  Speaking only of quality of materials and workmanship, a book may be bound just as well in a simple cover as in an ornate one. Fine binding does not require adornment. It does require the services of a man of high skill and matching integrity, whose handiwork will inevitably display the quiet beauties of intrinsic quality. But in the hands of men who possess the spark of creative artistry, bookbinding can be more than pure craft work. Although the binder’s decorative tools are forever prefixed, each to reproduce its own set and simple pattern, they are infinitely flexible in the ways they can be combined. It is not the tool that makes a binding beautiful or ugly, but the hand that holds the tool—and even more the mind and eye that guide the hand. The history of bookbinding is studded with the names of men who were true artists in leather. For them the most rewarding commission a customer could give was a simple order to dress some work of lasting worth in a binding of appropriate beauty. In the Middle Ages all books were rare and valuable. Each volume was entirely lettered by hand and its pages were customarily “illuminated” with elaborately drawn initial letters and gilded marginal decorations. The binding of such a book was likely to be as painstakingly ornate as were its pages, and a few bindings were quite valuable in themselves. Before full leather covers became standard, the boards of some manuscript volumes—especially for a church altar or a royal library—might even be encased in beaten gold or silver and encrusted with enamel and semiprecious stones. The invention of printing from type, as everyone knows, had extremely far-reaching consequences on the spread of public education and enlightenment. It had also some effects that were not so desirable. In the didactic phrase of the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Printing brought small books, cheap books, ugly books.” Now it cannot be denied that most books today are smaller than the great manuscript tomes of the monastic scholars. They are cheaper, too. But it would be wrong to say that all books bound since Johann Gutenberg’s day have been ugly. To be sure, introduction of the printing press increased the flow of work to the bindery. But if the binder could no longer lavish time and care on every volume, he could still devote high artistry to an occasional book, steady craftsmanship to all. Innumerable examples from the hands of many binders since the fifteenth century attest that the cover of a printed book can be as beautiful as that of a manuscript book. The names of Nicholas Eve, Clovis Eve, “Le Gascon” (otherwise unknown), and Geoffrey Tory of sixteenth-century France, and Padeloup and Le Monnier in the eighteenth century, deserve mention. In England bindings are not as easily identified with their binders, but the names of Thomas Berthelet, royal binder to Henry VIII, and above all Samuel Mearne, binder to Charles II, stand out. Roger Payne was England’s most distinguished binder in the eighteenth century. Before the fifteenth century, European binders usually had worked ornamentation into leather “in blind,” that is, without gold leaf. The technique of applying gold seems to have been perfected by Islamic leatherworkers of Mediterranean Africa, and brought from Morocco to Europe via Spain and Italy. Sixteenth-century French binders carried this kind of adornment to a peak of intricate tooling and lavish gilding. Their English counterparts, while they imitated the French, tended to favor simpler designs and less gold leaf. In the late seventeenth century and continuing through the eighteenth, straight lines rather than curves became characteristic of English work. For example, the broken lines of the “cottage” style credited to Samuel Mearne resembled an outlined roof and walls. Later the “Cambridge” style became popular in England. It consisted of a vertical panel of thin lines Left, “cottage” style decoration on a 1674 Bible, bound in the shop of Samuel Mearne of London. Right, “Cambridge” style binding on a copy of Muscipula printed in 1728 by William Parks in Annapolis and bound by him. Around 1760 a Dutch binder developed a method of treating leather with acid to give it a marbled appearance, and other binders lost no time in prying the secret away from him. First among binders in England to learn the technique was an ÉmigrÉ German, John Baumgarten, who made the most of his advantage. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to Robert Skipwith in 1771, books “bound by Bumgarden in fine Marbled bindings” cost 50 per cent more than in plain bindings. In addition to national styles and local designs that developed at various times and places, certain binders perfected individual patterns of their own. In some cases Among the very large number of eighteenth-century bindings that survive, the great difficulty is to identify with any certainty the binder of a particular volume. In many instances—perhaps most—it is impossible to be absolutely sure on this point. Except in France, binders of the eighteenth century, or any period, who signed or labeled their work were relatively rare. One English craftsman who did identify his products was Roger Payne of London. An eccentric and a heavy drinker, Payne was nevertheless a careful worker and a creative artist in the bindery. His books are beautifully adorned with patterns built up with small tools that he designed and cut himself. In many of the books he bound, Payne included a detailed account of his work. The following statement, copied in part from a Bible now owned by Princeton University, is a good example:
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