Historical essay on the art of bookbinding/Bookbinders
OF BOOKBINDERS.
hat monks were anciently the binders as well as the makers of books is proven by documentary evidence. Hearne has published a grant from Rich. de Paston to the Bromholm abbey “of twelve pence a year rent charge on his estates to keep their books in repair;” Charlemagne conferred a diploma unto the abbot of Saint Bertin, a privilege to procure by means of hunting the skins necessary for the binding of the books of his abbey, and Dibdin quotes from a manuscript of the British Museum: “Sacrista curet quod libri bene ligentur et haspentur,” etc. The “bibliophile Jacob” also says that two monks, Goderan and Ernesten, of the monastery of Stavelot, in Flanders, completed in 1097 two volumes of the Bible, with the following inscription: “In omnia sua procuratione, hoc est Scriptura, illuminatione, ligatura, uno eodemque anno perfecti sunt ambo codices.”Nor did Tritheim, abbot of Spanheim, in the fifteenth century, omit bookbinding in an enumeration of the various employments of the monks of his abbey.
There is a show of justice in the modern book collector’s expression of due praise to the binder of the magnificent folio or shining duodecimo, made to sleep upon an eider-down pillow, but it will not atone for centuries of ingratitude. There was an old law which compelled bookbinders to take oath that they did not know how to read; and the magnificent books of Grolier and Maioli and De Thou come to us without an indication of the name of the artist, who is ever to remain in obscurity. The Marquis de Lavalette’s mistake of the name of Grolier for the name of a bookbinder was not an unnatural one, and should not have been considered by such an ardent bibliophile as Clément de Ris solely in the light of evidence of the distinguished minister’s ignorance of the history of bibliomania.
The publishers of the first printed volumes were bookbinders also, and the names of Johannas Guilebert, Johan Norris and Ludovis Bloc, impressed by a momentary vanity on the covers of a work, are the earliest of bookbinders of the sixteenth century that are known. A bookbinder by the name of Pigorreau appears to have been the first workman to ply his vocation independently of the publishers, in 1620. The Eve family, invested with the title of “Book-binders to the King,” for fifty years, from 1578 to 1627, were printers and publishers, and to them has been attributed the bindings of De Thou.
Nicolas Eve is cited as bookbinder to Henri III.; Clovis Eve to Henri IV. and Louis XIII.; Robert Eve inherited his father’s title; but it cannot be said with absolute certainty that either of them executed the works which have made their name famous.
The history of modern bookbinding is not therefore to be identified with the name of a bookbinder previously to the year 1641, when flourished Le Gascon, to whom Jerome Pinchon has attributed the bindings of the library of De Thou’s sons. Le Gascon is only a surname, and the real name of the artist is as unknown as his history, but his binding of “La Guirlande de Julie” is ever to remain a model. A competent critic, Feydau, has said that as a gilder Le Gascon attained perfection, and that he possessed a secret process of gilding which has not yet been discovered.
Le Gascon’s immediate successors were Boyet or Boyer, and Du Seuil or Duseuil, whose name Lesné, the bookbinder poet, has written Desseuil, as he logically but improperly misspelt Pasdeloup for Padeloup, to the confusion of bibliographers.
The work of Le Gascon is greatly superior to that of his successors. Louis XIV. was not an amateur of beautiful books, a defect which was not to be remedied by the edict of 1686, which liberated bookbinders from the dictatorship of printers and publishers, nor by the treaties with the Ottoman Empire, which stipulated an indemnity of morocco skins for the covers of the books of the royal library, possibly in emulation of Charles V. of Spain’s request from Cosmo de Medicis of a superb copy of Titus Livius as a token of conciliation.
From the time of the Roi Soleil the art of bookbinding declined gradually. Derome and Padeloup were great artists assuredly, but at a long distance from their predecessors.
At the end of the eighteenth century Bozerian is the unworthy representative of the art in France, while in England it has progressed steadily from the Harleian era to Roger Payne. Theirs was not a servile imitation of ancient work, although Mr. Roscoe wrote eloquently in commendation of ancient binding in his “Lorenzo de Medici.” “A taste for the exterior decoration of books has lately arisen in this country, in the gratification of which no small share of ingenuity has been displayed; but if we are to judge of the present predilection for learning by the degree of expense thus incurred we must consider it as greatly inferior to that of the Romans during the time of the first emperors or of the Italians at the fifteenth century. And yet it is difficult to discover why a favorite book should not be as proper an object of elegant ornament as the head of a cane, the hilt of a sword or the latchet of a shoe.”
Wisely and truly said, but for the consideration that the invention of printing was of that inferiority the causa causans, the manuscripts that were “all wrought in gold” being masterpieces of handicraft in themselves.
