- About Bookbinding -

Book Binders Outlook part 3

In the employment of other leathers than calf and morocco we Americans have taken the lead. Books bound in alligator, and in sealskin, for example, are to be found in any of the leading bookstores, not always appropriately clad, I regret to remark. There is a hideous incongruity, for instance, in sheathing the wisdom of Emerson in alligator hide, fit as this scaly substance might be for the weird tales of Poe. Equally horrible is a prayer book covered with snake skins; and both of these bibliopegic freaks have been offered to me by tradesmen more enterprising than artistic.

Gautier's "Une Nuit de Clepatre," that strange tale of the serpent of old Nile, might fitly be protected by the skin of the crocodile; and Captain Bourke's book about the" Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona" seems to call for an ophidian integument. So might we clothe a volume describing a voyage to Alaska in sealskin, or an account of Australia in the hide of the kangaroo. It would be a quaint fancy to put our old favorite "Rab and his Friends" in dog skin (easily to be had from the glovers); and our new friend ”Uncle Remus," in the soft coat of Brer Rabbit. Champfleury's "Les Chats," and M. Anatole France's old-fashioned and cheerful "Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard " could be bound in cat skin.

In more than one of the old treatises on bookbinding is mention made of an ardent admirer of Charles James Fox, who had the speeches of his idol covered with a vulpine hide which would serve better, it seems to me, as a coat for a volume of hunting reminiscences. So might the life of Daniel Boone be bound in the skin of a" b'ar" like that which the pioneer "cilled" ; and the life of Davy Crockett could be clad in the skin of the coon, a descendant of the fabled quadruped which volunteered to come down when he dis. covered that the backwoodsman had drawn a bead on him. Dana's" Two Years before the Mast" would look well in whale skin, or, if that were too tough, in shark skin shagreen. The "Peau d'ane" of Perrault suggests the use of the hide of the animal who once disguised himself in the lion's skin; and for any edition of AEsop's "Fables," an indefinite number of appropriate leathers lies ready to one's hand.

In 1890 Messrs. Tiffany & Co. issued a catalogue of more than a hundred different kinds of leather then on exhibition in their store on Union Square, and ready for use in the making of pocket books, bags, blotters, card cases, and the like; and all these are available for the binding of books, if the book lover will take the trouble to select and to seek for the leather best suited to each tome in its turn. A glance over the list of Messrs. Tiffany & Co. is most suggestive. The skin of the chameleon, for example, how aptly this would bedeck the orations of certain professional politicians! How well the porcupine would suit the later writings of Mr. Ruskin! How fitly the black bear would cover the works of Dr. Johnson, "author of the contradictionary," as Hood called him! I have already noted one book best bound in snake skin, but perhaps the uncanny ophidian had better be reserved for those books which every gentleman's library should be without. Yet I should like to see the speeches of Vallandigham bound in the skin of a copperhead.

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