English Embroidered Bookbindings Part 1

English Embroidered Bookbindings.

by Cyril James Humphries Davenport.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

A new series of 'Books about Books,' exclusively English in its aims, may seem to savour of the patriotism which, in matters of art and historical research, is, with reason enough, often scoffed at as a treacherous guide. No doubt in these pleasant studies patriotism acts as a magnifying-gla.s.s, making us unduly exaggerate details. On the other hand, it encourages us to try to discover them, and just at present this encouragement seems to be needed. There are so many gaps in our knowledge of the history of books in England that we can hardly claim that our own dwelling is set in order, and yet many of our bookmen appear more inclined to re-decorate their neighbours' houses than to do work that still urgently needs to be done at home. The reasons for this transference of energy are not far to seek. It is quite easy to be struck with the inferiority of English books and their accessories, such as bindings and ill.u.s.trations, to those produced on the Continent. To compare the books printed by Caxton with the best work of his German or Italian contemporaries, to compare the books bound for Henry, Prince of Wales, with those bound for the Kings of France, to try to find even a dozen English books printed before 1640 with woodcuts (not imported from abroad) of any real artistic merit--if any one is anxious to reinforce his national modesty, here are three very efficacious methods of doing it! On the other hand, English book-collectors have always been cosmopolitan in their tastes, and without leaving England it is possible to study to some effect, in public or private libraries, the finest books of almost any foreign country. It is small wonder, therefore, that our bookmen, when they have been minded to write on their hobbies, have sought beauty and stateliness of work where they could most readily find them, and that the labourers in the book-field of our own country are not numerous. Touchstone's remark, 'a poor thing, but mine own,' might, on the worst view of the case, have suggested greater diligence at home; but on a wider view English book-work is by no means a 'poor thing.' Its excellence at certain periods is as striking as its inferiority at others, and it is a literal fact that there is no art or craft connected with books in which England, at one time or another, has not held the primacy in Europe.

It would certainly be unreasonable to complain that printing with movable types was not invented at a time better suited to our national convenience. Yet the fact that the invention was made just in the middle of the fifteenth century const.i.tuted a handicap by which the printing trade in this country was for generations overweighted. At almost any earlier period, more particularly from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the first quarter of the fifteenth, England would have been as well equipped as any foreign country to take its part in the race.

From the production of Queen Mary's Psalter at the earlier date to that of the Sherborne Missal at the later, English ma.n.u.scripts, if we may judge from the scanty specimens which the evil days of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. have left us, may vie in beauty of writing and decoration with the finest examples of Continental art. If John Siferwas, instead of William Caxton, had introduced printing into England, our English incunabula would have taken a far higher place. But the sixty odd years which separate the two men were absolutely disastrous to the English book-trade. After her exhausting and futile struggle with France, England was torn asunder by the wars of the Roses, and by the time these were ended the school of illumination, so full of promise, and seemingly so firmly established, had absolutely died out. When printing was introduced England possessed no trained illuminators or skilful scribes such as in other countries were forced to make the best of the new art in order not to lose their living, nor were there any native wood-engravers ready to ill.u.s.trate the new books. I have never myself seen or heard of a 'Caxton'

in which an illuminator has painted a preliminary border or initial letters; even the rubrication, where it exists, is usually a disfigurement; while as for pictures, it has been unkindly said that inquiry whence they were obtained is superfluous, since any boy with a knife could have cut them as well.

Making its start under these unfavourable conditions, the English book-trade was exposed at once to the full compet.i.tion of the Continental presses, Richard III. expressly excluding it from the protection which was given to other industries. Practically all learned books of every sort, the great majority of our service-books, most grammars for use in English schools, and even a few popular books of the kind to which Caxton devoted himself, were produced abroad for the English market and freely imported. Only those who mistake the shadow for the substance will regret this free trade, to which we owe the development of scholars.h.i.+p in England during the sixteenth century.

