III
In bringing forward what may be called the younger generation of binders, it is natural to speak first of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson as the source from which they have drawn much of their inspiration. His work, however, is not represented here, as it would be discourteous to go against his wishes in the matter. Whatever may be the reasons for his change of attitude in this respect, he has in the past done a great deal to introduce his work personally to the public and to explain his method and ideals. The pages of the British Bookmaker, a trade journal no longer in existence, the English Illustrated Magazine, the Fortnightly Review, testify to his former willingness that his work should be known and appreciated. He has also been one of the main supporters of the Arts and Crafts Society since its inception in 1888, and his books have been the largest contribution to binding in its occasional exhibitions. There too, as well as at the Society of Arts and elsewhere in London and the provinces, he has lectured on the craft, setting forth what he conceives to be its purport both in the limited matter of its processes and achievements and in the wider aspect of its relation to the wants and progress of society. Not long ago he published a book on Industrial Ideals, which it is interesting to compare with the collected papers by Mr. William Morris which have appeared on that and kindred subjects. Mr. Morris always held up the ideal of the Middle Ages as the goal towards which to strive. It was a time, he considered, when the processes or means by which life is lived constituted the end of life itself, without seeking for some other end external to them and often incompatible with them. This idea of ‘art being the highest function of life’ was the gospel to which he never ceased to direct the attention of his followers, and the next step—the attempted re-organization of life into conditions that enable art to realize itself—thus followed as a matter of course. As a protest against the mechanical exploitation of the arts for the sake of commercial success in its worst sense, and with the attendant evils of excessive competition, such a creed is most valuable, and has already had an important effect on the decorative arts which we trust may be permanent. But it would seem mistaken in theory and impossible of practice to attempt a reversion to mediaeval ideals with the wholly altered conditions of production, distribution and mode of living that are now part and parcel of modern life. A crusade against the existing conditions in which works of art are produced must, one would think, if its criticism is to be operative, find some way of including in its scheme of regeneration the great movements of commercial life which is one of the features of the age, and which even the most optimistic could hardly hope to stem. Here and there an individual may achieve a career somewhat in accordance with mediaeval ways, content with the limitations imposed by this ideal; but except in such isolated instances it does not seem possible to return to the practice of the past, when, as Mr. Lethaby says, ‘the designer of a gold cup made it and sold it over the counter, and the art was thrown in like a Christmas almanack.’ Here comes in the problem mentioned in a previous chapter. If, on the one hand, there is too much tendency for the designer to be occupied only in planning ornament for others to execute with the result that a certain inevitableness is nearly always wanting in the finished product, yet it may be better for a skilled workman to carry out the views of an artist rather than try and evolve variants from a few types set before him. In the frequent advocacy of a revival of past conditions which would benefit the workman, there is one point that seems always left unnoticed—a point of great importance; and that is the stringent means taken in those days to protect the purchaser also. In the scholarly little introduction called ‘Art in the Netherlands’ which Mr. W. H. James Weale contributed to the Catalogue of the picture exhibition held at Bruges in 1902, he gives a concise account of the conditions under which alone a man could become a painter in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and what held good for painting held good also for the minor arts of life. As long as the craftsman belonged to the guild of his craft, he was bound by its rules to carry out his work honestly and conscientiously, to use good materials, and to beautify it as far as he was able. The corporation arranged for the education of its members. They were apprenticed to masters responsible both for their technical efficiency and the fulfilment of their duties of citizenship. Each was bound to the other; the apprentice was to give zeal in his service and the master to impart all he knew of his trade. Once the apprenticeship at an end, the youth could work, as what would now be known as an ‘improver,’ with any master he liked, and in any town that he chose. Later on, in order to become a master, he had to present himself before the heads of the guild and give proofs of efficiency, promise obedience to the rules of the corporation, and swear to carry on his work well and honestly. Observe, however, that, although a master, he remained all his life under the control of the governing body of the corporation, the members of which could enter his shop at any moment, seize his materials if of inferior quality, confiscate them, and inflict punishment upon him. Lastly, in disputes between himself and his clients the guild was called in to decide between them. We can imagine no condition less in touch with the schemes of modern and social democracy, which so often deal exclusively with the needs of the worker and neglect those both of the employer and the consumer.
