In bringing forward what may be called the younger generation of
binders, it is natural to speak first of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson as the
source from which they have drawn much of their inspiration. His work,
however, is not represented here, as it would be discourteous to go
against his wishes in the matter. Whatever may be the reasons for his
change of attitude in this respect, he has in the past done a great deal
to introduce his work personally to the public and to explain his method
and ideals. The pages of the _British Bookmaker_, a trade journal no
longer in existence, the _English Illustrated Magazine_, the
_Fortnightly Review_, testify to his former willingness that his work
should be known and appreciated. He has also been one of the main
supporters of the Arts and Crafts Society since its inception in 1888,
and his books have been the largest contribution to binding in its
occasional exhibitions. There too, as well as at the Society of Arts and
elsewhere in London and the provinces, he has lectured on the craft,
setting forth what he conceives to be its purport both in the limited
matter of its processes and achievements and in the wider aspect of its
relation to the wants and progress of society. Not long ago he published
a book on _Industrial Ideals_, which it is interesting to compare with
the collected papers by Mr. William Morris which have appeared on that
and kindred subjects. Mr. Morris always held up the ideal of the Middle
Ages as the goal towards which to strive. It was a time, he considered,
when the processes or means by which life is lived constituted the end
of life itself, without seeking for some other end external to them and
often incompatible with them. This idea of ‘art being the highest
function of life’ was the gospel to which he never ceased to direct the
attention of his followers, and the next step—the attempted
re-organization of life into conditions that enable art to realize
itself—thus followed as a matter of course. As a protest against the
mechanical exploitation of the arts for the sake of commercial success
in its worst sense, and with the attendant evils of excessive
competition, such a creed is most valuable, and has already had an
important effect on the decorative arts which we trust may be permanent.
But it would seem mistaken in theory and impossible of practice to
attempt a reversion to mediaeval ideals with the wholly altered
conditions of production, distribution and mode of living that are now
part and parcel of modern life. A crusade against the existing
conditions in which works of art are produced must, one would think, if
its criticism is to be operative, find some way of including in its
scheme of regeneration the great movements of commercial life which is
one of the features of the age, and which even the most optimistic could
hardly hope to stem. Here and there an individual may achieve a career
somewhat in accordance with mediaeval ways, content with the limitations
imposed by this ideal; but except in such isolated instances it does not
seem possible to return to the practice of the past, when, as Mr.
Lethaby says, ‘the designer of a gold cup made it and sold it over the
counter, and the art was thrown in like a Christmas almanack.’ Here
comes in the problem mentioned in a previous chapter. If, on the one
hand, there is too much tendency for the designer to be occupied only in
planning ornament for others to execute with the result that a certain
inevitableness is nearly always wanting in the finished product, yet it
may be better for a skilled workman to carry out the views of an artist
rather than try and evolve variants from a few types set before him. In
the frequent advocacy of a revival of past conditions which would
benefit the workman, there is one point that seems always left
unnoticed—a point of great importance; and that is the stringent means
taken in those days to protect the purchaser also. In the scholarly
little introduction called ‘Art in the Netherlands’ which Mr. W. H.
James Weale contributed to the Catalogue of the picture exhibition held
at Bruges in 1902, he gives a concise account of the conditions under
which alone a man could become a painter in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries; and what held good for painting held good also for the minor
arts of life. As long as the craftsman belonged to the guild of his
craft, he was bound by its rules to carry out his work honestly and
conscientiously, to use good materials, and to beautify it as far as he
was able. The corporation arranged for the education of its members.
They were apprenticed to masters responsible both for their technical
efficiency and the fulfilment of their duties of citizenship. Each was
bound to the other; the apprentice was to give zeal in his service and
the master to impart all he knew of his trade. Once the apprenticeship
at an end, the youth could work, as what would now be known as an
‘improver,’ with any master he liked, and in any town that he chose.
Later on, in order to become a master, he had to present himself before
the heads of the guild and give proofs of efficiency, promise obedience
to the rules of the corporation, and swear to carry on his work well and
honestly. Observe, however, that, although a master, he remained all his
life under the control of the governing body of the corporation, the
members of which could enter his shop at any moment, seize his materials
if of inferior quality, confiscate them, and inflict punishment upon
him. Lastly, in disputes between himself and his clients the guild was
called in to decide between them. We can imagine no condition less in
touch with the schemes of modern and social democracy, which so often
deal exclusively with the needs of the worker and neglect those both of
the employer and the consumer.
[Illustration: 18. BOUND BY DOUGLAS COCKERELL.]
[Illustration: 19. BOUND BY DOUGLAS COCKERELL.]
[Illustration: 20. BOUND BY F. SANGORSKI AND G. SUTCLIFFE.]
In connexion with this topic, mention should be made of Mr. C. R.