None the less, it was hard on a young industry, and though Pynson, Wynkyn de Worde, the Faques, Berthelet, Wolfe, John Day, and others produced fine books in England during the sixteenth century, the start given to the Continental presses was too great, and before our printers had fully caught up their compet.i.tors, they too were seized with the carelessness and almost incredible bad taste which marks the books of the first half of the seventeenth century in every country of Europe.

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, as is well known, the French thought sufficiently well of Baskerville's types to purchase a fount after his death for the printing of an important edition of the works of Voltaire. But the merits of Baskerville as a printer, never very cordially admitted, are now more hotly disputed than ever; and if I am asked at what period English printing has attained that occasional primacy which I have claimed for our exponents of all the bookish arts, I would boldly say that it possesses it at the present day. On the one hand, the Kelmscott Press books, on their own lines, are the finest and the most harmonious which have ever been produced; on the other, the book-work turned out in the ordinary way of business by the five or six leading printers of England and Scotland seems to me, both in technical qualities and in excellence of taste, the finest in the world, and with no rival worth mentioning, except in the work of one or two of the best firms in the United States. Moreover, as far as I can learn, it is only in Great Britain and America that the form of books is now the subject of the ceaseless experiment and ingenuity which are the signs of a period of artistic activity.

As regards book-ill.u.s.tration the same claim may be put forward, though with a little more hesitation. We have been taught lately, with insistence, that 'the sixties' marked an epoch in English art, solely from the black and white work in ill.u.s.trated books. At that period our book-pictures are said to have been the best in the world; unfortunately our book-decoration, whether better or worse than that of other countries, was almost unmitigatedly bad. In the last quarter of a century our decorative work has improved in the most striking manner; our ill.u.s.trations, if judged merely for their pictorial qualities, have not advanced. In the eyes of artists the sketches for book-work now being produced in other countries are probably as good as our own. But an ill.u.s.tration is not merely a picture, it is a picture to be placed in a certain position in a printed book, and in due relation to the size of the page and the character of the type. English book-ill.u.s.trators by no means always realise this distinction, yet there is on the whole a greater feeling for these proprieties in English books than in those of other countries, and this is an important point in estimating merits.

Another important point is that the rule of the 'tint' or 'half-tone'

block, with its inevitable accompaniment of loaded paper, ugly to the eye and heavy in the hand, though it has seriously damaged English ill.u.s.trated work, has not yet gained the predominance it has in other countries. Our best ill.u.s.trated books are printed from line-blocks, and there are even signs of a possible revival of artistic wood-engraving.

In endeavouring to make good my a.s.sertion of what I have called the occasional primacy of English book-work, I am not unaware of the danger of trying, or seeming to try, to play the strains of 'Rule Britannia' on my own poor penny whistle. As regards ma.n.u.scripts, therefore, it is a pleasure to be able to seek shelter behind the authority of Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, whose words in this connection carry all the more weight, because he has shown himself a severe critic of the claims which have been put forward on behalf of several fine ma.n.u.scripts to be regarded as English. In the closing paragraphs of his monograph on _English Illuminated Ma.n.u.scripts_ he thus sums up the pretensions of the English school:--

'The freehand drawing of our artists under the Anglo-Saxon kings was incomparably superior to the dead copies from Byzantine models which were in favour abroad. The artistic instinct was not destroyed, but rather strengthened, by the incoming of Norman influence; and of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there is abundant material to show that English book-decoration was then at least equal to that of neighbouring countries. For our art of the early fourteenth century we claim a still higher position, and contend that no other nation could at that time produce such graceful drawing. Certainly inferior to this high standard of drawing was the work of the latter part of that century; but still, as we have seen, in the miniatures of this time we have examples of a rising school of painting which bid fair to attain to a high standard of excellence, and which only failed for political causes.'[1]

To this judicial p.r.o.nouncement on the excellence of English ma.n.u.scripts on their decorative side, we may fairly add the fact that ma.n.u.scripts of literary importance begin at an earlier date in England than in any other country, and that the Cotton MS. of _Beowulf_ and the miscellanies which go by the names of the _Exeter Book_ and the _Vercelli Book_ have no contemporary parallels in the rest of Europe.

