The Merits of Machine Binding

This is the great Merit of modern commercial bookbinding done by machinery— that it is independent, that it has freed itself from the trammels and the traditions of hand-work, that it is no longer a savourless sham copying blindly, that it lives its own life. It recognizes the fact, obvious enough nowadays, that we cannot all be as Heber, to whom Ferriar sang:
           
                        The folio Aldus loads your happy shelves,
                        And dapper Elzevirs, like fairy elves,
                        Shew their light forms amidst the well-gilt twelves.

            In this change Great Britain and the United States have led the way, followed for once by France, and, after an interval, by Germany. It was in frugal Germany that “Half-binding” had its origin. Half-binding is a money saving contrivance, which lordly book-lovers have reprobated as equivalent to genteel poverty. The Jansenists used to keep the leather sides of their books free from ornament; and some sparing German carried this simplicity one step further, substituting paper for the plain surface of leather and using morocco and calf only for the back, and for a narrow but needful hinge on each side. To push this economy a little further yet was easy; and so it came to pass in the last century that the English binders altogether omitted the leather, and covered with paper both the sides and the back. Strictly speaking, those books were not bound at all; they were merely cased— that is, sheathed in boards. A casing of this kind was the most temporary of makeshifts. Every librarian knows how fragile are the paper and pasteboard which envelop the books of the last century. The back is prone to crack and to peel off, and the sides are prompt to break away; the method was as slovenly and as inconvenient as possible.

            Early in this century the disadvantage of paper-covered boards led to the use of plain glazed calico in place of the paper. There was at first no thought of decoration; the plain calico was substituted for the plain paper because it was stronger and did not chip and tear quite so easily; the title was still printed on a label of white paper, and pasted on the back of the volume. The exact date of this improvement is in doubt. I have among my Sheridaniana the third edition of Dr. Watkin’s “Memoirs of the Public and Private life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan,” printed for Henry Colburn in 1818 and both volumes are clad in glazed calico, with a slightly ribbed surface and of a faded purple tint. The date of the biography is that of the binding. “Constable’s Miscellany,” the publication of which was begun in 1827, said to have been the first collection regularly bound in cloth; the cases were covered in the simplest fashion with plain calico, and distinguished by a paper label. The edition of Byron’s works in seventeen volumes published in 1833 is supposed to have been the first work issued without the paper label, and with the title printed in gold on the back of the books; but certain volumes of a series of “Oxford English Classics” may perhaps have preceded this “Byron.”

            Stamping was probably done by a handpress, such as British binders kept ready to impress on the sides of leather-covered volumes the broad block with the owner’s arms. From this “arming-press,” as it was called, has been evolved by slow degrees the powerful and rapid machinery of modern bindery. Murray’s “Family Library” was probably the first series on which the title was printed with ordinary ink. Then came, in 1832, Charles Knight’s “Penny Magazine,” and, in 1833, his “Penny Cyclopaedia,” the successive volumes of which were bound by Archibald Leighton in stamped cloth. Mr. Wheatley says that at first the cloth was stamped before it was put on the boards, a proceeding which proved unsatisfactory from the beginning, so the boards were covered with cloth, which was then stamped.

            Thereafter the art speedily improved. The cloth was dyed to any desired colour; and it was run through rollers to give it any desired grain or texture. The old-fashioned arming-press was modified and made stronger, and steam was swifly substituted for footpower. Subsequent improvements enabled the pattern to be imprinted on the side and back of the book in as many colours as an artist could use to advantage or the publisher was willing to pay for. And the work can be done with extraordinary speed; it is no unusual thing now for a bindery to turn out several thousand copies of a book in the course of twenty-four hours.

            Here we come to essential difference between bookbinding by hand and bookbinding by machinery. In artistic hand-work the book is bound in leather and then decorated. In edition work the cloth case is made and decorated apart from the book itself, which is afterward fastened in. The former is a slow process, and in its higher manifestations it is an art. The latter is a rapid process, and it is wholly mechanical, except in so far as the designer of the stamp is concerned. And therefore it is on the designer of the stamp that the duty lies of making beautiful the books demanded by our modern and democratic civilization.

            In Great Britain those who were called upon to invent ornament for the outside of clothbound books were free from the disadvantages under which their fellow-labourers in France were placed. In France there still lingered the dominating influence of the traditions of the great bibliopegic artists of the past, and there was pressure on the designer to devise a decoration which should make his machine-made cloth cover look like the slowly tooled leather of a book bound by hand. In England where the solid cloth-casing was hailed as a manifest improvement on the flimsy paper-boards which had immediately preceded it, there existed no such pressure, for no one seemed to see any necessary connection between the new cloth-work and the old artistic leather-work. So the designers were at liberty to develop a new form of decoration suitable to the new conditions. In this endeavour they have been unexpectedly successful; indeed, there is hardly any form of modern decorative art which has achieved its aim more satisfactorily. One might hazard the suggestion that there has been less copying and less conventionality, more inventiveness and greater appropriateness, in the commercial bindings of England and  America during the past thirty than in the avowedly artistic “extra” binding.

