It may be necessary to introduce a few words about the material on which the Printed Book has at various times been brought before its readers, or at least its purchasers. The oldest European fabrics employed for books of this class (not MSS.) were paper and parchment, the latter very often prepared with very slight care, but the former of remarkable strength and durability. The cost must have been at first very onerous; but impressions of ancient volumes were usually limited. By degrees, fine vellum, alike conspicuous for its delicacy of quality and beauty of tone, was introduced, and became fashionable among the patrons of literature in Italy and elsewhere during the Renaissance. No such luxurious mode of presenting the type and giving full effect to the work of the illuminator, which so constantly formed a feature and a charm in the productions of the presses of the Continent of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has ever since been found possible. It is rather singular that not merely classical authors and other editiones principes received this sumptuous treatment, but even such books as grammars and theological treatises. A copy of the Grammatica of Alexander Gallus (or De Vill Dei) was lately offered for sale by auction, and realised £23; it was printed on vellum of excellent character and colour about 1480.

A visit to the galleries where the show-cases are ranged at the British Museum in intelligible order, is by no means the worst method of arriving at an introductory or general acquaintance with this aspect of the matter. For there examples of printing on parchment or vellum in all countries from the earliest period are conveniently grouped together. The National Library is fairly rich in treasures of the present class, partly owing to the two facts, that it has inherited a good deal from the old royal collections and the Grenville one, and that it was already in the field when prices were more consistent with the financial resources of the institution. Among the productions on vellum here to be found are the Gutenberg, and Fust and Schoeffer, Bibles (1455-62); the Psalters of 1457 and 1459; the Cicero of 1465; the Livy of 1469; the Book of St. Albans, 1486; one of the two known Caxtons on vellum (the Speculum VitÆ Christi, bought of Mr. Maskell in 1864); the Sarum Missals of 1492 and 1497; the Great Bible of 1540; and the Works of Aquinas, in seventeen folio volumes, formerly belonging to Pope Pius V. and Philip III. of Spain. A curious episode is connected with the last item. In the time of Panizzi the copy was offered for sale, and the Museum commission (£300, we believe) was topped; but the book occurred again, and was acquired by Coventry Patmore, who presented it to the establishment, where he had for many years been an officer.

On the whole, there is no doubt that the English, and much more the Scotish, printers employed this costly and durable substance far more sparingly than those of the Continent. Of many no specimens whatever have descended to us; and the circumstances render it improbable that we shall hereafter add sensibly to our stores in this direction. In the case even of the Romish service-books, printed on paper, it is a matter of common knowledge among book-lovers that the Canon MissÆ, which was subject to exceptional wear and tear, is usually on vellum.

In our own language, works which we are accustomed to view as essentially popular were occasionally struck off (in a few copies, no doubt) on parchment. There is the edition of Helyas, Knight of the Swan, printed by Wynkyn de Worde, 1512, of which only one copy remains, and the metrical version of the Ship of Fools, from the same press, 1509, of which an unique copy is in the National French library. Let us recollect, too, the Scotish Boece of 1536, the Great Bible of 1539, and the Tudor Prayer-Book of 1544.

Except paper, parchment (called in some old documents parthemen), and vellum, there are no substances which can be said to boast any degree of antiquity, so far as European literature is concerned. We have, as is sufficiently well known, many others of comparatively modern introduction, which tend to impart to the editions or specimens for which they are employed a special value and curiosity. Such are: (1) Whatman's hand-made paper; (2) Dutch paper (papier de Hollande), of which there are cheap and worthless imitations; (3) China paper; (4) India paper; (5) Japanese (so-called) vellum; (6) tinted paper; (7) writing paper; (8) motley paper or paper of different colours; (9) silk; (10) satin.

The edition de luxe has consumed in its time an enormous total of some of these descriptions of receptacle for literary products. The lovers of the Select in Books, who more commonly regard their possessions as vertu rather than as vehicles of instruction or amusement, not unnaturally prefer something which the ordinary purchaser cannot procure, or at any rate does not seek. The fancy appears to be, for the most part, worse than futile, unless it is that books with engravings sometimes gain by being taken off on one or another of these materials; although in practice illustrations are found to be just as apt to come out well on ordinary paper of good quality as on spurious vellum. It was not unusual in the last century, in Mexico and in South America, to print on silk even ordinary works; it may have been possibly found cheaper than paper. Satin is purely ceremonial.