[Footnote 1: _English Illuminated Ma.n.u.scripts._ By Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, K. C. B. (Kegan Paul, 1895), pp. 66, 67.]

When we turn from books, printed or in ma.n.u.script, to their possessors, it is only just to begin with a compliment to our neighbours across the Channel. No English bookman holds the unique position of Jean Grolier, and 'les femmes bibliophiles' of England have been few and undistinguished compared with those of France. Grolier, however, and his fair imitators, as a rule, bought only the books of their own day, giving them distinction by the handsome liveries which they made them don. Our English collectors have more often been of the omnivorous type, and though Lords Lumley and Arundel in the sixteenth century cannot, even when their forces are joined, stand up against De Thou, in Sir Robert Cotton, Harley, Thomas Rawlinson, Lord Spencer, Heber, Grenville, and Sir Thomas Phillips (and the list might be doubled without much relaxation of the standard), we have a succession of English collectors to whom it would be difficult to produce foreign counterparts. Round these _dii majores_ have cl.u.s.tered innumerable demiG.o.ds of the book-market, and certainly in no other country has collecting been as widely diffused, and pursued with so much zest, as in England during the present century. It is to be regretted that so few English collectors have cared to leave their marks of owners.h.i.+p on the books they have taken so much pleasure in bringing together. Michael Wodhull was a model in this respect, for his book-stamp is one of the most pleasing of English origin, and his autograph notes recording the prices he paid for his treasures, and his a.s.siduous collation of them, make them doubly precious in the eyes of subsequent owners. Mr. Grenville also had his book-stamp, though there is little joy to be won from it, for it is unpleasing in itself, and is too often found spoiling a fine old binding. Mr. Cracherode's stamp was as graceful as Wodhull's; but, as a rule, our English collectors, though, as Mr. Fletcher is discovering, many more of them than is generally known have possessed a stamp, have not often troubled to use it, and their collections have never obtained the reputation which they deserve, mainly for lack of marks of owners.h.i.+p to keep them green in the memory of later possessors.

That this should be so in a country where book-plates have been so common may at first seem surprising. But book-plates everywhere have been used rather by the small collectors than the great ones, and the regrettable peculiarity of our English bookmen is, not that they despised this rather fugitive sign of possession, but that for the most part they despised book-stamps as well.

Of book-plates themselves I have no claim to speak; but for good taste and grace of design the best English Jacobean and Chippendale specimens seem to me the most pleasing of their kind, and certainly in our own day the work of Mr. Sherborn has no rival, except in that of Mr. French, who, in technique, would, I imagine, not refuse to call himself his disciple.

I have purposely left to the last the subject of Bindings, as this, being more immediately cognate to Mr. Davenport's book, may fairly be treated at rather greater length. If the French dictum 'la reliure est un art tout francais' is not without its historical justification, it is at least possible to show that England has done much admirable work, and that now and again, as in the other bookish arts, she has attained preeminence.

The first point which may fairly be made is that England is the only country besides France in which the art has been consistently practised.

