- About Bookbinding -
Bookbindings Old and New
Notes of a Book-Lover by Brander Matthews
Books in Paper Covers part 2
Sometimes, it may be, the outside IS adorned with an illustration taken from the inside of the book, as were Mr. Janvier's " Uncle of an Angel," made attractive by Mr. Smedley's alluring picture of Narragansett Pier, and M. Daudet's "L'Immortel," brightened by M. Rossi's pert ballet dancer. Sometimes the wrapper is treated with decorative sobriety, as was Mr. Howells's "Hazard of New Fortunes," with its sombre symbol of fate. Sometimes, indeed, the outside cover is merely an external title-page, having a chaste typographic beauty quite distinct from the pictorial and from the decorative: such, for example, is the stiff paper casing of Mr. De Vinne's "Plantin and the Plantin-Moretus Museum," as it was sent forth by the Grolier Club. But this typographic severity would seem a little austere, perhaps, if applied to a summer novel: yet it is thus that the popular Scribner yellow-covered series is attired. Akin to this, and yet not wholly similar, are the side-stamps designed by Mr. Stanford White and by Mr. Francis Lathrop for the successive collections of proofs from the Century magazine.
In England the railway novel is incased in boards sheathed with paper; and this cover is adorned more often than not with a crude and hard illustration of some scene in the story, printed in three colors generally, and woefully void of art or charm of any sort. Mr. William Morris has reminded us that "to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is the one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it." Possibly the man who must perforce use the ordinary British railway novels is so demoralized by them that he can take delight in the staring and vulgar pictures on the covers of these tales; but surely no man could have found pleasure in making anything so grotesquely inartistic.
