which only a book can impart. Such a book as this marks an epoch, and ought to be the beginning of a time when even sale-catalogues shall take pains to be splendid.
When the library of the Baron de Lacarelle came to be dispersed at his death a few years ago, the auctioneer’s catalogue, as issued by Charles Porquet, of the Quai Voltaire, made a volume which, wherever it goes, imparts dignity to human endeavour, and consecrates a virtuoso’s whim. It was but a small library—only 540 books—and to call it well selected would be to abuse a term one has learnt to connect with Major Ponto’s library in ‘The Book of Snobs.’ ‘My library’s small,’ says Ponto, with the most amazing impudence, ‘but well selected, my boy, well selected. I have been reading the History of England all the morning.’ He could not have done this in the Baron’s library.
As you turn the pages of this glorified catalogue, his treasures seem to lie before you—you can almost stroke them. A devoted friend, de la Société des Bibliophiles français, contributes an ecstatic sketch of the Baron’s character, and tells us of him how he employed in his hunt after a book infinite artifice, and called to his aid all the resources of learned strategy—‘poussant ses approches et manœuvrant, autour de la place, avec la prudence et le génie d’un tacticien consommé, si bien que le malheureux libraire, enlacé, fasciné, hypnotisé par ce grand charmeur, finissait presque toujours par capituler et se rendre.’ This great man only believed in one modern binder: Trautz. The others did not exist for him. ‘Cherchez-vous à le convertir? Il restait incorruptible et répétait invariablement, avec cet esprit charmant, mais un peu railleur, dont il avait le privilège, que s’il était jamais damné, son enfer serait de remuer une reliure de Capé ou de Lortic!’
It is all very splendid and costly and grand, yet still from time to time,
‘From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne,’
there comes the thought of Charles Lamb amidst ‘the ragged veterans’ he loved so well, and then in an instant a reaction sets in, and we almost hate this sumptuous Baron.
Thomson’s “Seasons,” again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn and dog’s-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old “circulating library” “Tom Jones” or the “Vicar of Wakefield”!’ Thus far, Elia.
Let us admit that the highest and noblest joys are those which are in widest commonalty spread, and that accordingly the clay pipe of the artisan is more truly emotional than the most marvellous meerschaum to be seen in the shop-windows of Vienna—still, the collector has his joys and his uses, his triumphant moments, his hours of depression, and, if only he publishes a catalogue, may be pronounced in small type a benefactor of the human race.