- About Bookbinding -
Famous Book Binders
Padeloup and Derome part 6
It is not a treatise on bookbinding that I have here attempted, or a history of the art, or even a set and formal essay. All I have sought to do is to jot down a few stray notes - to gossip about those who have helped to make the Book Beautiful. What I have tried to show in my rambling paragraphs, and in the illustrations chosen to accompany them, is the sequence of styles, and the way one style was evolved from another, and their relations one to the other. At first we find almost simultaneously the Aldine and the Maloli, the Grolier and the Henry II, styles. Then followed the powder (which probably suggested the wreaths), the fanfares of the Eves, and the brilliant fantasies of "Le Gascon." Finally came Padeloup with his polychromatic mosaics (some of them deriving their monotonous framework from the wreaths and the powder), and Derome with his vigorous borders. And as I wandered down the history of bookbinding, I have tried to show that the key to any understanding of the succeeding styles is to be found in a study of the tools of each epoch.
That the names of the gifted bookbinders and devoted book-lovers which came to the end of my pen in the course of my stroll down the vista of bibliopegy were nearly all French is not willful on my part, but inevitable. The art of bookbinding was cradled in France, even if it was born elsewhere, and in France it grew to maturity. Italy shared the struggle with France in the beginning, but soon fell behind exhausted. Germany invented the book-plate to paste inside a volume, in default of the skill so to adorn the volume externally that no man should doubt its ownership. England has had but one binder - Roger Payne - that even the insular enthusiasm of his compatriots would dare to set beside the galaxy of bibliopegic stars of France.
The supremacy of the French in the history of this art is shown in the catalogues of every great book-sale and of every great library; the gems of the collection are sure to be the work of one or another of the Frenchmen to whose unrivalled attainments I have once more called attention in these pages. It is revealed yet again by a comparison of the illustrations in the many historical accounts of the art, French and German, British and American; nearly nine-tenths of the bindings chosen for reproduction are French. And, after enjoying these, we are often led to wonder why a misplaced patriotism was blind enough to expose the other tenth to a damaging comparison. These remarks, of course, apply only to the binders whose work was done before the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of late years the superiority of French binders has been undisputable, but it has not been overwhelming. There are at present in Great Britain and in the United States binders whom no one has a right to pass over in silence, and about whom I shall gossip again in this volume; but in the past it was France first and the rest nowhere.