Certain books occur of various dates, such as the Livre de Quatre Couleurs, printed on paper of various shades or colours, either for some passing reason or as a mere matter of fancy. A modern jest-book appeared not long since, harmoniously executed on motley paper in a motley binding—a humorous conceit!

It is sufficiently remarkable that neither the Printing nor the Book-binding industries ever erected themselves into societies or guilds, as did the representatives of so many trades far less important in the nature as well as the influence of their products. All the early typographers, at all events from the sixteenth century, were members of the Stationers' Company, and the investiture of books in liveries of different kinds became the function of an unprivileged and unchartered body, of which our knowledge is on that account even more limited and imperfect than it would otherwise have been. It is only through occasional and casual notices in correspondence or diaries that we hear of those who bound volumes for the older collectors, and we have to wait till we come down to the Harleian era, before we find artificers of this class in possession of a recognised calling and competent staff. Three employments, which have long been independent and distinct, those of the printer, stationer, and binder, were therefore at first and during a prolonged period in the same hands and under the same roof.

Anterior to the introduction of printed books, the literary product or record was either rolled up (volutus) or stitched, with or without a wrapper; and hence, when there were no volumes in the more modern acceptation in existence, there were rolls. We do not agree with the editor of Aubrey's Letters, &c., 1813, where, in a note to a letter from Thomas Baker to Hearne, he (the editor) remarks that the term explicitus was applied to the completion of the process of unfolding a roll: it always signified the termination of the labour of the scribe, and even in early printed books occurs in the form explicit to convey the same idea on the part of the printer.

The most ancient binders were the monks, who stitched together their own compositions or transcripts, or, when the volume was more substantial, encased it in oaken boards, which a subsequent hand often improved and preserved by a coat of leather. But laymen were occasionally their own binders, as we perceive in the note to Warton's Poetry,[3] where a "Life of Concubranus" in MS. is said to have been bound by William Edis, afterward a monk at Burton-on-Trent, while he was a student at Oxford in 1517.

At Durham and Winchester there were notable schools of art of the present class in the Middle Ages, and specimens occasionally occur, though rarely in good state. A very fine Winchester piece of work was sold in 1898 among William Morris's books (No. 580), and all over the country and abroad, even down to the present time, the inmates of religious institutions occupy themselves with the same industry on a less ambitious scale, and with infinitely less artistic and picturesque results.

When Barclay wrote his English paraphrase of Brandt's Stulltifera Navis about 1508, it almost seems as if the type of connoisseur, who understood the outside better than the interior of a book, was already in evidence, for the writer says:—

In Barclay's English Ship of Fools, 1509, it is stated that at that time damask, satin, and velvet were employed as luxurious materials for the covering of books, and it seems to have been usual to draw a curtain before the case in which they were preserved. Showy or gay bindings were approved, especially where the owner was not a reader, but, to quote the Latin text, was "Viridi contentus tegmine libri."

The formation of Book-binding into a distinct employment and organisation must have preceded any explicit evidence of the fact. The gradual increase in the output of literature of all kinds from the days of Elizabeth necessitated the surrender to an independent craft of the envelopment of volumes in various liveries, more especially when the French and Italians had set the fashion of elaborate ornamental patterns and rich gilding. Already in the time of Edward VI. the tariff chargeable for certain quasi-official publications, such as the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, was fixed by Government, and at a later date scales of prices for binding in different styles or materials were periodically printed. That of 1646 is reprinted entire in the Antiquary for 1886.

The most usual styles were plain brown sheep or calf without any lettering, a publisher's label inside the volume sometimes supplying the latter deficiency, and communicating to a shelf of books an aspect far from picturesque; but vellum or parchment of varying consistence was also a favourite and inexpensive mode of covering the contents of a library. Morocco and russia were later innovations, and the former is not unusually found altogether free from decoration or gilding and with a lettering, probably abbreviated and obscure, on the back. Very sumptuous examples alike of calf and turkey leather binding frequently present themselves, either executed for ordinary persons, or without any note of the original owner; many are more or less successful copies of Continental models, such as the Lyonnese calf, the Grolier and Maioli pattern; but in general our ancestors seem to have been satisfied with the paned sides and floriate back, unless heraldic accessories intervened to usurp the space occupied by the lateral ornament or (as in some of John Evelyn's or his sovereign's books) a gilt ornamental cypher formed the dorsal embellishment.