In Italy, binding, like printing, flourished for a little over half a century with extraordinary vigour and grace, and then fell suddenly and completely from its high estate. From 1465 to the death of Aldus the books printed in Italy were the finest in the world; from the beginning of the work of Aldus to about 1560 Italian bindings possess a freedom of graceful design which even the superior technical skill quickly gained by the French does not altogether outbalance. But just as after about 1520 a finely printed Italian book can hardly be met with, so after 1560, save for a brief period during which certain fan-shaped designs attained prettiness, there have been no good Italian bindings. In Germany, when in the fifteenth century, before the introduction of gold tooling, there was a thriving school of binders working in the mediaeval manner, the Renaissance brought with it an absolute decline. Holland, again, which in the fifteenth century had made a charming use of large panel stamps, has since that period had only two binders of any reputation, Magnus and Poncyn, of Amsterdam, who worked for the Elzeviers and Louis XIV. Of Spanish bindings few fine specimens have been unearthed, and these are all early. Only England can boast that, like France, she has possessed one school of binders after another, working with varying success from the earliest times down to the present century, in which bookbinding all over Europe has suffered from the servility with which the old designs, now for the first time fully appreciated, have been copied and imitated.

In this length of pedigree it must be noted that England far surpa.s.ses even France herself. The magnificent illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, the finest of their age, which were produced at Winchester during the tenth century, were no doubt bound in the jewelled metal covers of which the rapacity of the sixteenth century has left hardly a single trace in this country. But early in the twelfth century, if not before, the Winchester bookmen turned their attention also to leather binding, and the school of design which they started, spreading to Durham, London, and Oxford, did not die out in England until it was ousted by the large panel stamps introduced from France at the end of the fifteenth. The predominant feature of these Winchester bindings (of which a fine example from the library of William Morris recently sold for 180), and of their successors, is the employment of small stamps, from half an inch to an inch in size, sometimes circular, more often square or pear-shaped, and containing figures, grotesques, or purely conventional designs. A circle, or two half-circles, formed by the repet.i.tion of one stamp, within one or more rectangles formed by others, is perhaps the commonest scheme of decoration, but it is the characteristic of these bindings, as of the finest in gold tooling, that by the repet.i.tion of a few small patterns an endless variety of designs could be built up. The British Museum possesses a few good examples of this stamp-work, but the finest collections of them are in the Cathedral libraries at Durham and Hereford. Any one, however, who is interested in this work can easily acquaint himself with it by consulting the unique collection of rubbings carefully taken by Mr. Weale and deposited in the National Art Library at the South Kensington Museum. In these rubbings, as in no other way, the history of English binding can be studied from the earliest Winchester books to the charming Oxford bindings executed by Thomas Hunt, the English partner of the Cologne printer, Rood, about 1481.

During the first half of this period the English leather binders were the finest in Europe; during the second, the Germans pressed them hard, and when the large panel stamps, three or four inches square and more, were introduced in Holland and France, the English adaptations of them were distinctly inferior to the originals. The earliest English bindings with gold tooling were, of course, also imitative. The use of gold reached this country but slowly, as the first known English binding, in which it occurs, is on a book printed in 1541, by which time the art had been common in Italy for a generation. The English bindings found on books bound for Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Mary I., all of which are roughly a.s.signed to Berthelet as the Royal binder, resemble the current Italian designs of the day, with sufficient differences to make it probable that they were produced by Englishmen. We know, however, that until the close of the century there were occasional complaints of the presence of foreign binders in London, and it is probable that the Grolieresque bindings executed for Wotton were foreign rather than English. Where, however, we find work on English books distinctly unlike anything in France or Italy, it is reasonable to a.s.sign it to a native school, and such a school seems to have grown up about 1570, in the workshop of John Day, the helper of Archbishop Parker in so many of his literary undertakings. These bindings attributed to Day, especially those in which he worked with white leather on brown, although they have none of the French delicacy of tooling, perhaps for this reason attack the problem of decoration with a greater sense of the difference between the styles suitable for a large book and a small than is always found in France, where the greatest binders, such as Nicholas Eve and Le Gascon, often covered large folios with endless repet.i.tions of minute tools whose full beauty can only be appreciated on duodecimos or octavos. The English designs with a large centre ornament and corner-pieces are rich and impressive, and we may fairly give Day and his fellows the palm for originality and effectiveness among Elizabethan binders. In the next reign the French use of the seme or powder, a single small stamp, of a fleur-de-lys, a thistle, a crown, or the like, impressed in rows all over the cover, was increasingly imitated in England, very unsuccessfully, and, save for a few traces of the style of Day, the leather bindings of the first third of the century deserve the worst epithets which can be given them.