            Of course there have been countless millions of tomes disfigured by hideous covers; and of course every one of us can recall cloth cases which were the epitome of everything they should not be. But a selection of machine-made covers most pleasing to the trained taste is equally easy. When Thoreau bought back the many unsold copies of his first book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers,” remarking with characteristic humour that he had now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, more than seven hundred of which he had written himself, he had added to his collection books probably quite as appropriately bound as those which he owned before. No doubt if he could see the neat attire his “Walden” wears now that it is included in the trim and tasteful Riverside Aldine Series, Thoreau would acknowledge that he could ask no fitter garb for his offspring. Nor could there be anything more modestly satisfactory than the maidenly simplicity of the little tomes in this series, with their smooth blue cloth, with their chaste lettering, and with the golden anchor of Aldus—a hopeful emblem of good books yet to come.

            In comparing many modern books to select illustrations and examples for this paper, I venture to think, as might be collected from American publishers. And the reason of this, I take it, is partly that the British are borrowers of new books rather than buyers, and partly that the British still desire to have the books worth owning bound finally in leather, and they therefore still look upon the cloth case as merely a temporary convenience. The American reader, for the most part, accepts the cloth binding as a permanency; and the American publisher is moved, therefore, to expend more time and attention on the decoration of the books he offers for sale.

            Consider, for example, the gaudy cover which the British publisher put on Mr. Du Chaillu’s “Land of the Midnight Sun,” and compare it with that prepared by Mr. E.A. Abbey for the American edition.  A true book-lover would be in haste to get Mr. Du Chaillu’s entertaining work out of the British cloth case; but he would feel it absurd to wish to rebind a copy adorned with Mr. Abbey’s cover. He would be ready to echo Hawthorne’s protest against those who “strip off the real skin of a book to put it into fine clothes.”

            Again, take Mr. Vedder’s remarkable edition of Fitzgerald’s “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” for which the artist designed the cover-stamp. To rebind this folio, even in the most sumptuous crushed levant, is to deprive one’s self of not the least interesting of the illustrations by which the American painter has interpreted the Persian poet. And what could be more ingenious or more characteristic than the Dutch tile which is seemingly set into the golden cover of the “Sketching Rambles in Holland” of Mr. george H. Boughton and Mr. E. A. Abbey?

            Simplicity is an ingredient of dignity, and there are book-lovers who love simplicity above all things, having a Jansenist taste even in cloth bindings. There is nothing noisy or fussy in the cover of Mr. Harold Frederic’s “In the Valley,” due to the pencil of Mr. Harold Magonigle, or in the cover of Mr. Aldrich’s “Sisters’ Tragedy,” with its severe and yet elegant myrtle wreath designed by Mrs. Whitman. To Mrs. Whitman also is due the credit for the tea-leaf border of Dr. Holme’s “Over the Tea-cups” with is vigorous lettering, and its subordinate teapot of a fashion now gone by. None of Mrs. Whitman’s book-covers are frivolous or finicky; they have always reserve and purity.

            Yet decorations of this chaste severity are not alone on our book-shelves; and there are not a few devised on other principles and compounded in another fashion. Some satisfaction there is in finding an old German woodcut border doing duty on the cover of Mr. Woodberry’s “History of Wood Engraving,” or in observing the apt use of the orange with its full fruit and its green leaves as they are wreathed in the arabesques of the medallions which adorn the back and side of Mr. Lafcadio Hearn’s “Two Years in the French West Indies,” and which were designed by Miss Alice E. Morse, with a full understanding of the value of colour on a book-cover, and an apt appreciation of the technical means whereby it is best to be attained.

            It is essential to good decorative design, whatever its kind, whether it be a book-cover or a wall-paper, a carpet or a tapestry, a carved panel or an inlaid floor, that the artist shall recognize technical possibilities, and shall be in sympathy with the materials employed. The decorative artist must be swift to seize that one of the processes presenting themselves which will best suit his immediate object. “One reason for our modern failures lies in the multitude of our facilities,” suggests Mr. Lewis F. Day in his little book on the “Application of Ornament,” and he adds that “the secret of the ancient triumphs is often in the simplicity of the workman’s resources.” Where a man has but a single tool, he must perforce devise ornament which that single tool can accomplish, or else go without ornament altogether. Out of the struggle comes strength.

            When we see the rather violently polychromatic cover which that most accomplished artist Jules Jacquemart placed on the book on “La Ceramique” illustrated by him, we cannot but wonder whether he would not have given us something quieter and more beautiful if the resources of modern colour-printing had not been ready to his hand. And yet, nothing venture, nothing have: the decorative artist, if he wishes to get outside the little circle of every-day banality, must try the hazard of new fortunes as often and as boldly as the explorer or soldier. Often he will discover strange countries fair to see, which he will annex forthwith.

            Sometimes the search for novelty is rewarded only by chance fantasticality. A volume of ghost-stories by Mrs. Molesworth had a plain cloth cover, from the side of which, as one gazed at it, there seemed suddenly to start a shadowy figure- due to a stamp which did no more than remove the glaze of the calico, not changing its colour. Colonel Norton’s glossary of “Political Americanism” was covered with a dark-blue cloth turned inside out, and exposing a blue-gray grain, on which there was printed, in the original dark blue, the title, set off by the figure of the fearsome gerrymander. But these are trifles—the casual freaks of commercial bibliopegy.