The all-over bindings, always small, are not uncommon; they are in black or red morocco, with colours interchanged, and are tooled in gold, with the very decorative addition of silver paint, water-colour, applied by hand here and there.
Eliot and Chapman did much excellent work in the eighteenth century and invented large ornamental borders for their bindings. These borders are not rolls, but the component parts are separately stamped. There is an excellent design with arches, a bird and a fly, and another with a globe, but all of them are admirably and effectively designed.
Except the work of Eliot and Chapman, the main English ornamentations on bookbindings during the eighteenth century were modifications of one or other of Mearne’s designs.
Fig. 118.—English gold tooled binding showing the influence of Samuel Mearne.
Eliot and Chapman bound largely for Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford, and their broad bordered style is known as the “Harleian.” The centres, in the finest examples, are left unornamented, but there are numbers of examples, especially in later work, in which the centres are filled with a diamond-shaped mass of small gold toolings. Their style has been very largely copied.
Fig. 119.—The book stamp of Robert Harley.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century English binding received a remarkable stimulus by reason of the advent of Roger Payne, a native of Windsor, who set up in London as a bookbinder about 1770.