Until, however, French fas.h.i.+ons came into vogue after the Restoration, English binders had never been content to regard leather as the sole material in which they could work. Embroidered bindings had come early into use in England, and a Psalter embroidered by Anne Felbrigge towards the close of the fourteenth century is preserved at the British Museum, and shown in one of Mr. Davenport's ill.u.s.trations. In the sixteenth century embroidered work was very popular with the Tudor princesses, gold and silver thread and pearls being largely used, often with very decorative effect. The simplest of these covers are also the best--but great elaboration was often employed, and on a presentation copy of Archbishop Parker's _De Antiquitate Ecclesiae Britannicae_ we find a clever but rather grotesque representation of a deer-paddock. Under the Stuarts the lighter feather-st.i.tch was preferred, and there seems to have been a regular trade in embroidered Bibles and Prayer-books of small size, sometimes with floral patterns, sometimes with portraits of the King, or Scriptural scenes. A dealer's freak which compelled the British Museum to buy a pair of elaborate gloves of the period rather than lose a finely embroidered Psalter, with which they went, was certainly a fortunate one, enabling us to realise that in hands thus gloved these little bindings, always pretty, often really artistic, must have looked exactly right, while their vivid colours must have been admirably in harmony with the gay Cavalier dresses.

Besides furnis.h.i.+ng a ground for embroidery, velvet bindings were often decorated, in England, with goldsmith work. One of the most beautiful little bookcovers in existence is on a book of prayers, bound for Queen Elizabeth in red velvet, with a centre and corner pieces delicately enamelled on gold. Under the Stuarts, again, we frequently find similar ornaments in engraved silver, and their charm is incontestable.

Thus while for English bindings of this period in gilt leather we can only claim that Berthelet's show some freedom in their adaptation of Italian models, and Day's a more decided originality, we are ent.i.tled to set side by side with this scanty record a host of charming bindings in more feminine materials, which have no parallel in France, and certainly deserve some recognition. After the Restoration, however, leather quickly ousted its compet.i.tors, and a school of designers and gilders arose in England, which, while taking its first inspiration from Le Gascon, soon developed an individual style. In effectiveness, though not in minute accuracy of execution, this may rank with the best in Europe.

We can trace the beginnings of this lighter and most graceful work as early as the thirties, and it might be contended with a certain plausibility that it began at the Universities. Certainly the two earliest examples known to me--the copy of her _Statutes_ presented to Charles I. by Oxford in 1634, and the Little Gidding _Harmony_ of 1635, the tools employed in which have been shown by Mr. Davenport to have been used also by Buck, of Cambridge--are two of the finest English bindings in existence, and in both cases, despite the multiplicity of the tiny tools employed, there is a unity and largeness of design which, as I have ventured to hint, is not always found even in the best French work. The chief English bindings after the Restoration, those a.s.sociated with the name of Samuel Mearne, the King's Binder, preserve this character, though the attempt to break the formality of the rectangle by the bulges at the side and the little penthouses at foot and head (whence its name, the 'cottage' style) was not wholly successful. The use of the labour-saving device of the 'roll,' in preference to impressing each section of the pattern by hand, is another blot.

Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to find an English or Scotch binding of this period which is less than charming, and the best of them are admirable. At the beginning of the eighteenth century a new grace was added by the inlaying of a leather of a second colour. These inlaid English bindings are few in number (the British Museum has not a single fine example), but those who know the specimens exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, two of which are figured in its Catalogue, will readily allow that their grace has never been surpa.s.sed. The fine Harleian bindings let us down gently from this eminence, and then, after a period of mere dulness, with the rise of Roger Payne we have again an English school (for Payne's traditions were worthily followed by Charles Lewis) which, by common consent, was the finest of its time. Payne's originality is, perhaps, not quite so absolute as has been maintained, for some of his tools were cut in the pattern of Mearne's, and it would be possible to find suggestions for some of his schemes of arrangement in earlier English work. If he borrowed, however, he borrowed from his English predecessors, and he brought to his task an individuality and an artistic instinct which cannot be denied.

