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Stamped Leather part 2

Although I recall the stamped leather cover of the photolithographic facsimile of the first folio of Shakespeare, blind tooled in accordance with Teutonic tradition, - I think that it is only within the past few years, and here in the United States, that publishers have made a practice of issuing the whole edition of certain beautiful books bound in leather stamped by machinery as though it were .cloth. Mr. Howard Pyle's resetting of "Robin Hood" was issued by Messrs. Charles Scribner's Son's in 1883 with a leather cover embossed with a Dureresque design by the artist author. Then came the lovely volumes illustrated by Mr. E. A. Abbey with the collaboration of Mr. Alfred Parsons, and published by Messrs. Harper & Brothers. For Goldsmith's "She Stoops to Conquer," an ample folio, Mr. Stanford White devised a cover decoration, modern, tasteful, and graceful; a border surrounded the two sides and the back, here treated as if they were a single plane surface (although outlined straps crossed the back); and a cartouche on the side held the title of the work and the name of the artist who had made the sprightly and refined drawings that illustrated. it. The gold of the lettering was of a different tone from the gold of the decorative design; and by another mechanical device the filleted border was filled by a ribbed surface,

Quite as effective as this, although simpler, was the cover of "The Quiet Life" of Messrs, Abbey and Parsons, with its powder of flowers, also due to the ingenuity of Mr. White. From the same publishers have since come the "Old Songs" 'by the same illustrators. the "Sonnets by William Wordsworth," with drawings by Mr. Parsons alone, and "The Boyhood of Christ," of General Lew Wallace, the covers of which were all conceived in the same spirit as the two earlier books, although they lacked something of the distinction Mr. White gave to his handiwork. For the edition of Longfellow's "Hiawatha," to the illustrating of which Mr. Frederic Remington brought his extraordinary knowledge of Indian manners and modes of thought, the publishers, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., prepared a most appropriate cover of buckskin, and on the rough, brown red surface of this Mrs. Whitman's side-stamp stood out brilliantly. So far as I know, buckskin had not before been used in bookbinding in America, although it seems to be a fit material to clothe the many books of frontier life: the late Edouard Fournier records that many of the old monkish bindings were of deerskin - so, as usual, the novelty turns out to be an antiquity.

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