- About Bookbinding -
Bookbindings Old and New
Notes of a Book-Lover by Brander Matthews
Book Binders of the Late 1800's part 6
But he never confounds decoration with illustration; as he explained in an article on his art, "beauty is the aim of decoration, and not illustration, or the expression of ideas." So we do not find on his books any of the childish symbolism which has been abundantly advocated in England, and according to which a treatise on zoology or botany must be adorned with an animal or a flower - a bald and babyish labeling of a book wholly unrelated to propriety of ornamentation. Mr. Cobden-Sanderson's covers are generally rich with conventionalized flowers arrayed with geometrical precision. He falls into a naturalistic treatment only at rare and regrettable moments. In a copy of Mr. Morris's "Hopes and Fears for Art," which Mr. Cobden-Sanderson has bound, the design has a careful freedom of composition and an artful symmetry; the treatment of the rose-branches which form the border is almost purely conventional, and the broad blank space in the centre is restfully open.
In America the art of the binder is retarded by reasons really outside of art by the high wages of skilled workmen, and by the high tariff on raw materials, which have so raised the cost of the best bookbinding that many book-lovers in New York have been wont to send their precious tomes on a long voyage across the Atlantic, to be bound in London or Paris. Americans were among the best customers of Francis Bedford, and the catalogue of the Grolier Club exhibition proves that they have been persistent purchasers of the best work of contemporary French binders. But to send books abroad to be bound is no way to encourage the development of the art at home.
This same Grolier Club exhibition showed that American craftsmen were capable of turning out work of a very high rank. The best of the books bound by Mr. William Matthews, by Mr. Alfred Matthews, by Bradstreets, by Mr. Smith, and by Mr. Stikeman, held their own fairly well. Considering the difficulties under which the art has developed in this country, the showing made by the American binders was the most creditable.