After Payne and Lewis, English binding, like French, became purely imitative in its designs; but while in our own decade the French artists have endeavoured to shake themselves free from old traditions by mere eccentricity, in England we have several living binders, such as Mr.

Cobden Sanderson and Mr. Douglas c.o.c.kerell, who work with notable originality and yet with the strictest observance of the canons of their art.

Moreover in the application of decorative designs to cloth cases England has invented, and England and America have brought to perfection, an inexpensive and very pleasing form of book-cover, which gives the bookman ample time to consider whether his purchase is worth the more permanent honours of gilded leather, and also, by the facts that it is avowedly temporary, and that its decoration is cheaply and easily effected by large stamps, renders forgivable vagaries of design, which when translated, as they have been of late years in France, into the time-honoured and solemn leather, seem merely incongruous and irreverent.

In binding, then, as in the other bookish arts, the part which English workers have played has been no insignificant or unworthy one, and the development of this art, as of the others, in our own country is worthy of study. In this case much has already been done, for the ill.u.s.trations of _English Bookbindings at the British Museum_, edited, with introduction and descriptions by Mr. W. Y. Fletcher, present the student with the best possible survey of the whole subject, while the excellent treatises of Miss Prideaux and Mr. Horne bring English bookbinding into relation with that of other countries. Here, then, there is no need of a new general history, but rather of special monographs, treating more in detail of the periods at which our English binders have done the best work. The old stamped bindings of the days of ma.n.u.script, the embroidered bindings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the leather bindings of Mearne and his fellows under the later Stuarts, and the work of Roger Payne--all these seem to offer excellent subjects for unpretentious monographs, and it is hoped that others of them besides the _English Embroidered Bindings_, with which Mr. Davenport has made a beginning, may be treated in this series.

In other subjects the ground has not yet been cleared to the same extent, and for the history of English Book-Collectors and English Printing, not special monographs, but good general surveys are the first need. To say much on this subject might bring me perilously near to re-writing the prospectus of this series. It is enough to have pointed out that the bookish arts in England are well worth more study than they have yet been given, and that the pioneers who are endeavouring to enlarge knowledge, each in his own section, may fairly hope that their efforts will be received with indulgence and good-will.

ALFRED W. POLLARD.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER I

EMBROIDERED BOOKS

The application of needlework to the embellishment of the bindings of books has. .h.i.therto almost escaped special notice. In most of the works on the subject of English Bookbinding, considered from the decorative point of view in distinction from the technical, a few examples of embroidered covers have indeed received some share of attention. Thus in both Mr. H. B. Wheatley's and Mr. W. Y. Fletcher's works on the bindings in the British Museum, in Mr. Salt Bra.s.sington's _Historic Bindings in the Bodleian Library_ and _History of the Art of Bookbinding_, and in my own _Portfolio_ monograph on 'Royal English Bookbindings,' some of the finer specimens of embroidered books still existing are ill.u.s.trated and described. But up to the present no attempt has been made to deal with them as a separate subject. In the course, however, of the many lectures on Decorative Bookbinding which it has been my pleasure and honour to deliver during the past few years, I have invariably noticed that the pictures and descriptions of embroidered specimens have been the most keenly appreciated, and this favourable sign has led me to examine and consider such examples as have come in my way more carefully than I might otherwise have done. Very little study sufficed to show that in England alone there was for a considerable period a regular and large production of embroidered books, and further, that the different styles of these embroideries are clearly defined, equally from the chronological and artistic points of view. A peculiarly English art which thus lends itself to orderly treatment may fairly be made the subject of a brief monograph.

