Account book bindings are peculiar and very strong. They have been used for a long time in banks and business houses, and are purely utilitarian and comparatively quite modern.
Strong sound paper is an essential for account books. The sewing is done in the flexible style, but on broad flat bands of vellum or leather instead of raised bands of hemp. The ends of the bands are fixed between two boards, pairs of which form the boards of the book. The space between the edge of the back of the book where the bands leave it and their inset to the boards is not drawn close, but a narrow margin is left so that a perfectly flexible and strong leather joint is left. In small books this peculiarity is known as a French joint, and it obviates the common failing of sides falling away from otherwise sound bindings along the joint-line at the back.
The back of account book bindings looks very strong, but it is really nothing of the sort. It is only a show back, to take the lettering and cover up the real joints, which are securely laid along the edges of the boards.
When an account book is opened it “sets up” so that it can be easily read right down to the sewing at the back. This is of great value in many cases other than the keeping of accounts, and it is the only advantage of the common, but weak, bindings with “hollow” backs. But there is no doubt that a modified form of account book binding, with a French joint, is a style which might with advantage be studied by our modern art binders.
The study of end papers is to some extent necessary for the true judgment of the work of certain binders. For instance, Thomas Berthelet normally used white end papers, Samuel Mearne used red marbled end papers, and Roger Payne used purple or pink end papers. The Italian binder who worked for Grolier used vellum for end paper, and so on. The knowledge of such details is useful in detecting frauds, as they are apt to be under-estimated in importance by a forger.
Of all end papers the most common is marbled paper, and one of the most curious usages of it is when a beautiful and delicate French binding has a charmingly gold tooled doublure of splendid leather faced by a wretched leaf of marbled paper.
The usual marbled paper is made by means of a bed of size on which colour is sprinkled by a brush, the colour lies on the top of the size and is moved about by means of a wide-toothed comb or a pin or anything that is handy, until the resulting pattern is to the satisfaction of the operator. Then the paper is laid down in the size, and when raised up it brings all the colour with it. It is generally easy to see how the pattern has been made by looking at the paper, and it will be found that the most usual forms have been made by the use of a broad-toothed comb. I should think that the process might well have produced something better than it ever has; undoubtedly if J. M. Whistler had ever known of it we should have had some remarkable results.
Marbling is probably of Oriental origin, and was most likely first practised in Germany, so far as Europe is concerned. It was certainly understood in Nuremberg in 1599, as specimens made there are to be seen in the Album Amicorum, of J. Cellarius, of that date. It is, of course, obviously capable of endless modifications, and of late years some very delicately and prettily coloured end papers have been made.
More or less in continuation of the mediæval fashion of covering book-bindings with richly-worked metal overlays, we find, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries particularly, numbers of small books bound in metal or with metal enrichments in the form of centrepieces and cornerpieces. Clasps occur all along, and although I hardly think that they have followed out any very marked line of development, I expect that some day a careful study will be made of them, when some such development may possibly be discovered. No student, as far as I am aware, has made any attempt to classify book clasps.
