- About Bookbinding -

The Search for Novelty

More fertile is the effort to find special cloths for special books, to enlarge the number of fabrics from which the binder may choose. The very step in advance which M. Octave Uzanne urged upon the artistic bookbinders of France has been taken by the commercial bookbinders of America; and we are constantly seeing new stuffs impressed into the service. M. Uzanne claims the invention of the cartonnage a la Pompadour, the clothing of a light and lively tale of the eighteenth century in a brocade or a damask of the period. This is almost exactly what a publisher in Boston did when he sent forth Mrs. Higginson's "Princess of Java," clad in the cotton which the Javanese wear. It was what a publisher in New York did when he sent forth Mr. Lafcadio Hearn's "Youma," the story of a slave, covered with the simple fabric that slaves dress in. It was what a London publisher did when he sent forth a tiny little tome of old time fashions, "Our Grandmothers' Gowns," bound with the chintzes and calicoes of by gone days.

The American edition of Charles Lamb's "Poetry for Children" was issued by Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons in a half binding of some woven material such as is used in the nursery for the pinafores of childhood; and the same publisher covered Mr. Riis's stimulating account of "How the Other Half Lives," with a stuff very like that from which the laborer’s overalls are made, a most appropriate garment for a book like Mr. Riis's. Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. have made experiment of a more aesthetic fabric, Persian silk; they used it for the back of Miss Jewett’s "Strangers and Wayfarers," on which it contrasted boldly with the white side bearing Mrs. Whitman's decorative lettering imprinted in the colour of the silk; and they employed it again for Browning's latest volume of poems, "Asolando," in this case covering the whole book, one side of which was further decorated by a dignified panel and border of Mrs. Whitman's designing. I know of no recent commercial binding more satisfactory than this, or more adequate to its purpose, the appropriate sheathing of a poet's last words.