With the exception of point-lace, which is sometimes made in small pieces for such purposes as ladies' cuffs or collars, decorative work produced by the aid of the needle is generally large. Certainly this is so in its finest forms, which are probably to be found in the ecclesiastical vestments and in the altar frontals of the Renaissance period, or even earlier. On the other hand, such work as exists on books is always of small size, and, unlike the point-lace, it almost invariably has more than one kind of 'st.i.tchery' upon it--chain, split, tapestry, satin, or what not.

Thus it can be claimed as a distinction for embroidered book-covers that as a cla.s.s they are the smallest complete embroideries existing, ranging upwards from about 6 inches by 3-1/2 inches--the size of the smallest specimen known to me, when opened out to its fullest extent, sides and back in one. This covers a copy of the Psalms, printed in London in 1635, and is of white satin, with a small tulip worked in coloured silk on each side.

An 'Embroidered Book,' it should be said, means for my purpose a book which is covered, sides and back, by a piece of material ornamented with needlework, following a design made for the purpose of adorning that particular book. A cover consisting of merely a piece of woven stuff, or even a piece of true embroidery cut from a larger piece, is not, from my point of view, properly to be considered an 'embroidered book,' it being essential that the design as well as the workmans.h.i.+p should have been specially made for the book on which they are found; and this, in the large majority of instances, is certainly the case.

With regard to the transference of bindings to books other than those for which they were originally made, such a transference has often taken place in the case of mediaeval books bound in ornamental metal, but even in these instances it must be recognised that such a change can seldom be made without serious detriment. It is chiefly indeed from some incongruity of style or technical mistake in the re-putting together that we are led to guess that the covers have been thus tampered with.

Now and then such a transference occurs in the case of leather-bound books, and in such instances is usually easy for a trained binder to detect. Embroidered covers, on the other hand, have rarely been changed, the motive for such a proceeding never having been strong, and the risk attending it being obvious enough. We may, in fact, feel tolerably sure that the large majority of embroidered covers still remain on the boards of the books they were originally made for.

All the embroidered books now extant dating from before the reign of Queen Elizabeth have gone through the very unfortunate operation of 're-backing,' in the course of which the old embroidered work is replaced by new leather. The old head and tail bands, technically very interesting, have been replaced by modern imitations, and considerable damage has been done in distorting the work left on the sides of the book. It would seem obvious that a canvas, velvet, or satin embroidered binding, if it really must be re-backed or repaired at all, should be mended with a material as nearly as possible of the same make and colour as that of the original covering; but this has rarely been done, the large majority of such repairs being executed in leather. But in the case of such old bindings we must be grateful for small mercies, and feel thankful that even the sides are left in so many cases. It is indeed surprising that we still possess as much as we do. If all our great collectors had been of the same mind as Henry Prince of Wales, the Right Hon. Thomas Grenville, or even King George III., we should have been far worse off, as although several fine old bindings exist in their libraries, many which would now be priceless have been destroyed, only to be replaced by comparatively modern bindings, sometimes the best of their kind, but often in bad taste.

_Division of Embroidered Books according to the designs upon them._

The designs on embroidered books may be roughly divided into four cla.s.ses--Heraldic, Figure, Floral, and Arabesque.

The Heraldic designs always denote owners.h.i.+p, and are most frequently found on Royal books bound in velvet, rarely occurring on silk or satin, and never, as far as I have been able to ascertain, on canvas. The Figure designs may be subdivided into three smaller cla.s.ses, viz.:--

I. Scriptural, _e.g._ representations of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Jacob wrestling with the Angel, David, etc.

II. Symbolical, _e.g._ figures of Faith, Hope, Peace, Plenty, etc.

III. Portraits, _e.g._ of Charles I., Queen Henrietta Maria, Duke of Buckingham, etc.