The prejudice in favor of ancient binding was displayed as recently as in the report of the International Bookbinding Exhibition of 1857, wherein the judges—Merlin, Capé and Bauzonnet—expressed the opinion advanced by Roscoe. They went further than this in their extollation of the masters of the three preceding centuries, especially of those whom, as Dibdin would say, St. Jerome or St. Austin would have lashed for the gorgeous decoration of their volumes. It was of special interest to American bibliophiles that Holland, once famous for its bindings of vellum; Germany, whose gilders had been constantly employed by the binders of France, Spain and Italy, exhibited nothing but imitations of the declined French art. The rivalry, which should have been universal, existed between France and England only. France excelled in taste and finish, but at some sacrifice of flexibility; while in England the soft and coaxing manner in which, by the skill of Hering or Mackinlay, “leaf succeeds to leaf,” was marred by the tarnishing of the once blazing gilt edges. It was of interest to American bibliophiles, as an evidence of the fact that the decline of the art of bookbinding was due to the apathy of the book collectors. Artists found no occasion for reference to the compilation of “Messire Francisque, pelegrin de Florence,” composed of designs of foliage, interlacing ornaments and moresque patterns, nor for innovation or improvement in their work, because the book collectors suggested nothing. And as the art of bookbinding owed its existence to them, and to them only, they were responsible for its decadence. Obviously, it was not an art to be restricted to one nation or to one family, as tradition would have it in France, and forthwith did Bradstreet’s, of New York, undertake to make it American also; and now, if the rallied book collectors of the Old World point with pride to Trautz-Bauzonnet, Lortie, Marius Michel, Hardy, Amand, Bedford, Smeers, Rivière and Zachnsdorf, the New World may retort with Matthews and Bradstreet’s. And deservedly, because there is a solidity, strength and squareness of workmanship about the books of The Bradstreet bindery which seem to convince that they may be “tossed from the summit of Snowdon to that of Cader Idris,” without detriment or serious injury. Certainly, none can put a varied colored morocco coat on a book, and gild it with greater perfection in choice of ornament and splendor of gold, and with greater care, taste and success, than Bradstreet’s. The experienced book collector will appreciate this de visu; the uninitiated should be made aware of the qualities that constitute perfection in bookbinding, the combination of solidity with elegance. The volume should open easily, and remain open at any page, the back flexible and the leaves evenly cut. The gilding and other ornaments may be left to the artist, but the inscription of the title is a very serious matter, as found to his discomfiture the owner of a work of Lucian, translated by a M. Belin de Balu, which the great Bozerian lettered: “Lucien T. P. Belin de Balu.” T. P.=traduit par. Not less unfortunate was the bibliophile whose uncut, scarce edition of the works of Brantôme, confided to an artistic but dreadfully provincial bookbinder, was returned with the leaves scrupulously cut, and the volumes inscribed: Bran Tome I., Bran Tome II., Bran Tome III., and so on to the ninth volume. And Dibdin relates, among anecdotes of barbarous titles applied to precious works, the discovery by a well-educated bibliomaniac of the first and almost unknown edition of the “Decameron” of Boccaccio, in a volume entitled “Concilium Tridenti.”
As to the expression of the binding of a bool, it should be sad or gay, sombre or brilliant, in accord with its spirit, its tone and its epoch, as is suggested by Hartley Coleridge. Didot even insisted upon a refinement in the matter of color, advising chromo bibliotacts, as they are aptly styled by Uzanne, to clothe their works on theology in purple, astronomy in azure, and travels in marine blue, presumably in accordance with the good and very appropriate metaphor of the inscription on a King of Egypt’s bookcase: “Treasure of the Remedies of the Soul,” books being, like drugs, to be taken with discretion and in various doses, and their outward appearance to denote the nature of the remedy they contain, in order that those that are poison be not mistaken for their antidotes.
In his attractive little book on “The Home Library,” Mr. Arthur Penn says justly that “it is well also not to begrudge money for a fine piece of work;” but how very few appreciate the fact who are otherwise prodigal in their admiration of the fine arts. It would be interesting to look into the comparative value of fine binding in different centuries.
The work of the ancients was painstaking in the extreme; the time that it took scarcely less than the writing and illuminating of a missal; but their forwarding was not as good as is that of modern bookbinders. This desideratum is noticeably appreciated by the artists of the United States, wherefore the American bibliophiles entrust to them the work that they were wont to send to European bookbinders, in spite of the most vexatious delays. Assuredly, fostered and encouraged, American bookbinders are to attain the highest niche in the temple.
A writer in the “Miscellanées Bibliographiques,” Jean Poche, has given a copy of an account of the binder Duseuil, in which twelve volumes of the second tome of the Manuscripts of the Library of the King, bound in morocco, with gold filigree and the royal coat-of-arms, are quoted at 30 livres each, and the writer of the article adds a note to the effect that the director of the Imprimerie Royale reduced the price to 25 francs.
The French bibliophiles were slow to appreciate the value of Grolier’s bindings. In 1725 the highest price paid for them by the Count d’Hoym was 7 livres 10 sous; in 1813, at the MacCarthy Reagh sale, 75 francs was considered an exorbitant price. In England in 1810 the famous London bookseller, James Edwards, found a ready sale for them at 1,000 francs, and wrote to Renouard that he would be glad to buy all volumes of the Aldine press, with the binding and the name of Grolier, at 1 louis a volume. Grolier’s copy of the “Philostrati Vita Apollinii Tyanci et Eusebius contra Hierocleni,” which at the McCarthy sale brought 255 francs, and at the Hibbert sale (1829) £21, was bought at the Beckford sale for £300 by Quaritch.
