FINE or “extra” binding as it is called in the trade implies that the craftsman has done his best with the best materials. It may be plain or decorated, but whatever work there is should be the best of which the craftsman is capable. Printed books are largely machine-made productions, and it would seem reasonable that machine-made books should have machine-made covers, and it is in such covers or “cases” that most of our books are issued. There is a general feeling that the cost of the binding should bear some relation to the cost of the book; but since books are turned out by the thousand from the printing press, and fine bindings can only be made singly and laboriously by hand, it is inevitable that in most cases such a binding costs much more than the book it covers. This has probably been the case since the invention of printing cheapened books, and yet there have always been people who valued certain books highly enough to have them well bound and decorated. For a true book-lover does not value a book at the price it costs, and he may wish to have the words of a favourite author enshrined in a precious cover. Some books by their nature and use call for lavish treatment. Books used for important ceremonies, such as altar books or lectern Bibles, can quite well be covered with ornament, provided this ornament is good. They will be but a spot of gorgeousness in a great church or cathedral, and should be judged in relation to their surroundings and not as isolated articles.

There is a fashion now to value decoration in inverse ratio to its quantity, and demand that it should be concentrated on spots, leaving the greater part of the surface of articles bare. This is quite a reasonable way to treat a binding, but it is not the only way. A satisfactory binding can be made with little or no ornament, and there is then little fear of a disastrous failure. To cover a book all over with gold-tooled decoration is a more difficult thing to do satisfactorily, but it can be done, and, if well done, is well worth doing.

At the present time there are many binders working in England who are capable of turning out work of the highest class, and fortunately there are book-lovers here and in America with the taste and means to commission such work. Probably, if a man were bold enough to spend five or ten thousand pounds on binding the finest books that are being produced at the present time, he would find, if the money were wisely spent, that he had got a library that would be celebrated all over the world. There is an interesting revival in the use of arms-blocks on bindings, and when certain modern libraries come to be dispersed their owners will be remembered by their books in the same way as are the original owners of the many armorial bindings that have come down to us from the past.

There are some qualities that are common to all well-bound books. Of course abnormal books have to be treated specially, but it may generally be said that every leaf of a book should open right to the back. This means that all single leaves and plates should be attached by guards, and that no overcasting or pasting-in should be allowed, and it also means that the back should be truly flexible. The sections should be sewn to flexible cords or tapes, the ends of these should be firmly attached to the boards, and the back should be covered with some flexible material, such as leather, which, while protecting the sewing-thread or cord, shall itself add to the strength of the binding. A fine binding will have many other features added by way of refinement or elaboration, but unless it has these qualities it is likely to be an unsatisfactory piece of work. A well-bound book should open well and stay open, and shut well and stay shut. The binder can bind any book so that it will not open, but there are some books that he cannot bind so that they will open and shut “sweetly.”

Bookbinding is only one part of the larger craft of book production, and to obtain a perfect book it is necessary that the workers in each branch of the craft should have a common ideal of what a book should be, and that each should do his part in such a way that this ideal may be attained. Unfortunately it too often happens that the printers are quite content if their printing looks perfect as it comes from the press, with the result—through errors in the choice of paper or the number of leaves to a section—that the bookbinder has unnecessary and sometimes unsurmountable obstacles put in his way. A book that will not open freely and that gapes like a dead oyster when it ought to be shut is not pleasant to use, and when these faults are noticed the binder generally gets the blame. Sometimes he deserves the blame, for the fault may be his, but more often than not the fault lies with the paper. To open a book a certain number of leaves of paper must be bent, and if the paper is so stiff that a single leaf will not fall over by its own weight, the book cannot be made to open quite satisfactorily if bound in the ordinary way. By swinging each leaf on a guard it is possible to bind a pack of playing-cards into something like a book which will open and shut freely, but that this can be done is no excuse for the production of books which necessitate this drastic treatment before they can be bound satisfactorily.

William Morris, when he founded the Kelmscott Press, did more than revive fine book-printing; he established a tradition for books that were eminently bindable, and the presses that followed his lead kept up the tradition; so that we have in England a large number of beautifully printed books that are worthy of the best binding, and that impose no unnecessary difficulties on the binder.

Mr. Cobden-Sanderson did much to revive the use of the tight or flexible back. In this style the leather is attached directly to the back of the sections, and so helps to hold them firmly together. All leather-bound books had tight backs until about a hundred years ago, when the hollow back came into general use. A tight back should throw up when the book is opened; that is to say the back, convex when the book is shut, should become concave on the book being opened. This causes a certain amount of creasing in the leather, and this creasing is not good for gold tooling; but with a well-bound book the damage is not serious, and important constructional features must not be sacrificed for the sake of the decoration.

