- About Bookbinding -
Bookbindings Old and New
Notes of a Book-Lover by Brander Matthews
The Merits of Machine Binding part 3
In Great Britain those who were called upon to invent ornament for the outside of cloth bound books were free from the disadvantages under which their fellow laborers in France were placed. In France there still lingered the dominating influence of the traditions of the great bibliopegic artists of the past, and there was pressure on the designer to devise a decoration which should make his machine made cloth cover look like the slowly tooled leather of a book bound by hand. In England where the solid cloth casing was hailed as a manifest improvement on the flimsy paper boards which had immediately preceded it, there existed no such pressure, for no one seemed to see any necessary connection between the new cloth work and the old artistic leather work. So the designers were at liberty to develop a new form of decoration suitable to the new conditions. In this endeavor they have been unexpectedly successful; indeed, there is hardly any form of modern decorative art which has achieved its aim more satisfactorily. One might hazard the suggestion that there has been less copying and less conventionality, more inventiveness and greater appropriateness, in the commercial bindings of England and America during the past thirty years than in the avowedly artistic "extra" binding.
Of course there have been countless millions of tomes disfigured by hideous covers; and of course every one of us can recall cloth cases which were the epitome of everything they should not be. But a selection of machine made covers most pleasing to the trained taste is equally easy. When Thoreau bought back the many unsold copies of his first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers," remarking with characteristic humor that he had now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, more than seven hundred of which he had written himself, he had added to his collection books probably quite as appropriately bound as those which he owned before. No doubt if he could see the neat attire his "Walden" wears now that it is included in the trim and tasteful Riverside Aldine Series, Thoreau would acknowledge that he could ask no fitter garb for his offspring. Nor could there be anything more modestly satisfactory than the maidenly simplicity of the little tomes in this series, with their smooth blue cloth, with their chaste lettering, and with the golden anchor of Aldus a hopeful emblem of good books yet to come.