A visit to some old church or parish, or even cathedral, library nowadays may afford a notion of the external aspect of the early book-closet of the English student or amateur. The glass case is conspicuously absent; the shelf on which the volumes are ranged has to our eyes a ragged, slatternly look; and nothing can well be more opposite to modern taste. Yet the feeling for the printed matter between the two covers or behind the paper label was more genuine, may be, and more practical when a handful of volumes, reflecting the personal predilections or requirements of the owner, gradually accumulated, and the acquisition did not amount to a pursuit, much less to a passion and a competitive race.

The professional binding of books in our country, whether they had been actually produced here or had been purchased abroad, was at the outset almost exclusively executed by printers, who must have had a special department to carry out this branch of work. We hear of the site of Dean Colet's original school having been a bookbinder's, and of the teaching establishment occupying the upper part of the building. The usual style of binding appears to have been the covering of stamped leather, of which such a rich store of examples still survives, and which was copied from the German and Low-Country models. For weightier books oaken boards frequently served as a foundation, on which the leather was laid. Our sovereigns and nobility employed Pynson, Berthelet, Raynes, and other typographers to clothe the volumes which formed their libraries, before the more luxurious and splendid fashion was introduced of investing them in richly gilt calf bindings, with or without armorial cognisances, and these were again superseded by the adoption of the Continental taste for Levant morocco (maroquin de Constantinople).

Down to the time of the earlier Stuarts the binding department more than probably remained part of the printer's functions, and calf or sheep was the usual material employed. Thomas Vautrollier, however, the Elizabethan typographer, who carried on business in the Black Friars, and who adopted the Anchora Spei as a device on his title-pages, seems to have occasionally bound copies of his own publications in morocco with the same symbol on the covers in gold—perhaps to order; and Lyonnese calf was another style in favour at the same date. Some highly preserved specimens of the latter have descended to us. Another of the earlier essays in England in the direction of morocco bindings appears to have had in view as a model the Grolieresque style of decoration. A copy of a Latin Bible printed at Venice in 1537, and presented in 1563 by the Earl of Arundel to Sir William Petre, bears the crest of the Fitzalans, a white horse, on sides enclosed in a painted design, the compartments filled in with a dotted pattern. But examples of the same or a similar class are by no means uncommon. A copy of a very common volume, Knolles's History of the Turks, 1638, was sold among the Morris books in 1898 at a high price on account of the very charming red morocco binding, richly gilt, with the unusual feature of side-panels filled in with dotted scrolls.

Early Continental collectors more usually than our own registered not only the place and date of purchase on the fly-leaf or title-page, but the circumstances attendant on the binding, as we find in the volume of tracts elsewhere mentioned, put into their existing covers in 1469, in the nearly coeval assemblage of tracts formed and bound by Udalric Ellenbog in 1476, and in the Latin Petrarch of 1501, bound for Antonius Kressen of NÜrnberg in 1505, now in the British Museum.

The middle-period schools of collectors and binders, who displayed a preference for morocco over russia and calf, were assuredly wise in their generation. Much of the russia has perished, or is perishing fast, under a variety of deleterious agencies; and the more modern calf, at least, does not bear its years well. But morocco, at first more expensive, withstands infinitely better and longer the incidence of social life. What noble sets of books, as well as single volumes, have almost crumbled away in damp country-houses, sometimes relegated to the garret or the stable by the intelligent and highly-educated proprietors, while others have fallen a prey to gas and dust in town. These sources of injury and natural ruin no material can of course long resist; and, the foreigner often enjoying the advantage of a less impure atmosphere, and not usually aiming at a larger collection than may be necessary as chamber-furniture, his acquisitions are apt to come down to us in a more contemporary state, although we grant that, where certain postulates have been fulfilled, we have shown our capability of presenting to a distant age an assemblage of the ancient literature of our own and other countries as immaculate as when it changed hands over the counter in Tudor or in Stuart times.

Binding and Bibliography, no less than literature, are in opposite lobbies as regards the character of the objects which one sees submitted to periodical competition. The taste in books has undergone revolutionary changes; the volumes on which early owners lavished extravagant sums have too often become per se waste paper; and it consequently happens that a catalogue devoted to an account of such relics of the past has to register titles and names which play a subordinate part in the matter, and are, as it were, merely useful as a means of identification.