The hollow back does not crease the leather, and so is preferred by finishers, and besides it is easier to cover a hollow back neatly than a tight one; but the strain of opening and shutting, which should be distributed evenly across the back, is in the hollow back thrown on the joints, with the result that the leather is apt to break at these places unless specially strengthened, as is the case with well-bound account books.

While “flexible” backs that are truly flexible are undoubtedly the best, some binders line up their backs so stiffly under the leather as to allow little or no movement when the book is opened. This avoids the creasing of the leather and leaves the decoration uninjured, but the book will not open freely, and there is no virtue in such a tight back. Leather is chosen for binding because of its toughness and flexibility, yet binders deliberately sacrifice this last quality in order to obtain extreme neatness or to hide faults in the forwarding.

It is the fashion in some quarters to admire as the perfection of craftsmanship an exact and hard square edge to the boards of a book. This can only be got by paring the leather down till it is as thin as paper and has consequently very little strength. A softer, rounder edge is natural to a leather-covered article, and it is unreasonable to expect the qualities of a newly planed board in a material so wholly different in character. The edges of the leather-covered board should have a distinctly flat face, and clumsiness will be avoided by any good craftsman. It is only the extreme sharpness, so much admired by unknowing people, that is objectionable.

In the treatment of the edges of the leaves fashion has gone to two extremes: some book-lovers demand that the edges should be entirely uncut, while others require them to look like a solid piece of metal. The rough edges, or “deckle,” on hand-made paper is a necessary defect due to the way the paper is made. These rough edges were always trimmed off by the early binders because they were unsightly, difficult to turn over, and harboured dust. Some of the shorter leaves would usually be left untrimmed. Such short leaves are known in the trade as “proof,” i.e. proof that the book has not been unduly cut down. To gild a book-edge absolutely solid the binder must cut down to the shortest leaves and so often has to reduce the size of the book unreasonably; but an acceptable compromise between entirely uncut edges and solid gilding can be arrived at if the sections of a book to be finely bound are trimmed singly and gilt “in the rough” before sewing. This enriches the edges but does not disguise their nature nor necessitate their being unduly cropped.

In recent times there has been much good work done in England in the investigation of bookbinding materials. The Royal Society of Arts Committee on “Leather for Bookbinding” has established standards of leather that have made it possible for binders to procure skins that are uninjured in the process of manufacture, and bookbinding leather of the very highest class is now being produced in England. The leather manufacturers are able to dye leather any reasonable shade without the use of sulphuric acid, and it is only some of the lighter fancy colours that are unprocurable in “acid free” leather. That these “fancy” shades are unprocurable in uninjured leather is a distinct gain, as they mostly fade, and books bound in such leather seldom look as if they were intended to be used.

There are various ways by which leather-bound books may be decorated, but tooling, either in gold or blind, is by far the commonest, and it is tooled bindings that we are considering here. “Blind” tooling is the impression of hot tools on the leather. The most satisfactory tools for blind work are those cut die-sunk like a seal. These, by depressing the ground, leave the ornament in relief. Tools for gold work are cut so that the ornament with the gold is depressed below the surface of the leather. These tools may be used without gold, but blind tooling produced in this way has little of the character associated with this work when it was at its best, i.e. up to the end of the fifteenth century. Gold-tooling came to Europe from the East, and preserved a tradition of Eastern design for a very long period. The English gold-tooled bindings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are often strangely Eastern in the style of the decoration.

The ornamentation of fine bindings reached almost its lowest ebb in England about the middle of last century. Of technical skill there was never any lack, but decoration had lost vitality, and the ornamental bindings of this time are for the most part copies or parodies of the work of earlier binders. William Morris designed a few very beautiful gold-tooled bindings which were covered all over with the impressions of tools, each one of which represented a complete plant. His friend, Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, who gave up the practice of the law to learn the binder's craft, produced books that are unsurpassed in the delicate beauty of their decoration. Before his time there had been few attempts to combine tools to form organic patterns. Mr. Cobden-Sanderson's tools were very elementary in character, each flower, leaf or bud being the impression of a separate tool. These impressions were combined in such a way as to give a sense of growth, and yet in no way overlapped the traditional limitations and conventions of the craft. Mr. Cobden-Sanderson got his results by sheer genius in the right use of simple elements. He used inlays very sparingly, and his finest bindings depend entirely on the effect of gold on leather. The style of design which he founded has spread throughout the trade, mainly through the teaching at the various technical schools, and it is now comparatively rare to find an elaborate binding of recent date without some attempt having been made to connect the tools so that they together form an organic whole.

