Samuel Mearne was appointed royal binder to Charles II., and he was the second great binder in England. Mearne bound the majority of his books in the same beautiful red leather that I have already mentioned as being used for some late bindings belonging to Charles I., and the same coat-of-arms occurs on some of those bound for Charles II. This red leather was probably dyed with cochineal. Before this no red leather was used to any extent in England. Brown, olive, blue, and black were all common, but not red. The ordinary bindings made by Mearne for Charles II. were simply and tastefully ornamented with rectangular lines having the royal initials at the corners, but others are more elaborate.
We owe a national design to Mearne’s inventive genius, and it is known as the “Cottage” style. The gold-lined parallelogram is the starting point, and the upper and lower lines are broken outwards into a gable form. From this starting point Mearne developed his further decoration with supreme success, until indeed he succeeded in producing some of the finest bindings for large books that have ever been made. Not only that, Mearne’s style and even the details of his stamps continue until the present time, and the Bible on which King Edward VII. took the coronation oath was bound in the Cottage style. No style has ever lasted so long, not only in England, but in any other country.
There was yet another beautiful style invented by Mearne. It is not so real a design as the Cottage, as it partakes to some extent of the principle of the semis, inasmuch as symmetrical repetition is an integral part of it. There is no doubt that Mearne saw and admired the work of the great French contemporary binder Le Gascon, and from him he borrowed several ideas, among them that of the pointille or dotted stamps, and also that of the interlacing fillets with interstitial spaces filled with small gold tooling.
Fig. 116.—English gold tooled binding by Samuel Mearne. Made for Charles II.
The radical change that Mearne made with regard to Le Gascon’s interlacing fillets was that he made them up by using successive impressions of a two-horned curve instead of a continuous fillet or ribbon. Although at first sight there would seem to be no connection between one of these “all over” bindings by Mearne and one of Le Gascon’s exquisite little interlacings, I think the connection is undoubted.
Fig. 117.—English gold-tooled binding in “all-over” style, by Samuel Mearne.