From the library of Thomas Astle the little book passed into the possession of the Marquis of Buckingham, and was kept at Stowe in a beautiful Gothic room built for a library. In June, 1849, the Stowe library changed hands and became the property of Lord Ashburnham, and in 1883 it was acquired by the Trustees of the British Museum.
So the coronation book is now the property of the nation, and in company with the greater part of the Stowe library, but the Irish MSS., some of them in beautiful bindings, went to Ireland, where they are now safely kept in the library of the Royal Irish Academy.
Caxton’s styles of binding are not distinctively English in character. The reason for this is that in all probability he brought foreign stamps and styles with him when he returned from Bruges and set up in Westminster in 1477. So the few blind stamped bindings that appear to have issued from Caxton’s workshop bear the diamond-shaped spaces characteristic of foreign work, filled with impressions for cameo stamps, often triangular. Wynkyn de Worde used the same stamps.
Fig. 89.—English blind tooled bindings. Caxton. (1491.)
White deer skin bindings were used much in England in the fifteenth century; they were unornamented, and usually had small clasps. A fine copy of the Book of St. Albans, in a contemporary binding of this kind, was recently sold by Mr. Quaritch.
A curious treatise in bookbinding, the earliest known, is in the Bibliothèque Nationale; but there are two treatises by John Bagford which may be of about the same date, early in the eighteenth century. These treatises have been published by the Bibliographical Society, and are full of interesting matter. Bagford mentions inscriptions on stone, “slate books,” or diptychs, paste-boards, sewing, headbands, covers, bosses, clasps, horn books, and gives curious rules for collating, folding, and binding.
At Oxford fine blind tooled bindings were produced in considerable numbers. In the fifteenth century Theodoric Rood and Thomas Hunt did fine work, and in the seventeenth, Dominick Pinart and Edward Miles were especially prominent. The main characteristic of early Oxford bindings is the presence of small rectangular stamps closely arranged in rows.
Cambridge has also been notable among English towns for the production of fine blind tooled bindings. The main characteristic of these bindings may, perhaps, be considered to be the existence of rolls on which are variations of the Royal Tudor badges, rose, fleur-de-lys, portcullis, the castle of De Beaufort, and the pomegranate. Larger rolls have devices of monsters, and frequently the initials of the binders may be found.
In the sixteenth century the works of Garrett Godfrey, Nicholas Spierinck and John Siberch are, perhaps, most usually met with. They show the initials of their respective binders.