- About Bookbinding -
Bookbindings Old and New
Notes of a Book-Lover by Brander Matthews
Book Binders of the Late 1800's part 7
For a binding like Mr. William Matthew's "Knickerbocker's History of New York," there is no need to make any apology; it is excellent in conception and in execution, pure in style, modestly original, and most harmoniously decorative, with its appropriate ship, its tiny tulips, and its wreaths of willow. The inventor of these designs for the inside and the outside of the Knickerbocker was Mr. Louis J. Rhead, whom Mr. Matthews had called to his aid.
Although both Mr. Matthews and Mr. Rhead are Englishmen by birth, I think I can feel an American influence in the decoration of this American book. If I am right, this is evidence, were any needed, of the great advantage there is in having a book bound by a countryman of the author, who will treat it with unconscious propriety of decoration. I know a wise collector in New York who makes it a rule to have his French books bound in Paris, his English books bound in London, and his American books bound here in New York.
"Fifty years ago," said Mr. William Matthews in his interesting address on his art, "there was not a finely bound book, except what by chance had been procured abroad, to be found III any collection in America. Fine binding was an unknown art." Now in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Mr. Matthews thinks" there are many examples of American workmanship in our collections that would do honor to the best French and English binders of the last half-century." If this is true, much of the credit for the improvement of public taste is due to the influence of Mr. Matthews himself.
Of modern Italian and German binding there is no necessity or space to say anything here. The tradition of vellum binding has been kept alive in Rome and in Florence, where the bevel edged white tomes are often relieved by an inlaid rectangle of colored calf, tooled with what might perhaps be called fairly enough a Neo-Aldine pattern. The exhibition of the Grolier Club, which has aided in the preparation and in the illustration of these pages, included no Italian work, - and this is evidence that our collectors, rightly or wrongly, do not hold it in high esteem.