the seventeenth, the French bookbinders had no equal, and if they
afterwards deteriorated, they had still many great names among their
ranks. Padeloup's binding of a 'Daphne et Chloe' of 1718, with the arms
of the Duke of Orleans, then Regent of France, is a masterpiece; and
then there are his bindings in mosaic, looking like lace-work, and the
masterly designs worked out for Madame de Pompadour, Queen Maria
Leczinska, and many other celebrities. Derome, the Abbe Du Sueil, and
Monnier were all fine binders, whose work is eagerly sought for. And
then comes the French Revolution, which for the time being seems to have
utterly demoralized art in all its branches. Most modern collectors who
affect notable bindings have to look to later days, when the surge and
storm of the turmoil had passed away, and when Thouvenin, Bauzonnet,
Duru, Trantz, Lortic, Marius-Michel, and many more, were in their prime.
English bindings, so far as past times are concerned, were never
remarkable for refinement or taste. Velvet or silk, frequently
embroidered and tasselled, was often used for royal books, and we also
meet with pasteboard covered with leather and studded with gilt
ornaments on the back. There is, however, not a trace of the genius of
Le Gascon or Derome in any of these productions, and the designs show
very little originality. Occasionally, however, an English binding is
produced which, bound in morocco--the introduction of which is placed to
the credit of James I.--has an extremely good effect, as in the case of
the 'Pontificale Romanum,' 1595, now in the British Museum. This
specimen is elaborately gold-tooled with the arms and badges of the
King. A facsimile of it will be found facing page 228 of Mr. W. Salt
Brassington's 'History of the Art of Bookbinding.' It is a clever and
characteristic piece of work in brown morocco, and gives a very good
idea of the highest form of English art of the period which it was
possible to produce.
The English, however, have never been at any period particularly
conspicuous for their talent in the art of designing book-covers, and it
is probable that the majority of well-informed persons who have not made
a study of this branch of art would, in case they were asked to
enumerate half a dozen good binders of English nationality, find
themselves unable to mention more than one. They would begin and end
with the talented but eccentric and thirsty Roger Payne, whose bindings
are often original and elegant, and who might, had he been able to keep
himself respectable, have attained an excellence worthy of the palmy
days of France. But Payne chose to live in a tumbledown garret, denuded
of plaster, and spent his money in the proportion of
For bacon .... 1 half-penny
For liquor ... 1 shilling
He was, moreover, dirty and ill-conditioned, and the only thing that
saved him from utter ruin even in his youth was the painful necessity of
having to work for a very long time in order to earn what any binder of
the present day would look upon as a trifle. Nevertheless, Payne was,
when he applied himself, a most conscientious artist, and, although the
owner of some costly manuscript or volume would certainly have been
horrified to find it lying in a corner of his garret, waiting its turn
in company with an old shoe or two, and the remains of the food which
Payne had been consuming a week or two before, yet he might be sure that
he would get his treasure back in the end, not the worse for its
company, but bound in a style that could not be equalled anywhere but in
Paris, and not even there at the same small cost.
Some of Payne's bindings--for he had his moods--are beautiful,
classical, and surprisingly artistic, and, notwithstanding his failing,
it is clear that he worked hard on occasion. In fact, it is the opinion
of many authorities that no English-born binder has ever succeeded, from
that day to this, in approaching the genius of Payne. Walther,
Staggemeier, and Kalthoeber, though they worked in London, were all
Germans. Lewis may or may not have equalled his predecessor, and the
same remark applies to Riviere and Bedford, whose names, however, are
too contemporary to invite comparison. Besides, the question is one of
individual preference, after all, and any binder, however excellent, may
have to yield the palm to another in some specific matters of detail.
The glamour of a binding, indeed, vanishes when criticism steps forward.
The indescribable something, which is at the same time everything, falls
to pieces the instant dissecting implements are produced, and the effect
is gone on the instant. The whole work of art must be regarded, and no
single part of it, and we may then dream, if we like, of all the strange
things that happened when it was ushered into the world. It is a pity
that antique and historic bindings are so extremely difficult to
procure. No one but a millionaire could hope to stock his shelves with
a representative assortment of bindings of different epochs and schools,
and even he might spend his whole life in searching for them.
There is something in a binding which fascinates, and yet hurls back the
inspired sneer of Robbie Burns with interest:
'Through and through the inspired leaves,
Ye maggots, make your windings;
But, oh! respect his lordship's taste,
And spare his golden bindings.'
Yes! some bindings are of greater interest, from every possible point of
view, than the leaves they protect, and but for their kindly care other
leaves which exist among our choicest possessions might have been
utterly destroyed. Many a book has been saved from death by the glamour
of its cover, and will yet be saved.
*CHAPTER X.*
*THE HAMMER AND THE END.*
The past ten years have witnessed rather more than 600 high-class sales
of books by auction in London alone, and the vast majority of the
collections dispersed to the winds during that period of time were not
fifty, nor forty, and, at a venture, not thirty years old. Nay! it would
be tolerably safe to go still further, and to say that the life of a
library is, as a rule, less than half that of a man. Though it may
consist of the products of antiquity, it has but a short period of
existence before it as a whole; and as book is added to book, and
manuscript to manuscript, and the sum total of volumes of either kind
continues to increase, so, too, it is all but certain that the closing
scene of its dissolution draws nearer and nearer to the end.
Generally speaking, the larger and more important a collection, the
shorter its life. There are exceptions, but they only prove the rule,
which may fairly be described as universal. Books are a valuable
species of personal property, and next-of-kin often prove unsympathetic
and unsentimental in the custody of them; besides, books cannot be
divided so satisfactorily as coin, and the first and almost necessary
step is to turn them into money when an estate has to be distributed
among many. This is the reason why there are so few great collections
in the hands of private individuals, and why they are in jeopardy every
day and hour.
