Bib-li-op-e-gis-tic

(Pertaining to the art of binding books.—Dibdin)

to which is appended
a glossary of some
terms used in
the craft

With Illustrations of
Bindings Designed and Executed by
The Trow Press, New York

Bibliopegistic

The craft of the bookbinder is older than that of the printer. Quoting from Mr. Brander Matthews:

“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.”

Modern art in bookbinding began in Italy in the fifteenth century. The invention of printing had so multiplied books that the work got out of the hands of the monks, and workmen from other trades were pressed into service, bringing with them their skill in working leather, as well as their tools, and designs which they had previously used to decorate their work.

At this time the libraries were shelves, so inclined, as to allow of the books lying on their sides, inviting their decoration. At first the embellishment was suggested or influenced by the work in the volume, and very often there would be found on the cover, repetition of the typographic ornaments used by the printer.

Carols V. Gerichtsordnung (1597)
Vine colored Levant—inlays of red and green leather. Interlacing bands and decoration tooled in gold.

But with the associations and influence of the other decorative arts, there came the use of interlacing bands, scrolls, and geometric designs, followed by copies of patterns and parts of designs from laces, embroideries, pottery and ironwork of the times. And with the broadening in the ideas of decoration, came the use of inlays of leather of harmonizing colors, and even of precious stones.

While the art was developing in Italy, largely under French patronage, it was also beginning to flourish in France, where later it reached its supremacy. So much so that up to the nineteenth century it was “France first and the rest nowhere.”

In no work more than in binding have the French shown their fine artistic taste, and in the famous collections of the world the choicest specimens are by French binders of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

France to-day has many binders of great skill and good taste, but no longer holds the supremacy of the earlier days. England has developed some craftsmen of great skill and original artistic feeling, even though their best efforts are many times but reproductions of older models.

Barely fifty years ago America did not have a binder capable of covering a volume to compare with the work of the artisans of France or even England. But in that time there have developed shops where work of such merit is done that it is now no longer necessary to send one's precious tomes abroad to be properly clothed.

The true book lover as well as the collector desires for his treasures a suitable binding, and there is to-day an increasing demand for fine binding on individual volumes as well as on sets.

This demand is not satisfied with “commercial binding” and is too intelligent to accept extravagant work, extravagant in over-decoration as well as in price.

The art of bookbinding is now so widely