The use of composite tools (that is, tools which form a whole design in themselves and do not bear any definite relationship to one another) is now restricted to cheap bindings. The corners and centres on the backs of school prizes are familiar, if degraded, examples of the use of such tools. Together with the Cobden-Sanderson style of decoration there has been a marked revival of the use of interlacement in gold-tooled designs. Interlaced gold lines, if not so intricate as to be bewildering, may be very beautiful, but in this, as in most other crafts, the highly-skilled workman loves to attempt the almost impossible, and some of the recent interlaced patterns fail on account of their over-elaboration and consequent restlessness.

Mr. Charles Ricketts designed some very notable gold-tooled bindings for the Vale Press. These bindings have hardly received the attention they deserve, and the style has not spread to any extent, possibly because Mr. Ricketts' refinement and delicacy in the use of fine lines are not easy to acquire. These bindings have an architectural quality that places them in a class by themselves. Mr. Cobden-Sanderson and Mr. Ricketts, in their entirely different styles, have shown that gold-tooling may be extremely beautiful as decoration without overstepping the traditional limits of the craft, and in the case of the most successful bindings now being produced these traditional limits have been recognised. Gold-tooling is by its nature a limited means of expression, though exactly where the limits lie must be a matter of feeling and taste rather than of knowledge. Certainly in some of the elaborate bindings now being produced the limits of the craft have been passed, and while serving to show amazing dexterity on the part of the finisher, these bindings are less successful artistically than many that are less ambitious in technique.

There is no clearly marked school of blind-tooling at present, though here and there the method has been used with success. Mr. William Morris designed a notable binding in white pigskin for the Kelmscott “Chaucer.” Many copies were so bound at the Doves Bindery, but most of the attempts that have been made to carry out work in the same style have been comparatively unsuccessful.

There have been a good many efforts made to revive modelled leather-work as a means of decorating books, but although this method is capable of producing very fine results, most of the binding in modelled leather shown in recent exhibitions cannot be said to be successful. Any work that has to be done on the leather before the book is bound is almost doomed to failure, because leather which is modelled before binding cannot be handled by the binder with the freedom that is necessary if he is to make a workmanlike job of the covering. It is, however, possible to put quite sufficient relief in modelled leather after a book is bound, if the leather be reasonably thick; indeed high relief for most books is objectionable.

Many of the old bindings had fine metal mounts and clasps. If clasps are used on modern books, as a rule they should be flush with the sides, so as not to scratch their neighbours when taken in and out of shelves. Raised clasps and bosses are only suitable for books that are expected to stand permanently on a lectern.

In criticising decorated bindings there is a danger of falling into the common error of generalising from isolated instances. You cannot put too much ornament on a thing as small as a bookcover if the ornament is good enough. A book well bound in beautiful leather may be perfectly satisfactory and beautiful by virtue of good workmanship, fine material and colour. A binding covered with fine gold-tooling may be just as restful and far more beautiful, but while there is comparatively little scope for failure in the plain binding, there are appalling pitfalls if the cover be lavishly decorated. There are, of course, all sorts of degrees of decoration between an absolutely plain binding and one covered entirely with gold, but there are some qualities common to most successful tooled ornament.

There are few bindings that are quite successful unless the ornament is arranged on a symmetrical plan. Any attempt to portray landscape, human figures or naturalistic flowers is almost doomed to failure. Gold-tooling is not a suitable medium for rendering such subjects.

Lettering should be well designed and free from eccentricities. The problem of lettering a long title across a narrow back may necessitate ungainly breaking of words, but where this is done it should only be done from obvious necessity, and the reasonable necessity for this fault should be apparent. To letter books in type so small as to be quite illegible, lettering that looks from a short distance like a gold line, is more unreasonable than almost any breaking of words that allows the use of letters of a larger size.

Fine binding is an expensive luxury but not an unreasonable one compared with many others. We have now in England a school of really fine binding, and the most reasonable and unobjectionable form that luxury can take is the use of beautiful things in everyday life. If a book is well bound and well decorated it is fit to use, and in choosing a book to be expensively bound it would be better to choose the book most often used than one which would be put away unopened. Most fine bindings would be greatly improved by use, and the reasonable using of them would give immense pleasure, a pleasure that would justify the binder's care and trouble and the purchaser's outlay. The use of a beautiful thing gives a far higher form of pleasure than does the mere sense of ownership.

BOOKBINDING WITH GEOMETRICAL BORDER IN POINTILLÉ BY KATHARINE ADAMS