ART.
BOOKBINDINGS AT THE BURLINGTON FINE ARTS CLUB.
THERE once was a pure palmographer who regarded with con- tempt and loathing any dealings with the "merely literary" side of a classic writer. Just as to the austere critic of literary form it is the forbidden thing to take account of the thought and argument of a book, these being but the in- different stuff of art, so to him poetry and rhetoric were only the inseparable accident of some Codex L. or V., and an Odyssey or Antigone a humble instrument in the hands of Evolution, to illustrate the development of an Uncial Gamma, or the sporting of a Cursive Tan. None who have seen it will forget his look of mild pain and resentment when to him, having tracked some evolving or sporting character through a Grecian scribe of epoch making crabbedness, entered one of the profane vulgar to mistake him for textual critic or common gentleman and scholar.
This was a lofty and desirable attitude, but it is possible to. be yet more severe with the Book ; and the secret is with the
Bookbinder. To him, the whole inside of a book is at the best accidental and indifferent ; at the worst, dangerous, if it tempt curiosity. It is, indeed, a part of his art to make a book to open, since art is only permitted on some utilitarian. pretence ; and noblesse oblige that the book should open well; but it is with no friendly eye that he catches you enjoying its pages over the fire, for to the true binder the cover is the book. Itis a habit of mind that extends itself to other things; he will be found to consider his human acquaintances only as they are well or ill bound ; he holds that our civilisation has been decadent since tattooing went out of fashion ; and it is unsafe to be left alone with the more ardent of the kind, since you may see them cast a hungry eye on the untooled surfaces of their friends. One of them confessed that he could never meet any specimen bound in a fine olive Levantine without longings to impress it with Grolieresque scrolls, and the legend, Mei et Amicorunt.
It is hardly to be expected that in a democratic time so
detached an ideal should flourish ; the book for us is a little primer of useless knowledge, neatly bound in cloth,—say, one of a " Cataclasms of the Universe" series, for railway-reading and ninepence cash. But the Burlington Fine Arts Club, with its pleasing taste for any survival of the choice and the• exorbitant, has brought together for the elect an exhibition of bookbindings such as this country has never seen, and by the courtesy of the members, some outsiders of an elect spirit have been allowed to enjoy the show. The elect in this matter are usually composed in varying proportions of the natural historian and the collector. In bindings, as in other things, it is engrossing to trace a history of adaptation, to follow out the life and errors of a decorative motive, its emigrations, its transformations at the hands of successive artificers and schools ; to find local varieties emerge, like the English "Cottage" style, or the seventeenth-century Scottish, and to welcome the freak as a variety the more. To the collector, again, bookbindings, like other collected things, have the merits of costliness and rarity or uniqueness ; can be identified by their workmanship or legend, with famous libraries like that of Grolier or De Thou ; can be bought and treasured with a hope of completeness, like Caxtons, birds' eggs, and postage-stamps. To all such, this collection has been a splendid opportunity for study, and they will find in the notices prefixed to the catalogue by Mr. Gordon Duff and Miss S. T. Prideaux, a most useful sketch of the history of the art, and in the laborious catalogue itself an indispensable book of reference. But besides the natural historian and the collector, there is another person who is interested in such a show, and that is the artist. The art of bookbinding in leather, with decoration in tooling and gilding, is still practised even in this country, where our way is to have our books- ready-bound in cloth ; and the practical bookbinder and the amateur will be eager to compare what is being done now with specimens of older work. In mechanical skill and exactitude, the modern binder is equal to the most skilful and careful of the ancients ; indeed, the exactness of a mitreing or the rectitude of a line loom much larger in his perspective than more important things. The technical part, then, may be put aside, and the question remains of the decorative value- of all this patient and skilful labour. Now, in this matter the collectors sway opinion to an absurd extent. The modern bookbinder, with no good tradition to follow, hears an immense talk of Grolier and De Thou, and straightway falls to reviving or imitating that or another belanded style. The Grolier designs, it is true, are extremely ingenious in the variety obtained from the use of simple curves and a few other tools, and thigi economy is a certain virtue ; but the result at best is little more than a geometrical ingenuity. So with more com- plex and elaborate schools, like the English seventeenth- century style of N, 46 and 48. You are struck with the finesse or prettiness of some little part of the design, but there is no grasp about the treatment as a whole. This is the same as saying that little first-rate artistic talent has been expended on bindings. The mark of a first-rate talent is that the large relations and proportions of a decoration are attended to, that the architecture, so to speak, is got right in the first place ; in bookbinding, we find often a good tool or stamp, and a too great plenty of decorative motives injudiciously applied,—which means that an artist designed the tools, and another applied them. In the more degraded examples, the smaller elements as well are bad. Among the tools of the ordinary binder at the present day, you will hardly find one that is tolerable.
Some of the finest designing is to be found among the English stamped bindings in the first case. Stamping, it should be explained, preceded tooling proper, and the dis- tinction is that a stamp is a die, it may be of considerable size, by which a design is impressed on the leather at a single blow, whereas in tooling the design is made up by a combination of tools of small size. A further difference is, that the early stamps leave the designs in relief, as in cameo work ; while in tooling the design is depressed so as to defend the gilding which is afterwards added. These stamps, as has been said, are often fine, and when a large seal-like device is placed by itself on the board, the effect is simple and handsome ; but when the stamps are arranged in some "Oxford frame," or diamond-divided surface, the initial awkwardness of the arrangement cannot be got over. To divide a rectangular surface into diamond-shaped panels is usually the first thought of the designer who is tired of right-angled panels, and wishes novelty; but he always comes to grief over the half-diamonds which must be formed at the edges. How few binders, again, have ever considered the back of the book when setting out the covers ! And yet the obvious thing about a binding, considered as a decorative whole, is that it consists of a back and two sides ; and the back is the con- trolling element, for unless the bands of the book be sunk in grooves sawn out of the paper, the back is divided by those bands into panels, and the shape and size of those panels give the space-unit which must be referred to in setting out the sides. Further, the size of the panel determines the scale of lettering employed ; and this, again, ought to affect the scale and character of the design. Leaving the back out of consideration, or to be considered separately, as most binders have done, we find the most satisfactory bindings in the collection are those with a simple heraldic or other device in the middle of the board, like, for instance, the fine Cardinal's hat of I, 83, or a central device, combined with lettering and border, as in some Italian examples (E, 56, for example), or combined with a semis, that is, a ground powdered with letters, lilies, or other small features arranged as a chequer. Noble examples of this are the Clement of Louis XIY., with his cipher and fleur-de-lis (I, 59), and another French seventeenth-century volume, stamped with the initial and coronet of Henri, Duo de Montmorency (I, 65).
Crowned heads and millionaires are notoriously devoid of taste ; for them, the rude magnificence of the Tottenham Court Road; for them, official painting and middle-class poetry. Else it were of some use to talk of less humble forms of binding than morocco tooled and gilt. It is true that the Ashburnham Gospels in gems and wrought silver would be a prickly book for the pocket, and as anxious a travelling com- panion as a wife with diamonds ; but is there never a noble or a speculator who can afford a handsome coat to a retired classic, to an editio princeps of some mighty ancient whose page the puny modern can no longer turn, to the royal folios on whose matter sleep and supersession have passed, and the date come for a burial befitting their state P Let the living classics—Bradshaw and the Book of the Season and the Best
Hundred Books—wander in sheepskin or goatskin, and suffer the reader gladly, and be lent about; but let here and there a famous ancient that no man reads lie down undisturbed in
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