Ashbee’s experiment with the Guild and School of Handicraft. It began
its existence at Essex House in East London, and, after fourteen years,
in May 1902, removed to Chipping Campden, a small Cotswold village where
the wool trade flourished during the Middle Ages and the silk trade in
the eighteenth century. The aim of the Guild is set forth in a little
pamphlet, distributed to visitors at the Dering Yard Gallery, 67A New
Bond Street, where the work of the school is annually exhibited. It need
only be said here that its object is to set a higher standard of
craftsmanship by liberating the workman from the restrictions of the
trade shop, and directing his independence away from purely
individualistic efforts on to lines of art service to the community, and
that it is conducted co-operatively, the men having an interest and a
share in the concern and its government. While recognizing the
importance of what a man does and the conditions under which he does it,
both to himself as a citizen and to the community for which he labours,
the Guild endeavours to strike a mean between the socialism that cares
only for the worker and the commercialism that disregards him and his
idealistic as well as material needs. The work carried out at Chipping
Campden is very various, and includes furniture, metal work, jewellery,
printing and binding. After Mr. Morris’s death, Mr. Ashbee acquired the
plant hitherto in use at the Kelmscott Press, and began a series of
books, first in a Caxton type and later from a fount of his own design.
Binding followed almost as a matter of course on these issues from the
Essex House Press; and in connexion with it, besides the ordinary
plain-tooled leather bindings, excellent in restrained ornament, he has
revived certain fifteenth-century styles for which he has a special
predilection, and which include the use of enamels and wooden boards,
the latter often carved in low relief. The bindings, though designed for
the most part by Mr. Ashbee, are carried out by Miss Power, who is in
the main responsible for them. These books raise again the question
whether such deviations from the ordinary paths are legitimate attempts
to enlarge the limitations of the binder’s art. The ultimate serviceable
use of a book should ever be kept in sight, and must in the end
determine the matter. Leather and vellum, tooled with a few fine stamps,
disposed with taste and restraint, will always remain the best coverings
for books, because they are unobtrusive and can be pleasantly handled
and easily disposed. Work that is embossed, enamelled, carved, or even
too decorative in colour for unlimited production, can only be desired
as occasional specimens of interest in themselves, and as exceptions
proving the rule.
[Illustration: 21. BOUND BY DE SAUTY.]
[Illustration: 22. BOUND BY DE SAUTY.]
Mr. Douglas Cockerell, a pupil of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, has written the
first of a new series of technical handbooks on the artistic crafts
which is a model of the kind and should prove the text-book for all
future binders. It is, no doubt, the outcome of some years’ teaching at
the County Council School in Regent Street, where, for many years, he
did excellent work in training the younger men to an intelligent
interest in the various processes of their craft. No craft can be well
learned anywhere but in a practical workshop; and he considers the value
of class teaching to be limited to helping those engaged in a trade, and
that such help is of great value in giving higher ideals and encouraging
experimental work. From the beginning Mr. Cockerell has been specially
interested in the repairing of books and in the preservation of old
covers, and has given his pupils some training in all that relates to
the care of books. There are numbers of old bindings that after four
hundred years of wear and tear are still capable of fulfilling their
original purpose of protection, with a little help from modern hands. To
give a new lease of life to fine old books is really of far greater
importance than the continual production of new and pretty bindings. Mr.
Cockerell’s original work is well known both here and in America, and
there is luckily a great deal of it that is simple as well as highly
decorated. It is comparatively easy to do the latter; but a plain
binding that yet has the stamp of the maker’s individuality is a very
exceptional achievement, and in work of that character Mr. Cockerell is
unsurpassed.
[Illustration: 23. BOUND BY MISS ADAMS.]
Mr. F. Sangorski and Mr. G. Sutcliffe, who were formerly with Mr.
Cockerell, have started a bindery of their own, and are engaged both in
teaching and doing varied work of a pleasant character. Trained in the
methods of Mr. Cockerell at the Technical School at 316 Regent Street,
Mr. Sutcliffe now controls the teaching for the County Council at its
branch establishment in Camberwell, and Mr. Sangorski that of the
Northampton Institute in Clerkenwell.
Mr. de Sauty is another young binder, and his work is of considerable
merit. His inlays are distinguished for the taste shown in the
association of colours, and his finishing has some of the brilliant
qualities of the French school, seen particularly in the finely studded
tooling of which he seems particularly fond. He has now the post
formerly held by Mr. Cockerell.
[Illustration: 24. BOUND BY MISS MACCOLL.]
[Illustration: 25. BOUND BY MISS ALICE PATTINSON.]
In concluding this sketch of Bookbinding in England as it appears
to-day, we must not omit to speak of the entrance recently effected by
women in many of the handicrafts, and notably in the one under
consideration. Quite a number are now trying to make a livelihood out of
bookbinding; and possibly, therefore, a few words less of criticism than
of counsel may not come amiss. It may be said that there are certain
conditions absolutely necessary for successful achievement, quite apart
from financial gain, which is another matter. The first of these is a
workshop training, which, though impossible some years ago, is now no
longer so within certain limits; that is to say, there are one or two
binders with small workshops who undertake to give women systematic
teaching for a limited time. In a workshop they will see a variety of
work that they will miss if taught privately, and they will learn the
habit of rapid and dexterous manipulation of tools and materials without
which it is impossible to work quickly enough for a profitable return
upon the outlay. A second most necessary qualification is that they
should have the physique for standing and working at a bench during the
hours of an ordinary working day. For binding is not like other less
specialized crafts that can be taken up at odd hours and laid aside with
equal facility, but needs concentration of mind as well as sureness of
hand. A third element in the desirable equipment is a certain faculty of
imagination controlled by right feeling or good taste, so that the
results of workmanship have the note of individuality without
eccentricity. In art as in life, personality is the one thing needful,
and we may fairly look to women to show the realization of it that can
hardly be expected from those working in the stereotyped grooves of
production.
