Modern bookbindings: Their design and decoration

by S. T. Prideaux

Up to, roughly speaking, about 1825, books of the type of dictionaries, classics, school books, and books of reference were mostly bound in roan or sprinkled sheep; while books of history, poetry, and novels were issued in drab or olive-coloured paper boards, with a printed label pasted on the back, or the full title printed on the back and sides, as in the case of Walker’s British Classics (1818). It was very rarely that anything but a dull colour was used, though Whittingham’s British Poets (1816) had a dark Venetian red paper, and the class of literature known in those days as gift-books or annuals occasionally appeared in vellum-coloured paper, stamped with gold. The more valuable of these, however, filled with choice steel engravings and prepared for the Christmas market, were bound in morocco and silk, and issued under such titles as The Keepsake, The Bijou, Friendship’s Offering, The Book of Beauty, The Landscape Annual, and so on. Such books commanded a large sale, even in those days; and a writer on the subject, in the first volume of The Bookbinder, mentions Finden’s Tableaux, two thousand imperial quarto volumes, full bound in best morocco, gilt. The paper-covered boards, which clothed the larger number of the books of that time, had a way of cracking at the hinge, and so becoming disconnected, a difficulty which was got over about 1822 by covering the back with calico or cloth. As an illustration of this step we may take Scott’s Waverley Novels. The Novels and Tales, in twelve volumes, appeared in 1819 in pink paper, with white labels; the Historical Romances, in six volumes, followed in 1822, in blue paper, with pink cloth back and white paper labels; and Novels and Romances in 1824 in the same fashion. The next step was that of covering books entirely with cloth, introduced by Mr. Archibald Leighton, one of the most enterprising and successful of modern binders, whose business capacity and energy secured for him the patronage of the chief publishers of the day. He bound for Murray, Pickering, Colbourn, Tilt, Charles Knight, Moon, Boys, Graves, and many others, and died prematurely in 1841, leaving to his family a well-established business which, under a somewhat varying character, has remained in their hands up to the present time.

In the Bookseller of July 4, 1881, there is an interesting account, by Mr. Robert Leighton, of the invention of bookbinders’ cloth by his father, and of how the subsequent embossing of it came about. The exact date of cloth binding he is not able to state, but says that he has in his library a volume, presented to his father by the author, bound in smooth, red cloth, with a paper label. The publishers’ names are Lackington, Hughes, Harding and Lepard, and the date on the title-page is 1822. There is every reason to believe that it is one of a number similarly bound in that year. In those days the white calico was bought in London, sent to the dyers to be dyed, and thence to Mr. John Southgate, of 3 Crown Court, Old Change, to be stiffened and calendered. The embossing of bookbinders’ cloth was suggested by Mr. Archibald Leighton to the late Mr. de la Rue, and was carried out so admirably by him, with the appliances he possessed for embossing paper, that his process remains still comparatively unaltered. The desired pattern was engraved on a gun-metal cylinder, and transferred in reverse to one made of compressed paper, strung upon an iron spindle and turned in the lathe to the exact circumference of the gun-metal one, and these two being worked together in a machine, and the pattern transferred from one to the other, the cloth was passed between them and received the impress of the pattern engraved on the metal cylinder.

52. Bound by Canape.

In this way the whole of the cloth used by Messrs. Leighton was for many years embossed upon their own premises. The cylinders were only fourteen or fifteen inches wide, and the machine was turned by manual labour and heated by red-hot irons, which were placed in the gun-metal cylinder and replaced by others when cold. In those days it was customary to engrave special cylinders for books of importance, and you may still occasionally meet with stray volumes of The Penny Cyclopædia or Knight’s Pictorial England, and such like popular works, with embossed cloth covers so prepared. Mr. Pickering was the first person for whom Mr. Leighton bound books in cloth, and either his ‘Aldine Poets’ or the ‘Diamond Classics’ were the first books on which it was put. The first person to undertake the embossing of bookbinders’ cloth on cylinders a yard wide was Mr. Law, of Monkwell Street, and for years he embossed all the cloth sold by Mr. James Leonard Wilson, of St. John Street, who had followed Mr. Leighton’s methods in the preparation and sale of the cloth. Mr. Wilson sold his business to Messrs. Duffield, who established a manufactory of bookbinders’ cloth at Hoxton, and so improved it that for years he held practically a monopoly of its output. The exact period when gold-stamping was first applied to cloth is clearly marked by the publication of Lord Byron’s life and works, in seventeen volumes, by Mr. John Murray, of Albemarle Street. The volumes were published monthly, and had a sale of about 20,000. They were bound in green cloth, and the first volume was issued in 1832, with a green paper label on the back, matching the cloth in colour, on which was printed in bronze the title and a coronet; on the second and succeeding volumes the paper label was dispensed with, and the coronet and title were stamped in gold upon the cloth itself. Mr. Henry George Bohn, in a letter addressed to the Art Journal, says that his father, John Henry Bohn, a German bookbinder, established about 1795 in Frith Street, Soho, had a special reputation for gilding on the silk linings of books, as well as calf-graining, tree-marbling, and other special processes, all of which he himself made acquaintance with when a boy. ‘In later life,’ he continues, ‘the knowledge of the peculiar dressing used for gilding on silk enabled me to communicate to Mr. Leighton the means of getting cloth prepared so as to take gilding by heated machinery at the rolling or stamping press, which a leading trade firm said was impracticable. The process, however, after a few weeks’ experiments conducted by the late Mr. James Leonard Wilson, was successfully accomplished; and Mr. Leighton thereupon wrote to me triumphantly announcing the fact, and undertaking in consequence to bind in gilt cloth several thousand volumes at half the price I should previously have had to pay, on account of the necessity of having to add leather backs for taking the gold by hand tooling. The book was Martin and Westall’s Bible Points, which I brought out in 1832. What to me at the time seemed an accomplishment of little moment has now become of such importance to cloth binders that, could the discovery have been patented, it would have yielded a considerable income.’