In this respect, then, the life of a book is even less than that of a
man--an analogy which in no wise minimizes the value of existence to
either. A good deal of enjoyment can be crowded into a compass of thirty
years, and much information may be obtained in that period if only it be
sought for aright. To ask _cui bono?_ is a beggarly interrogatory which
might with equal force be thrust before all life's actions, and I would
not have it supposed that in my opinion it is a proper or even a
satisfactory question to put where books are concerned. I only deplore
the fact that to accumulate is usually to scatter the seeds of a
short-lived enjoyment which dies in October. Hence it is that lovers of
books have been known to cheat time and the hour, and to gratify their
own inclinations as fully as possible, taking steps to secure their
treasures from the hammer and the end, and have with these objects
established national libraries of the very utmost importance--libraries
which may certainly be destroyed in some great conflagration or by the
rush of shot and shell, but can never be dispersed for the sake of the
money they would produce, and will practically, therefore, remain intact
for many centuries.
This, it would seem, is really the only effectual way of preserving the
good and permanent things of this life for the benefit of those who come
after us, for the hammer, though it never destroys directly, does so
indirectly, if it be a fact that the whole is greater in every quality,
save number, than the parts which compose it. Here is an instance of
the contrary plan of hedging round our possessions with stipulations and
directions designed for their preservation. Among the great failures of
book-men let this be chronicled.
The mind travels back some five or six years to one of the high-priests
of a fast-decaying cult. He lodged at a farm-house which, being in the
direct path of advancing streets, has perhaps by this time been pulled
down. At the time of which I speak it stood in an ocean of mud, not far
from the highroad--a relic in the midst of surroundings so painfully new
that few strangers who wandered that way failed to pause at the
wicket-gate, and gaze on the thatched roof and warped windows that time
had doomed. Once or twice a year, seldom oftener--for book-men of the
type of the one who held sway there hate to be disturbed--I used to
claim admission to the one moderately large room that the house
possessed. Its walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and a
number of movable cases mapped out the surface into narrow alleys. Some
thousands of volumes, all bound alike, and consisting chiefly of
historical works in English and Latin, must have been here stored.
There were many rare books, and all were good of their kind, and most
had been well read. The ways of their owner, the lifelong occupant of
this crumbling cottage, were peculiar. He would get up at ten in the
morning to the minute, and after breakfast take a walk in the fields, or
perhaps to the city, returning at five precisely, winter and summer
alike. He was so accurate in his movements that people used to set
their watches by him, the new clock being generally out of gear. At
half-past five he drank tea out of an enormous basin, and smoked a clay
pipe, which it was his pleasure to light with a burning coal or at the
chimney of his lamp. Matches he detested, on account of the sulphur,
which, he said, fouled the tobacco and made it unbearable. At seven the
business of the day commenced, and was continued till two, and sometimes
three, in the morning--the business of reading hard without cessation,
except to take a pull at the basin or to fill and light the pipe. Very
pleasant were the winter evenings, when the wind howled round the gables
of the house, as it often did, and the night was as black as pitch.
This had gone on for thirty years without much, if any, variation, until
one day the bookworm was found dead at his post, surrounded by the only
real friends he had in the world, for the safety of which he had
provided as follows:
By his will, made some twelve months previously, he directed that the
whole of his property of every description, books excepted, should be
turned into money and divided between two persons named in equal shares.
The books he bequeathed to another worm, who lived a mile or two away,
and who used occasionally to drop in to compare notes, subject, however,
to the express condition that they should neither be sold nor otherwise
parted with, and be kept in the same state in which they then were. For
their further preservation he directed that the legatee should have the
use of the books for his life only, and that after his death they should
become the absolute property of a third person, at that time
comparatively young in years, a good scholar, and a man of money. One
would certainly have thought that these precautions would have sufficed
to preserve this library intact for a very considerable length of time;
but, as events turned out, it was carted off within a month and sold
piecemeal by auction to the highest bidders.
In the first place, it seems, the owner for life had looked over the
books, and not finding them sufficiently representative of the
particular branch of study to which he devoted himself, went to the
reversioner and proposed a joint sale. The latter demurred, not,
indeed, to the general principle, but to the suggested division of the
proceeds. He said that a life interest in the hands of a man of fifty
was worth less than a prospective inheritance of the whole by one much
younger, and in this he was right. An actuary very quickly calculated
the shares, and then came the hammer and the end.
There are hundreds and thousands of such cases, but not many bookworms
of the type I have mentioned. They are fast dying out, for they belong
to a very old school, which has no part or lot in these go-ahead days.
It would be pitiable to hear a graybeard say farewell to a class of
boys, and to see him totter to the door, which, as Epictetus says, is
always open; and still more pitiable would it be if we could enter into
his thoughts and regrets. Fortunately, we are as yet spared the pain of
such partings as these, for our school is new--brand new--and what few
old-time book-men are left feel out of place therein. Rather do they
regard us in the light of merry roisterers growing wise by painful
stages, whose presence is not as yet mellowed by experience, nor
sanctified by the touch of time.
And so there are two schools of book-men, one closed to all but the very
few, the other open to all who choose to enter, and in each there is a
table laden with delights. But at the head of each alike sits the
skeleton of Egyptian orgies, veiled, perhaps, after the manner of later
and more effeminate times, but still there. It is the same skeleton
that startled the Epicurean in the heyday of his pleasures, and
threatened him ere the banquet was half over. So also it menaces us,
for it clutches a hammer, and we know that it will very shortly proclaim
THE END.
_Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, London._