A finished book-cover design can be made on water-color paper, bristol-board, or a piece of book-cover linen. This last method is popular with publishers, as it shows them how the cover will look when finished. A designer keeps sample books of all the most popular bookbinding materials, which the manufacturers are glad to supply. A practical designer always chooses for the ground color of a design a cloth that is to be found at one of the regular book-cloth manufacturers.
When a book-cover design is finished, it is neatly mounted on cardboard and a careful note is written on the margin, telling how the design is to be executed by the binder, the kind of cloth to be used, and its number in a particular sample book. Unless the design is executed on a piece of book cloth, a sample of the cloth desired is pasted under the directions. The design is then cut in brass by a die cutter, as described in the next chapter, and the covers are stamped in gold or inks from this die by the binder. The design must be the exact size of the future book or drawn larger in exact proportion for reduction to the proper size.
Gold is of course the most expensive way of reproducing a cover design, and a publisher generally tries to get as good an effect as possible without the use of gold, or he limits its use to the title lines or to a small part of the design. Four inks is usually the extreme number used, and more often only two or three are used, or gold and one ink.
Several styles of decoration are used in designing book covers; but they may be put roughly into two classes,—those that are purely ornamental and those that are pictorial. Personally I am in favor of the purely ornamental cover, as being more dignified; but there are books that seem to require a pictorial cover that is treated somewhat in the fashion of a decorative poster.
A book-cover designer to be successful should be very versatile and able to make use of figures as well as thoroughly versed in the use of ornament.
One of the most important parts of a book cover is the title, to which the amateur and inexperienced designer does not always give sufficient attention. The title must be clearly drawn and everything else in the cover made subservient to it, so that the first thing the eye falls on is the title. For this reason a thorough study of lettering is necessary for the successful cover designer, and much practice in order to become proficient. A very successful cover may be due simply to a well-selected cloth with lettering properly drawn and placed so that the eye is perfectly satisfied and the whole has an air of distinction. Each designer grows insensibly into his or her own particular style, which those who are interested in book covers grow to know; but the more varied his style the more in demand will be the designer.
The designing of book covers is a minor art, but since there is a constant demand for ornamented covers, the more taste and skill that can be devoted to the making of them, the better. When one looks back to the covers of fifteen years ago, one realizes what an advance has been made, and that the standard has been raised higher and higher, until at the present time many a famous illustrator or decorative painter occasionally turns his or her hand to the designing of book covers.[Back to Contents]
THE COVER STAMPS
By George Becker
Not many years ago the crudest and most primitive devices were used in the production of a book cover. The artist, if such he could be called, who was responsible for the design, seldom went to the trouble of furnishing the engraver with anything more than a pencil sketch, which the latter transferred to a brass plate about one-quarter of an inch thick by coating the plate with beeswax and laying the sketch on it, face downward. When the paper was removed the beeswax retained the marks of the lead pencil. He then began the tedious process of outlining it by hand with a graver and afterward finished it with a chisel.
But the exacting demands of modern artistic taste, the improvement of scientific methods and the pressure of competition have marked a complete transformation in the business of making dies for book covers. A few pencils and gravers, a vise bench, and a grindstone no longer make an engraving establishment. Colored sketches of most painstaking execution, accompanied by a working drawing in black and white, have taken the place of the old pencil sketch. These artistic productions, having passed the ordeal of critical examination, are handed over to the photographer, who, if he understands his part, does all that the beeswax did, and a good deal more. He takes the black-and-white drawing above referred to and reproduces it, in the size desired, directly on a brass plate covered with a sensitive coating, and then having prepared it with acid-proof preparations, he passes it over to the etcher.