18. Bound by Douglas Cockerell.
19. Bound by Douglas Cockerell.
20. Bound by F. Sangorski and G. Sutcliffe.
In connexion with this topic, mention should be made of Mr. C. R. Ashbee’s experiment with the Guild and School of Handicraft. It began its existence at Essex House in East London, and, after fourteen years, in May 1902, removed to Chipping Campden, a small Cotswold village where the wool trade flourished during the Middle Ages and the silk trade in the eighteenth century. The aim of the Guild is set forth in a little pamphlet, distributed to visitors at the Dering Yard Gallery, 67A New Bond Street, where the work of the school is annually exhibited. It need only be said here that its object is to set a higher standard of craftsmanship by liberating the workman from the restrictions of the trade shop, and directing his independence away from purely individualistic efforts on to lines of art service to the community, and that it is conducted co-operatively, the men having an interest and a share in the concern and its government. While recognizing the importance of what a man does and the conditions under which he does it, both to himself as a citizen and to the community for which he labours, the Guild endeavours to strike a mean between the socialism that cares only for the worker and the commercialism that disregards him and his idealistic as well as material needs. The work carried out at Chipping Campden is very various, and includes furniture, metal work, jewellery, printing and binding. After Mr. Morris’s death, Mr. Ashbee acquired the plant hitherto in use at the Kelmscott Press, and began a series of books, first in a Caxton type and later from a fount of his own design. Binding followed almost as a matter of course on these issues from the Essex House Press; and in connexion with it, besides the ordinary plain-tooled leather bindings, excellent in restrained ornament, he has revived certain fifteenth-century styles for which he has a special predilection, and which include the use of enamels and wooden boards, the latter often carved in low relief. The bindings, though designed for the most part by Mr. Ashbee, are carried out by Miss Power, who is in the main responsible for them. These books raise again the question whether such deviations from the ordinary paths are legitimate attempts to enlarge the limitations of the binder’s art. The ultimate serviceable use of a book should ever be kept in sight, and must in the end determine the matter. Leather and vellum, tooled with a few fine stamps, disposed with taste and restraint, will always remain the best coverings for books, because they are unobtrusive and can be pleasantly handled and easily disposed. Work that is embossed, enamelled, carved, or even too decorative in colour for unlimited production, can only be desired as occasional specimens of interest in themselves, and as exceptions proving the rule.
21. Bound by de Sauty.
22. Bound by de Sauty.
Mr. Douglas Cockerell, a pupil of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, has written the first of a new series of technical handbooks on the artistic crafts which is a model of the kind and should prove the text-book for all future binders. It is, no doubt, the outcome of some years’ teaching at the County Council School in Regent Street, where, for many years, he did excellent work in training the younger men to an intelligent interest in the various processes of their craft. No craft can be well learned anywhere but in a practical workshop; and he considers the value of class teaching to be limited to helping those engaged in a trade, and that such help is of great value in giving higher ideals and encouraging experimental work. From the beginning Mr. Cockerell has been specially interested in the repairing of books and in the preservation of old covers, and has given his pupils some training in all that relates to the care of books. There are numbers of old bindings that after four hundred years of wear and tear are still capable of fulfilling their original purpose of protection, with a little help from modern hands. To give a new lease of life to fine old books is really of far greater importance than the continual production of new and pretty bindings. Mr. Cockerell’s original work is well known both here and in America, and there is luckily a great deal of it that is simple as well as highly decorated. It is comparatively easy to do the latter; but a plain binding that yet has the stamp of the maker’s individuality is a very exceptional achievement, and in work of that character Mr. Cockerell is unsurpassed.
23. Bound by Miss Adams.
Mr. F. Sangorski and Mr. G. Sutcliffe, who were formerly with Mr. Cockerell, have started a bindery of their own, and are engaged both in teaching and doing varied work of a pleasant character. Trained in the methods of Mr. Cockerell at the Technical School at 316 Regent Street, Mr. Sutcliffe now controls the teaching for the County Council at its branch establishment in Camberwell, and Mr. Sangorski that of the Northampton Institute in Clerkenwell.
Mr. de Sauty is another young binder, and his work is of considerable merit. His inlays are distinguished for the taste shown in the association of colours, and his finishing has some of the brilliant qualities of the French school, seen particularly in the finely studded tooling of which he seems particularly fond. He has now the post formerly held by Mr. Cockerell.
24. Bound by Miss MacColl.
25. Bound by Miss Alice Pattinson.
In concluding this sketch of Bookbinding in England as it appears to-day, we must not omit to speak of the entrance recently effected by women in many of the handicrafts, and notably in the one under consideration. Quite a number are now trying to make a livelihood out of bookbinding; and possibly, therefore, a few words less of criticism than of counsel may not come amiss. It may be said that there are certain conditions absolutely necessary for successful achievement, quite apart from financial gain, which is another matter. The first of these is a workshop training, which, though impossible some years ago, is now no longer so within certain limits; that is to say, there are one or two binders with small workshops who undertake to give women systematic teaching for a limited time. In a workshop they will see a variety of work that they will miss if taught privately, and they will learn the habit of rapid and dexterous manipulation of tools and materials without which it is impossible to work quickly enough for a profitable return upon the outlay. A second most necessary qualification is that they should have the physique for standing and working at a bench during the hours of an ordinary working day. For binding is not like other less specialized crafts that can be taken up at odd hours and laid aside with equal facility, but needs concentration of mind as well as sureness of hand. A third element in the desirable equipment is a certain faculty of imagination controlled by right feeling or good taste, so that the results of workmanship have the note of individuality without eccentricity. In art as in life, personality is the one thing needful, and we may fairly look to women to show the realization of it that can hardly be expected from those working in the stereotyped grooves of production.