While a large number of splendid examples of binding in russia and morocco have been produced in Great Britain, there has scarcely been at any time a school of binding analogous to those which France, and even Italy, have known, each with its distinctive and recognisable characteristics; nor have we attained in the liveries of our books to the same splendour and beauty of decoration, or to an equal degree of historical or personal interest.

A large number of fine examples present themselves in our sale-rooms here, formerly ornaments of some of the noble collections formed in different parts of Germany; too often they show traces of neglect, yet occasionally they have preserved their pristine beauty and freshness almost unimpaired. They are, for the most part, of the very favourite class, where the oaken boards constitute a receptacle or foundation for an encasement of leather (frequently pigskin) stamped with some beautiful historiette on either side, and carrying the date and other particulars of origin and ownership. We meet with numerous specimens from time to time of the libraries of the Electors of Saxony and Bavaria in this picturesque and becoming raiment.

There should be by right, and with advantage, as distinct an intellectual spirit or element of thought in the binding as in the writing and printing of a book. A man who traces on the covers and back of a volume lines, curves, circles, crescents, scrolls, and other figures without harmony and without significance—in other words, without mind or esprit—is no true artist, but either an unskilful copyist or a rude beginner. Different schools naturally adopted new ideas of the beautiful or the elegant; some of our most ancient patterns were scriptural or mathematical; the age ruled the prevailing taste and fashion, and everything in and out of Nature has had its turn and its day. Then, again, nationality goes for something: the Frenchman is fond of his lis and the Scot of his thistle.

Artistic and historical book-covers have more than a special and technical importance, inasmuch as they contribute to enrich a pursuit which might otherwise become more limited in its interest than it is. For gay or splendid bindings assist in bringing the Book, manuscript or printed, within the category of antiquities or curiosities, where it awakens sentiments in the breasts of persons, neither literary nor bibliographical in their tastes, akin to those which they entertain for a specimen of old furniture or old porcelain; and so indeed we see entire libraries, which are little more than assemblages of triumphs of the binder's art and agreeable memorials of prior ownership. A once rather famous emporium in Piccadilly was known as the Temple of Leather and Literature, because the extrinsic was supposed to govern; and the same point is illustrated by the enormous difference in pecuniary value between copies of many old works in morocco and in more humble garb. Here Dress makes the book no less than in the song it is said to make the man. So it was with the three independent libraries of Mesdames de France, daughters of Louis XV. Each of these ladies had her favourite hue in morocco, with the royal arms on the sides; for Madame Adelaide it was red, for Madame Sophie, citron, and for Madame Victoire, green or olive. The ornamental details of early bindings, especially those of Continental origin, embrace nearly every section of natural history: beasts, birds, fishes, insects, flowers, and fruit, and endless varieties of geometrical lines and curves. A Spanish New Testament, printed at Venice in 1556, even presented on its sides what were described in the Ashburnham Catalogue as "richly gilt raindrops." Among flowers we most frequently meet with the rose, the daisy, the lily, and the tulip.

Many varieties of form in connection with the gift of books to friends or patrons formerly subsisted, apart from the autograph note inside the volume. We have adverted to the Grolier group of bindings and certain other allied types perhaps borrowed from Grolier, and the practice was followed, though on a very limited scale, in England, where the token in all cases was mainly confined to the title or fly-leaf, and consequently enters into a distinct category. A very unusual example of presentation occurs in a copy printed on vellum of Voerthusius' Consecrationis AugustÆ Liber Unus, printed at Antwerp in 1563, where the centres of either side of the volume are occupied by an inscription in gold letters to the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne.

Of the Grolier examples which have descended to us—and possibly the greater part has done so—we possess two or three types as regards the mode of registering the proprietorship; the books occur with and without the autograph: "Jo. Grolierij Lugdunensis: et Amicorum," which generally occurs at the end, and with variant mottoes: "Portio mea Domine sit in Terra Viventium," "Spes mea Dominus et verbo ejus fidem habeo," and "Æque difficilior." He was a noble patron of learning, and on the title of a volume on Music, printed in 1518, dedicated to him, appear his arms and the motto, "Joannes Grolierius Musarum Cultor."

