Early Printed Books

by E. Gordon Duff

The bookbinding of the Low Countries was always fine; but the great improvement which was first introduced there was the use of the panel stamp, invented about the middle of the fourteenth century. It was not till after the introduction of printing, and when books were issued of a small size, that this invention became of real importance; but at the end of the fifteenth and during the first twenty or thirty years of the sixteenth centuries, innumerable bindings of this class were produced. The majority of Netherlandish panels are not pictorial, but are ornamented with a double row of fabulous beasts and birds in circles of foliage; round this runs a legend, very often containing the binder’s name. Discere ne cesses cura sapientia crescit Martinus Vulcanius is on one binding; on another, Ob laudem christi hunc librum recte ligavi Johannes Bollcaert. Some binders give not only their name, but the place also—Johannes de Wowdix Antwerpie me fecit. Though there are few pictorial Flemish panels, some of these are not without interest. A number were produced by a binder whose initials are I. P., and who was connected in some way with the Augustinian Monastery of St. Gregory and St. Martin at Louvain. One which contains a medallion head, a small figure of Cleopatra, and a good deal of arabesque ornament of foliage, is his best; while another panel, large enough for a quarto book, with a border of chain work, and his initials on a shield in the centre, is his rarest, and is in its way very artistic. At a still later date the binders in the Low Countries produced some panels, which, though still pictorial, show how rapidly the art was being debased. The designs are ill drawn, and the inscription, originally an important part, has come to be degraded into a piece of ornamentation without meaning, cut by the engraver purely with that object, ignoring the individual letters or legibility of the inscription, and anxious only that the finish which an inscription gave to his models might be apparent to the eye in his copies. A similar debasement is not uncommon in late English examples.

Italian and Spanish binding, though interesting in itself, affords little information as regards printers or stationers. No bindings were signed, and the designs are in all cases so similar as to afford little clue to the place from which they originally came.

The earliest English bindings are extremely interesting and distinctive. Caxton, our first printer, always bound his books in leather, never making use of vellum or pigskin. Bindings of wrapping vellum, which he is erroneously said to have made, were not used in England till a very much later period. His bindings, if ornamented at all, were ruled with diagonal lines, and in the centre of each compartment thus formed a die was impressed. A border was often placed round the side, formed from triangular stamps pointing alternately inwards and outwards, these stamps containing the figure of a dragon.

The number of bindings which can with certainty be ascribed to Caxton is necessarily small. We can, in the first place, only take those on books printed by him, and which contain, besides this, distinct evidence, from the end-papers or fragments used in the binding, that they came from his workshop. Under this class we can place the cover of the Boethius, discovered in the Grammar School at St. Alban’s, an edition of the Festial in the British Museum, and a few others; and from the stamps used on these we can identify others which have no other indication. It must always be remembered that these dies were almost indestructible, and therefore were often in use long after their original owner was dead. The Oxford bindings, though very English in design, are stamped with dies Netherlandish in origin. An ornament of three small circles arranged in a triangle occurs very often on these bindings, and is a very distinctive one. These bindings when in their original condition are almost always, like those of the Netherlands, lined with vellum, and have vellum guards to the centre of the quires. The only two copies known of one of Caxton’s indulgences were found pasted face downwards, used to line the binding of a Netherland printed book. Another binder, about the end of the fifteenth century, whose initials, G. W., and mark occur on a shield-shaped die, used always printed matter to line his bindings and make end-papers, though they were not necessarily on vellum. All the leaves now known of the Machlinia Horæ ad usum Sarum whose provenance can be ascertained, came from bindings by this man, scattered about in different parts of the country. It is not known in what part of the country he worked.

Trade bindings between 1500 and 1540 form an important series. All small books were stamped with a panel on the sides, and these often have the initials or mark of the binder. Pynson used a stamp with his device upon it; many others used two panels, with the arms of England on one side and the Tudor rose on the other, both with supporters. On the majority of these panels, below the rose, is the binder’s mark and initials; on the other side, below the shield, his initials alone. Not many of these binders’ or stationers’ names have been discovered, and there are few materials to enable us to do so. Pynson and Julian Notary’s bindings have the same devices as they used in their books, and some of Jacobi’s have the mark which occurs on the title-page to the Lyndewode of 1506 printed for him. Reynes’ various marks are well known and of common occurrence.

James Hyatt.
PYNSON BINDING.

Without a distinguishing mark of some kind beyond the initials, it is hopeless to try and ascribe bindings to particular stationers, though a careful examination of the style or evidences as to early ownership may help us to determine with some accuracy the country at least from which the binding comes. Even a study of the forwarding of a binding is of great help. The method of sewing and putting on headbands is quite different in Italian books from those of other countries. Again, all small books were, as a rule, sewn on three bands in England and Normandy; in other countries the rule is for them to have four. The leather gives sometimes a clue, e.g. in parts of France sheepskin was used in place of calf. Cambridge bindings can often be recognised from a peculiar red colouring of the leather. So little has been done as yet to classify the different peculiarities of style or work in these early bindings, that it can hardly be expected that much should be known about them; at present the study is still in its infancy, but there is no doubt that, if persevered in, it will have valuable results. These bindings were for the most part produced, certainly in the sixteenth century, by men who were not printers, and whose names we have consequently few chances of discovering. All that can therefore be done is to classify them according to style, and according to such extraneous information as may be available. It is useless with no other information to attempt to assign initials.

But while the bindings and the designs afford valuable information, the materials employed in making the bindings are also of great importance. The boards were often made of refuse printed leaves pasted together, and were always lined, after the binding was completed, with leaves of paper or vellum, printed or manuscript. On this subject I cannot do better than give the following quotation from one of Henry Bradshaw’s Memoranda, No. 5, Notice of the Bristol fragment of the Fifteen Oes:—

‘After all that has been said, it cannot be any matter of wonder that the fragments used for lining the boards of old books should have an interest for those who make a study of the methods and habits of our early printers, with a view to the solution of some of many difficulties still remaining unsettled in the history of printing. I have for many years tried to draw the attention of librarians and others to the evidence which may be gleaned from a careful study from these fragments, and if done systematically and intelligently, it ceases to be mere antiquarian pottering or aimless waste of time. I have elsewhere drawn attention[40] to the distinction to be observed between what may be called respectively binder’s waste and printer’s waste. When speaking of fragments of books as binder’s waste, I mean books which have been in circulation, and have been thrown away as useless. The value of such fragments is principally in themselves. They may or may not be of interest. But by printer’s waste I mean ... waste, proof, or cancelled sheets in the printer’s office, which, in the early days when printers were their own bookbinders, would be used by the bookbinder for lining the boards, or the centres of quires, of books bound in the same office where they were printed. In this way such fragments have a value beyond themselves, as they enable us to infer almost with certainty that such books are specimens of the binding executed in the office of the printer who printed them; and thus, once seeing the style adopted and the actual designs used, we are able to recognise the same binder’s work, even when there are none of these waste sheets to lead us to the same conclusion.’