53. Bound by Canape.

This Mr. Robert Leighton, who thus wrote of his father’s invention, was himself the pioneer in the use of steam machinery in bookbinding, and he adopted in his own business nearly all the machinery which has since become indispensable to the wholesale binder. He was also the first to use steam power for blocking in gold; the first to use aluminium, and black and coloured inks for cloth cases, examples of which he showed in the exhibition of 1851. He had a great reputation for the designs of his cloth bindings, which he devised in conjunction with his artist cousin, John Leighton, known as Luke Limner, a good instance being the pleasant and appropriate covers for Mrs. Jameson’s Legends of the Madonna and Legends of the Monastic Orders. The two Leightons, father and son, thus inaugurated and furthered the great revolution in the art of edition binding associated with the employment for the purpose of specially prepared cloth, and its decoration by means of steam-blocking in gold and colours. It was natural that such an invention should lead to abuse; and in a short time, unfortunately, there was so much gilt ornament that a strong reaction took place, and, while cloth as a material for the cover continued to be used, it was either left plain or had a single bordering line in gold, with or without the title likewise in gold upon the sides. More recently colour printing upon cloth has been revived with excellent results in many cases, especially where an artist who understands the power and limitations of the blocking process has been employed upon the designs. Many of these are entirely without gold, and give representations of scenes taken from the books with excellent impressionist effect. One may mention as instances in England the novels published by Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, such as In Our Town, Her Majesty’s Minister, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, The Hebrew, and many others of the same firm, one of whose members gives special attention to the successful production of cloth covers. The bindings of books issued by Mr. John Lane are also frequently very successful, though it is not so easy to keep in touch with the output of American work on similar lines. Messrs. Puttenham have produced some excellent examples of taste in colour printing, notably The Romance of the Colorado River, Puerto Rican, Lights of Childhood, and The Romance of the Renaissance Chateaux, in which the castle of Langeais is shown in black on a grey cloth. The same house publish likewise one or two books bound in plain cloth, with a photographic print on the cover, which seemed a pleasant variation not in use over here; while Twenty-Six Historic Ships, also issued by them, is a most satisfactory example of blocking with white foil on a blue ground. At Messrs. Appleton’s are to be found several specimens of bookbinders’ cloth which do not come over here at all. We have but little variety in the nature and preparation of our cloth; while in America it is treated in many different ways, which naturally give very varied results in the blocking-press.

Messrs. Gay and Bird issue some effective colour printing on In South Africa with Buller, and an attractive example of a loch and mountain scene in four sombre colours on The Story of Gösta Berling. There is little doubt that the most artistic effects are got by using very few colours in harmony rather than in contrast with the cloth. Gold is much more sparingly used for cloth work than formerly, and with far better taste. Paris in its Splendour, published by the last-named firm, is an interesting example of the different effects that can be obtained from the gold by varieties of matted ground in the block; while in Walden, issued by Messrs. Houghton and Mifflin, the cloth of the cover represents the design, the gold being confined to suggesting the background, with a decidedly original result.

This, then, is the position of cloth binding at the present time as shown by the leading publishers’ work. The technical processes are probably as perfect as such things can be, the drawings are frequently the work of artists, there is far more restraint than formerly both in the matter of design and the employment of colour, while the taste in colour schemes is often as good as possible, and a great advance on that shown a decade or two ago. We do not think that in that special branch of edition bindings there is any great advance to be made or novelty to be assumed, though no doubt we may expect a wider diffusion of the taste that we have noted in the best work and an increasingly small number of book covers inferior in design, colour, and general effect.