To the same school belongs the equally well-known Maioli, with the similar method of establishing his claim: "Tho. Maioli et Amicorum;" Cristoforo Beneo of Milan ("Questo libro e de Christophore Beneo de Milano e soi Amize"); Antonio Maldonado, of whom a volume of Petrarch has on the upper cover the name of the poet, and on the reverse, "D. Antonio Maldonado," with a shield enclosing five fleurs-de-lis; and Penelope Coleona, with flowering vases heightened in silver, and her initials at the foot of the book.

This is, of course, a most fascinating and covetable class of possession, and the difficulty of procuring genuine specimens of the Henry Deux and Diane de Poitiers bindings, and of all the other sumptuous and artistic productions of a like character belonging to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, has naturally suggested to certain ingenious persons the desirability of counterfeiting them. The Maioli bindings have long been subject to this treatment and abuse; but at present almost every other book which offers itself in a fine state of preservation is suspicious from a wholesale system of forgery, which has more or less recently been introduced with considerable success, and culminated in an entire sale at a leading auction-room of a library almost exclusively composed of such fabrications.

Of the genuine old English bindings, the usual materials are vellum or parchment and sheep or calf. All these may be, and in general are, ostentatiously plain; but they are, on the contrary, susceptible of being rendered in the highest degree ornamental. Nothing is more agreeable to the eye, and even the touch, than an old book in contemporary gilt calf, with arms on the sides, or in the original vellum wrapper, or, again, in the plebeian mutton.

The two former modes of treatment may, as we have said, be developed to any extent in the direction of tooling and gilding; the sheep has to be left unadorned—simplex munditiis.

What can we desire more characteristic and harmonious than a Caxton, uncut and in oaken boards, or even in a secondary vesture of vellum, like the Holford copy of the Life of Godfrey of Bouillon? Or than a volume of Elizabethan poetry or a first Walton's Angler, in the primitive sheep, as clean as a new penny, like the Huth examples of Turbervile, 1570, and Walton? The purest copy of the first folio Shakespeare we ever saw was Miss Napier's, in the original calf, but wanting the verses. It sold at the sale for £151, and subsequently for over £400. There exist such things as Laneham's Letter from Kenilworth, 1575, Spenser's FaËry Queen, 1590, Allot's England's Parnassus, 1600, and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, 1611, in the pristine vellum wrappers; and one of the Bodleian copies of Brathwaite's most rare Good Wife, 1618, is just as it was received 280 years since from the stationer who issued it. Would any one wish to see these remains tricked out in the sprucest, or even the richest, modern habiliments?

Among ourselves in these islands we commonly prize and preserve (even in a leathern case) a highly preserved specimen of Tudor or Stuart binding; and there are instances where to exchange the old coat for a new one, however magnificent or (so to speak) appropriate, is not merely sacrilege, but absolute surrender of value. A copy of the first folio Shakespeare, of a Caxton, of Spenser's FaËry Queen, in unblemished primitive clothing, could not be re-attired without making the party convicted of the act liable to capital punishment without benefit of clergy.

Besides the methods and kinds of binding above mentioned, there are others of a metallic and a textile character. We find volumes clothed in bronze, silver, silver-gilt, gold, and embroidered silks, the last variety usually associated with the Nunnery of Little Gidding, without absolute certainty of correctness so far as the claim set up on behalf of that institution to be an exclusive source of such products goes. Mr. Brassington has furnished in his well-known work examples of all these more or less exceptional and luxurious liveries. In the most precious metal the most celebrated specimen is the Book of Prayers of Lady Elizabeth Tirrwhyt, 1574, formerly belonging to Queen Elizabeth, and ascribed to the Edinburgh goldsmith, George Heriot. Next in point of rarity to gold comes bronze; silver and silver-gilt are comparatively frequent; and the embroidered style is only uncommon where the execution and condition are unimpeachable, as in the case of a few in our public libraries. The most ordinary books found within embroidered covers are small editions of the Common Prayer and Psalms; and they are almost invariably in a dilapidated state. Gilding books was usually considered at a later epoch, at all events in France, part of the business of a binder, and so perhaps it may have been in the case of Dubuisson, who flourished about the middle of the last century at Paris; yet we observe on his ticket attached to an exquisitely gilt copy of an almanac for 1747, in red morocco of the period, simply "DorÉ par Dubuisson," as if that portion or branch of the work only had been his. Some curious episodes have ere now occurred in connection with sets of books, or even works in two or three volumes, in historical bindings, or with a remarkable and interesting provenance of another kind. It was only at the sale of the last portion of the Ashburnham Library (1898), No. 3574, that the third and fourth parts of Tasso, Rime e Prose, 1589, bound together by Clovis Eve for Marie-Marguerite de Valois Saint-Remy, was acquired by a French firm through Mr. Quaritch, the purchaser having already secured at the Hamilton Palace sale the first and second portions, also in one volume, in the same binding, and the set still wants Parts v.-vi., so that it will demand a small fortune to effect a perfect reunion.

