- About Bookbinding -
Famous Book Binders
Grolier and The Renascence Part 2
With the invention of printing, and the immediate multiplication of books, there came an urgent demand for workmen capable of covering a volume in seemly fashion. In many a monastery the binderies must have been increased hastily to meet the demand; and we can trace the handiwork of these monastic craftsmen by the designs they imprinted on the covers of the books they bound designs made up mainly of motives from the manuscript missals, from the typographic ornaments of the early printers, and from the transcripts of those carvings in wood and stone with which the churches of that time were abundantly enriched.
But the workshops in the monasteries did not suffice, and leather-workers of all sorts saddlers, harness makers, and those who put together the elaborate boots and shoes of the times were impressed into the service, taking over to the new trade of bookbinding, not only their skill in dealing with leather, but also the tools and the designs with which they had been wont to decorate the boots, the saddles, the harness, and the caskets of fair ladies and lords of high degree. For the most part these were humble artisans, lacking even in the rudiments of learning. The authorities in France preferred the workman to be ignorant who was called in to bind the records of the State and the royal books of account. The late Edouard Fournier, in his essay on the "Art de la Reliure en France," cites the contract of one Guillaume Ogier in Italy, 1492, as a binder of the registers of the treasury, in which' the artisan "declared and made oath that he knew not how to read nor to write."
Perhaps one reason for the superiority of the early Italian bindings over the French of the same period was that the workmen employed in Italy were more intelligent and better educated. In a book printed by Aldus in 1513, the notice to the binder is in Greek! Ambroise Firmin-Didot explained the anomaly of this apparently extraordinary culture on the part of the handicraftsmen of that era by suggesting that the workmen employed by Aldus who was binder as well as printer were many of them Greeks who had been driven to Venice after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks. Every reader of "Romola" will remember the influence exercised on the Italian renascence by the personal presence of the Greeks; and in no art was this influence more immediate, more permanent, or more beneficial, than in the art of bookbinding.
We know that Grolier was in Italy in 1512, and that he was still at Milan in 1525. He was a friend and a patron of Aldus. "No book left the Aldine press," M. Le Roux de Lincy declares, "without several copies, some on vellum," some on white or colored paper, being specially printed for the library of the French collector. Voltaire says that "a reader acts toward books as a citizen toward men; he does not live with all his contemporaries, he chooses a few friends." Grolier chose for his friends the best books and the most beautiful; he was fond of a good author no less than of a wide margin. As Dr. Holmes tells us, a library" is a looking-glass in which the owner's mind is reflected"; and it is a noble portrait of the man which we get when we look at the books of Jean Grolier. He was a lover of the New Learning.