[Illustration: 26. BOUND BY MISS MAUDE NATHAN.]
And what is to be said of binding as a means of livelihood? Experience
has shown that properly trained women can do as good binding as men,
though not upon large and heavy work, and if they do it well enough some
of them can earn a fair wage, while if they fail to reach a high
standard they had better for all practical purposes let it alone. But to
hold out any inducement to the woman who really needs bread-and-butter
to take up binding as a lucrative employment, as is done in some
quarters, should be characterized with the severity it deserves. Many
women need but an addition to their income, and to such, if they are
willing to incur the expense of training and plant, and if they realize
the experimental nature of the undertaking, binding may be recommended
as a sufficiently pleasant occupation. Whether financial success comes,
however, or not, must depend upon the amount of work turned out, on the
originality and finish with which it is executed, and last, but not
least in importance, on the finding of a market. Booksellers are now so
overstocked with so-called artistic bindings of moderate merit, and it
may also be said of moderate price, that they are not eager to accept
those of average quality at the more than average price that many women
expect their work to command. A market can always be found for the best
of everything; but as far as bindings are concerned it is certainly at
present overstocked with the second best, and attention may well be
directed to other branches of decorative work. There are more than
enough half-trained workers, both male and female; and it would be a
most undesirable result of what in itself is so eminently desirable—the
opening of the artistic crafts to women—if there were to be a great deal
of inferior work put into circulation obviously from the hands of those
who have never left the amateur stage. Women make a mistake, too, in
specializing in the production of decorated bindings. It is no doubt a
right principle to take the everyday things of life and decorate them
rather than invent useless ones for the purpose. It has, however, this
disadvantage, that it has now become almost impossible to get any of
these homely things made with the severe simplicity of mere
purposefulness. If one does not want the useless things, at least one
need not buy them; but it seems hard that the necessary ones should
become the _corpora vile_ on which the professed decorator exercises his
too frequently disordered imagination. One is unfortunately as little
likely nowadays to find a plain pepper-pot as one is to find a bound
book on which there is not some flower sprawling over its cover in a
meaningless attempt to be Japanese in sentiment. We want to get rid of
the affectation of contorted pattern and have more of the plain things
of life plainly made. As far as bindings are concerned, in addition to
this much-desired simplicity, there is, as has been said above, far more
important and useful work to be done than pattern making, in the
repairing and preserving of old books and records. An instance of this
may be seen at the present moment in an extensive matter undertaken by
Mr. Cockerell for the Middlesex County Council. A large number of their
ancient Sessions Books, many of them crumbling to pieces, are being put
in a condition for reference, the whole business of mending being done
by women under the direction formerly of Miss Wilkinson and now of Miss
M‘Ewan both pupils of Mr. Cockerell. Again, many more women might
adventure starting a business in the country or in a provincial town. In
America there is hardly a centre where there is any interest shown in
books which has not a woman binder who has probably been trained by Mr.
Cobden-Sanderson. We are glad to notice that Miss Adams has a bindery at
Broadway, that Miss Paget is at Farnham doing good honest work of a
comparatively simple nature, and that Miss Philpot has established
herself at Cambridge. Space forbids more than a few illustrations from
the work of women binders, numerous as they now are. Miss MacColl’s
books have for some time excited interest both on account of the
character of her brother’s designs and her manner of executing them by
means of a small wheel, which is an attempt to overcome the restrictions
of the finisher’s ordinary methods. Miss Nathan, Miss Pattinson and Miss
Stebbing are all doing well-considered and tasteful work on sound
principles. Of those at work in Scotland we need only mention the names
of Miss Jessie King, Miss McClure and Miss Jane F. Hamilton, Miss Alice
Gairdner and Miss Agnes Watson of Glasgow, as their work has recently
been specially dealt with in a paper by Mr. Lewis F. Day.
[Illustration: 27. BOUND BY MISS WOOLRICH.]
[Illustration: 28. BOUND BY MISS PHILPOT.]
In conclusion, it is necessary to keep in mind that binding is but one
of the sub-crafts that contribute to the production of books. Of late
each of these has pursued its own often faulty ideals regardless of its
relationship to the other contributory crafts. The paper-maker, the
printer and the binder would be more likely to work intelligently if
they had some mutual knowledge of each other’s needs and limitations.
The habit has been growing for some time of looking on the binding of a
book as the most important thing in connexion with it. But the binder of
the future, if his work is to be an effective contribution to decorative
art, must look on the book itself as the unit of interest, the thought,
embodied in typography and illustration, constituting a whole to which
in the decorated cover he adds, not an essential part, but as it were
the crown or coping-stone.
[Illustration: 29. BOUND BY MARIUS MICHEL.]