It is hazardous to discount the durability and permanence of our best modern bindings of English origin, and to answer our own question, whether hereafter they will be appreciated in the same way as those of the old masters here and abroad. Yet we think that we can offer a valid and persuasive reason why we shall fall short of former ages in this handicraft. The feudal conditions and atmosphere, which go far to win our regard or arrest our attention in the case of the older binders and their work, have vanished, and can never revive. It is with the book from this point of view as it is from that of the autograph inscription or signature; both are extensions of the owner's personality; and what a personality it was! Those who follow us at a distance may find reason to think and speak differently; but we can at the present moment scarcely realise the possibility of our latter-day literature acquiring a pedigree and an incrusted fragrance such as belong to works, however dull and worthless in themselves, from the libraries of Grolier, Maioli, De Thou, Peiresc, or Pompadour. There is a sort of sensation of awe in taking up these volumes, as if they had passed through some holy ordeal, as if they had been canonised. It is not the piece of dressed leather with its decorative adjuncts which casts its spell over us: it is the reputation of the courtly patron of learning and art; of the statesman and soldier who sought a diversion in the formation of a library from severer employments; of the prince who loved to gather round him such evidences of his taste, or to lay them at the feet of a chÈre amie; of the licentious but superb Lady Marquise, who vied with her king in the magnificence of her books, as she did with his consort in that of her toilette—it is this which exercises upon our imagination its ridiculous yet unalterable sway.

It is impossible to avoid the discovery, if we take for the first time a survey of a library chiefly conspicuous for the splendour of its bindings, how almost invariably we are disappointed by the contrast between the exterior and the contents. It would probably be far from easy to fill a small case with examples where a really valuable book was enshrined in a covering of corresponding character. It is our ordinary experience to meet with some obsolete nondescript classic, or some defunct theological treatise of alike infinitesimal worth, in a sumptuous morocco garb, bestowed on it by the author as a compliment to his sovereign, or by the sovereign as an oblation to his mistress. In those princely establishments for which such things were destined and reserved, it was necessary that all the constituent features should correspond in external grandeur, the costumes of the great folks themselves, the furniture, the decorations, the equipages, the dependents, the book-bindings.

The remarkable changes of taste in books cannot be more powerfully and decisively exemplified than by the thousands of volumes which have descended to us in all languages and many branches of literature in liveries once only a subsidiary feature in the eyes of the possessors or acquirers, and at present often the sole title to regard and the sole object of competition. The work has become mere printed paper; but it is perhaps not less covetable as a triumph of bibliopegistic art, than as a memorial of the distinguished or interesting personages through whose hands it has passed to our own. The book, alas! has degenerated into a vehicle for external accessories. We are asked to admire, not the quality of the text or the style of the writer, but the beauty of the type, the splendour of the ink, and the elegance of the initial letters, on the one hand; on the other, the excellence of the leather, the brilliance of the gilding, the ingenuity and skill of the design, and the curiosity of the ex libris. But this has to be kept well in mind. It is the binding which constitutes the supreme feature of importance and attraction. A second copy in shabby attire may plead in vain its merits of production; but it fares as ill as a person of the highest respectability who labours under the misfortune of being badly dressed.

There is no point of distinction on the part of our own countrymen more marked and enduring than the very qualified allegiance which they give to the Parisian book-binding code. It is true enough that in England we admire not merely the old French School, but the modern one; but our loyalty and liking are by no means unreserved. A Frenchman, in nine cases out of ten, will not, in the first place, buy any book that was born out of France, any more than he will buy an article of furniture or china, or a coin, emanating from a less favoured soil; nor will he willingly acquire even a volume of native origin in any state but the orthodox morocco; but his first impulse and act, if he does so under protest, is to strip and re-clothe the disreputable article, and have it put into habiliments worthy of the cabinet choisi of Monsieur.

