About 1500 a particular pair of panels came into great vogue amongst the bookbinders. One had upon it the arms of England, supported by the dragon and greyhound, the other the Tudor rose supported by angels. Round the rose runs a ribbon with the motto:—
Haec rosa virtutis de celo missa sereno
Eternum florens regia sceptra feret.
In the top corners we generally find shields with the arms of St George and of London, while in the base below the rose or shield occur the initials and marks of the binders. This general use of the royal arms together with the use of the arms of London points, I think, to some trade guild to which these binders belonged. Foreigners, though they might still use the royal arms, do not use the City arms, putting something else in the place, sometimes the French shield, sometimes merely an unmeaning ornament. It is a very popular but erroneous opinion held by a great many people that these bindings with the royal arms were produced for the king, Henry VII or Henry VIII as the case may be. It would be just as reasonable to imagine that all the shops with the royal arms over the door were private residences of the king. Of course, the fiction is kept up in order to increase the price of the books; “from the library of Henry VIII” looks well in catalogues. Even in the sumptuous work recently issued on the historic bookbindings in the Royal Library at Windsor this mistake has been repeated.
A very large number of these bindings exist, all very similar; but unfortunately, although in many cases they bear the binder’s initials and mark, we cannot discover his name; on the other hand again we know the names of many binders, but we cannot identify their work; the mere fact that the initials on a binding agree with the initials of a binder’s name does not of necessity determine that the particular binding was produced by that binder; a good deal more proof is necessary.
A certain number of these bindings have been settled as the work of a certain man in another way. When the binder was a printer, or a stationer of sufficient importance to have books printed for him, then we can identify the mark on his bindings by means of the mark used in the books.
For instance, to take an early example. We have bindings by Julian Notary, the printer, which bear his initials and mark, and the mark, of course, is the same as the one he uses in his books, while in them his name is in full. So again the work of Henry Jacobi, an important London stationer of the early sixteenth century, was traced by the mark which he uses in some of his books.
We know the names of a considerable number of early binders from the registers of the grant of letters of denization and other manuscript sources, but unfortunately we have no link between them and the bindings. In this country it was not necessary, as it was in some parts of the Low Countries, to register the design of a binding, and though many of the Low Country bindings look the same, you will find on examination that the detail varies and each design was protected.
The binder who is best known in connexion with these stamped bindings is John Reynes, whose work is by far the most commonly met with, and who is almost the only producer of stamped bindings mentioned by any early bibliographer. His best-known panel is called “Redemptoris mundi arma,” and consists of all the emblems of the Passion arranged in a heraldic manner upon a shield. Reynes was certainly employed as a binder by Henry VIII, as we know from early accounts, and so far as I have seen all the copies of the king’s Assertio septem sacramentorum, which remain in their original binding, were bound by him. It is fortunate that Reynes put his mark and name in one printed book, otherwise we should not have been able to identify him as the binder. He had also two very well-executed panels, one depicting the fight of St George and the dragon, and the other the Baptism of Christ.
The period during which these panel stamps were produced in England was roughly the forty years from 1493 to 1534. The passing of the Act against foreign workmen in the latter year had no doubt a good deal to do with the falling off of the work, but the invention of a binding tool called a roll seems to have finally put an end to the use of the panel. The roll was a tool made in the form of a wheel, which saved a very great deal of time in ornamenting the sides of a book, and which was used very widely in England during the sixteenth century. At first when the roll was broad and well cut, as the earliest examples almost always were, it produced a very satisfactory appearance, but it soon became narrower and more finely cut, and therefore showing to much less advantage on the side of a large book, and finally about the end of the century its use was almost entirely given up.