- About Bookbinding -

Padeloup and Derome

The reign of Louis XIV was the golden age of French literature; it was but the over-gilt age of French binding. The characteristic of 'the art toward the end of the long rule of the Grand Monarch was a brutal luxury of heavy gilding. The king's own books were bound in a fashion as leaden as the architecture of Versailles, and as expressive of the royal pride. The royal arms, exaggerated out of all proportion, were stamped on the centre of the side of a book, and they were girt about by a broad border, equally emphatic and equally dull. These borders were often imprinted by a roulette, a wheel on which a pattern was incised in the same way that the cylinder-rings of the Egyptians were engraved. The use of the roll, repeating the same motive indefinitely as it is rolled over the leather, is in defensible; it is the negation of art; it destroys the free play of hand which is the very essence of handicraft.

The fashion set by the king was copied by the courtiers; and on most of the books bound under Louis XIV we find little more than a border around the margin, and a coat of arms in the centre. Sometimes a wheel was prepared broad enough to imprint a heavy wreath three inches in width; sometimes there would be two or three borders one within the other, the corners forming themselves as best they could, haphazard and happy-go-lucky. Sometimes huge and heavy corner-pieces were employed. Sometimes even the whole side of a book was engraved in the same heavy style, thus reducing the binder's task almost to the level of a day-laborer's. When the public accepts a mechanical and lifeless substitute for artistic and individual handicraft, the result is a deadening of the artistic impulse, and decadence into the inertia of commonplace.

Possibly we may fairly charge this decline to the inexorable self-assertion of the king; certainly there was no great bookbinder in France while Louis XIV was on the throne, and no great book-lover. His reign is not distinguished by the development either of a Grolier or of a "Le Gascon." Yet it was while he ruled that, under 'the influence of the traditions bequeathed by "Le Gascon," the tools known to book-lovers as the. fers du dixseptieme siecle, the seventeenth-century tools, were brought into use; and these lovely tools continue in use to this day, and form the basis of the stock in trade of the best binders of the nineteenth century.