Now, we have had, and no doubt have still, on this side of the Channel certain heathens in the likeness of collectors who, no matter how perfect and how fresh, and how suitable, the original jacket, commit the heinous offence of following the Continental mode, and in such a way thousands of lovely examples, transmitted to us as heirlooms from our ancient families, have been sacrificed. But let us congratulate ourselves that we have among us many who know better, who will not even let the binder desecrate a faultless copy of Tennyson, Byron, Shelley, or Keats in the publisher's boards.

This is, however, not exactly an analogy. The analogy arises and grows possible when we compare such writers as Montaigne, MoliÈre, Corneille, or again, certain of the Elzevir series, with our corresponding foremost names. If we meet with the latter in vellum or in sheep, we only too gladly preserve them as we find them, provided that the outward garb is irreproachable. Of how many gems do we not know, in all the peerless glory of their pristine life, tenderly ensconced in morocco envelopes. Let them never be acquainted with another existence! Let no binder's unholy hand come near them! Let them be exhibited as historical monuments.

On the other hand, if we could oblige Monsieur to comply with this law, he would be dÉsolÉ; for it is not the matter which makes the book; it is the maroquin rouge.

Even in England, where we are more robust in our taste, the true collector is not a reader. He may buy a cheap book now and then; but he hands it to the cook when he has perused it. Such things are outside his category; they are for those interesting creatures the toiling million. His possessions or desiderata are not vehicles of instruction; they are far too valuable; they are objects of ocular and sensuous indulgence equally with china, paintings, sculpture, and coins. They are classable with bric-À-brac. You have an opportunity of appreciating the quality of the paper or vellum, the type, and the binding. The merits of the author are reserved.

It is better, if a gentleman leans a little to the practical side, and chooses to admit literature for actual reading, to have two cases, one for Books, the other for Bibliographical Simulacra. For it is not for one till he has graduated to lay his prentice fingers on a tome in the pristine mutton, or to endanger the maidenhood of a Clovis Eve, a Padeloup, or a Derome, which you must handle as if it were the choicest and daintiest proof medal or etching. Why, one has to bear in mind that he is not dealing with a mere ordinary source of intellectual gratification and improvement, but with a mechanical product perfect in all its parts. Let him come gloved, and his friend the owner will bless him.

Between a book bound in its original cloth or paper boards, and one in its rich vesture of morocco or russia, there is a contrast similar to that between a woodland and a park. In the one case, at a distance, perhaps, of fifty or even a hundred years from the period of publication, we hold in our hand a volume precisely in the state in which it passed from that of the contemporary salesman to the contemporary buyer; and not a stain nor a finger-mark save the mellowing touch of time is upon it anywhere. Let us look at the description in a sale catalogue of such a rarity as Lamb's Poetry for Children, 1807, "in the original grey boards, with red labels," or a copy of the first edition of Fielding's Tom Jones, absolutely uncut, and in the bookseller's pristine covers, or, better still, of the first part of the first edition of Spenser's FaËry Queen, 1590, in the Elizabethan wrapper! It is not the mere circumstance, let it be understood, of untrimmed edges which makes the charm; many a book or pamphlet occurs as innocent of the binder's knife as the lamb unborn, and highly desirable it is too; but to render an example of this class complete, its authentic outward integument in blameless preservation is as essential to its repute and its marketable worth as the presence of the claws is held to be in the original valuation of a fur of fox or beaver.

No educated eye can regard with indifference a more or less interesting volume clothed in a becoming livery by an accomplished artist either of other times or of these. If it is an ancient vesture, with the credentials in the form of a coat of arms, an ex libris, or a signature, or all of these, handed down with it to us, we appear to be able to disregard time, and feel ourselves brought within touch of the individual who owned it, of him who encased it in its lavishly gilt leathern coat, and of the circle to which it was long a familiar object, as it reposed unmolested in a corner of some petite bibliothÈque or study during generations—if the subject of which it treated had to be handled, a vicarious copy in working raiment doing duty for it. For it is not a book in the ordinary acceptation of the word; it is a souvenir of the past, a message and a voice from remote times, ever growing remoter, or an objet de luxe, a piece of literary, or rather bibliographical, dandyism. In any case, its identity is to be preserved and held sacred.

[3] Hazlitt's edition, 1871, iii. 193.