Modern bookbindings: Their design and decoration

by S. T. Prideaux

The address of the Oxford University Press is still Amen Corner, E.C., and not St. Dunstan’s House, Fetter Lane, as stated on page [35].

MODERN ENGLISH BINDING

I

Within the last five-and-twenty years there has been a marked revival in every department of applied art. The influence of William Morris, whose efforts in all the accessories of house decoration were for some time only recognized by the few, has now spread to all classes. No longer confined to the houses of the rich or of those who profess the cult of aesthetics, it is to be found with more or less of travesty in country rectories and suburban villas, catered for by the enterprising tradesman on the monthly hire system. To those who remember vividly the early Victorian surroundings of the home and their prevailing ugliness, the complete change which has taken place has hardly yet ceased to be a source of wonder. Nothing remains the same: from wall-paper to coal-box, from bedroom to kitchen, all has ‘suffered a sea change.’ In any examination of the present condition of the artistic crafts and the promise they present of future development on a sound basis, one cannot fail to observe that the effort to promote taste has penetrated to the commonest objects of daily use. The thought that finds expression in decoration has gone to salt-cellars and buttons as well as to carpets, cabinets and books. Some industries too, that may almost be said to have died out for lack of appreciation, have been revived on new lines and taken up by the public with enthusiastic approval. The use of enamel in jewellery and in combination with wrought metal may be mentioned as an instance of this, as well as the inlaying of cabinet work not only with coloured woods, but with pewter, ivory and pearl. The spell of convention once broken, the imagination of the craftsman has found relief in flying to the furthest distance from models that were till recently his only guide. This freedom, when restrained by genuine artistic feeling, has given in many cases excellent results; but in the majority of cases the sole achievement has been an eccentricity that shows few signs of a realization of what is needed in applied art and of the laws that should govern it.

In no sphere has there been a more striking departure from the hitherto circumscribed lines of ornamentation than in everything that relates to books and their decorative treatment. Paper and ink, type and its massing on the page, illustration both as a part of the text and outside it, the materials and enrichment of the cover—all have alike undergone fundamental reconsideration. It is, however, with bindings and not with the other features of book production that we are now concerned; and it is proposed in these pages to draw attention to what is being done in England and France in a field of work that has an increasing number of recruits and a growing and interested public.

It is now more than twenty years since the movement spoken of began to include bookbinding. During that time there has been noted the trade opposition to Mr. Cobden-Sanderson when he started as an amateur, followed by an imitation in many quarters, which, to say the least of it, is not the most subtle form of flattery. There has been also the later influence of Mr. Douglas Cockerell—a result of his strenuous craft teaching as well as of the work of his own hands—and the tardy acknowledgment of professional binders that the interest of the amateur has been productive of good even from the narrow standpoint of their class. Nor has France escaped this wave of innovation, though there formalism had a stronger hold even than with us, inasmuch as the traditions of what in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had really been more of a fine art than a craft were rooted in the country with all the firmness that national pride could give. Finally, one may mark the growing enthusiasm of our American neighbours in the subject and their efforts to create a national taste in fine bindings. They show a ready acknowledgment of what is being done outside their own country, and a willingness to recognize that work directed by the artistic rather than the commercial spirit must be paid for according to a standard different to that of the ordinary tradesman.

2. Bound by Zaehnsdorf.

3. Bound by Zaehnsdorf.