26. Bound by Miss Maude Nathan.
And what is to be said of binding as a means of livelihood? Experience has shown that properly trained women can do as good binding as men, though not upon large and heavy work, and if they do it well enough some of them can earn a fair wage, while if they fail to reach a high standard they had better for all practical purposes let it alone. But to hold out any inducement to the woman who really needs bread-and-butter to take up binding as a lucrative employment, as is done in some quarters, should be characterized with the severity it deserves. Many women need but an addition to their income, and to such, if they are willing to incur the expense of training and plant, and if they realize the experimental nature of the undertaking, binding may be recommended as a sufficiently pleasant occupation. Whether financial success comes, however, or not, must depend upon the amount of work turned out, on the originality and finish with which it is executed, and last, but not least in importance, on the finding of a market. Booksellers are now so overstocked with so-called artistic bindings of moderate merit, and it may also be said of moderate price, that they are not eager to accept those of average quality at the more than average price that many women expect their work to command. A market can always be found for the best of everything; but as far as bindings are concerned it is certainly at present overstocked with the second best, and attention may well be directed to other branches of decorative work. There are more than enough half-trained workers, both male and female; and it would be a most undesirable result of what in itself is so eminently desirable—the opening of the artistic crafts to women—if there were to be a great deal of inferior work put into circulation obviously from the hands of those who have never left the amateur stage. Women make a mistake, too, in specializing in the production of decorated bindings. It is no doubt a right principle to take the everyday things of life and decorate them rather than invent useless ones for the purpose. It has, however, this disadvantage, that it has now become almost impossible to get any of these homely things made with the severe simplicity of mere purposefulness. If one does not want the useless things, at least one need not buy them; but it seems hard that the necessary ones should become the corpora vile on which the professed decorator exercises his too frequently disordered imagination. One is unfortunately as little likely nowadays to find a plain pepper-pot as one is to find a bound book on which there is not some flower sprawling over its cover in a meaningless attempt to be Japanese in sentiment. We want to get rid of the affectation of contorted pattern and have more of the plain things of life plainly made. As far as bindings are concerned, in addition to this much-desired simplicity, there is, as has been said above, far more important and useful work to be done than pattern making, in the repairing and preserving of old books and records. An instance of this may be seen at the present moment in an extensive matter undertaken by Mr. Cockerell for the Middlesex County Council. A large number of their ancient Sessions Books, many of them crumbling to pieces, are being put in a condition for reference, the whole business of mending being done by women under the direction formerly of Miss Wilkinson and now of Miss M‘Ewan both pupils of Mr. Cockerell. Again, many more women might adventure starting a business in the country or in a provincial town. In America there is hardly a centre where there is any interest shown in books which has not a woman binder who has probably been trained by Mr. Cobden-Sanderson. We are glad to notice that Miss Adams has a bindery at Broadway, that Miss Paget is at Farnham doing good honest work of a comparatively simple nature, and that Miss Philpot has established herself at Cambridge. Space forbids more than a few illustrations from the work of women binders, numerous as they now are. Miss MacColl’s books have for some time excited interest both on account of the character of her brother’s designs and her manner of executing them by means of a small wheel, which is an attempt to overcome the restrictions of the finisher’s ordinary methods. Miss Nathan, Miss Pattinson and Miss Stebbing are all doing well-considered and tasteful work on sound principles. Of those at work in Scotland we need only mention the names of Miss Jessie King, Miss McClure and Miss Jane F. Hamilton, Miss Alice Gairdner and Miss Agnes Watson of Glasgow, as their work has recently been specially dealt with in a paper by Mr. Lewis F. Day.
27. Bound by Miss Woolrich.
28. Bound by Miss Philpot.
In conclusion, it is necessary to keep in mind that binding is but one of the sub-crafts that contribute to the production of books. Of late each of these has pursued its own often faulty ideals regardless of its relationship to the other contributory crafts. The paper-maker, the printer and the binder would be more likely to work intelligently if they had some mutual knowledge of each other’s needs and limitations. The habit has been growing for some time of looking on the binding of a book as the most important thing in connexion with it. But the binder of the future, if his work is to be an effective contribution to decorative art, must look on the book itself as the unit of interest, the thought, embodied in typography and illustration, constituting a whole to which in the decorated cover he adds, not an essential part, but as it were the crown or coping-stone.
29. Bound by Marius Michel.