- About Bookbinding -
Famous Book Binders
Grolier and The Renascence
The man to whom this was written was a Viscount of Aguisy, for a while treasurer of the army of Italy, then French ambassador to Rome, and afterward treasurer of France under Francis 1., Henry II., Francis II., and Charles IX. "Born in 1479, dying in 1565, he lived eighty-six years," - so M. Le Roux de Lincy, his biographer, tells us, - " during which he showed himself always a zealous protector of the learned, a lover of the good and beautiful books issued by the Giunti and the Aldi, or by the other publishers of the time, and also an ardent collector of coins and of antiquities." Yet the prediction of Erasmus has so far come true that the name of the ambassador and treasurer of France would be forgotten were it not that the fame of the book-lover has lingered, and spread, until now, more than three centuries after the death of Jean Grolier of Lyons, there is a flourishing club called by his name here in New York, the chief city of a continent undiscovered when he was born.
Grolier had the good fortune to live through the glorious years of the Renascence, when all the arts were reviving at once and flourishing, together; and he had the good judgment to aid in the development of the art of bookbinding to which he attached his name inseparably. The art was not new when he began to 'collect the best works of the best printers, but it was about to have a new birth; and when it was born again, he helped to guide its steps.
Perhaps the first bookbinder was the humble workman who collected the baked clay tiles on which the Assyrians wrote their laws; and he was a bookbinder also who prepared a protecting cylinder to guard the scrolls of papyrus on which Vergil, and Horace, and Martial had written their verses.
Before the invention of printing, the choker manuscripts, books of hours, and missals, were made even more valuable by sides of carved ivory, or of delicately wrought silver often studded with gems. Even after printing was invented, the binder was called upon only to stitch the leaves of the book, all further decoration being the privilege of the silversmith. Benvenuto Cellini was paid six thousand crowns for the golden cover, carved and enriched with precious stones, which he made for a book that Cardinal de' Medici wished to give Charles V. In France the silversmiths claimed the monopoly of binding, and also of dealing in the finer stuffs'- not merely in cloth-of-gold, but even in velvet.
Certain of the books bound in the monasteries were incased in boards - veritable boards, of actual wood - so thick that now and again they were hollowed out to hold a crucifix or a pair of spectacles, although sometimes it was only to make room for an almanac. It is no wonder that when a tome thus ponderously begirt fell upon Petrarch it so bruised his leg that for a while there was danger of amputation. Even when these real boards were thin, they were thick enough to conceal a worm, that worst of all the enemies of books; and thus real boards, like the German condottieri in many an Italian city, destroyed what they were meant to protect. In time the genuine board was given up for a pasteboard, which was then made by pasting together sheets of paper; and myriads of pages of books no longer in fashion were thus destroyed to stiffen the covers of newer volumes. In our day many interesting fragments of forgotten authors, and not a few curious and instructive engravings, have been rescued from oblivion, when the decay of old book-covers has led to the picking apart of the pasteboards beneath the crumbling leather.