Early Book Covers
WHILE the printer's art has not suffered in the long run from the use of composing machines, the art of bookbinding has been less fortunate. Those who take an interest in the clothing of their books must look back with some regret to the past when even trade bindings were comely and sub- stantial, though necessarily more expensive than they are to-day. Book-lovers have tended of late to pay attention not so much to the fine bindings in which wealthy collectors have always indulged as to the simpler stamped bindings adopted by the earliest English publishers, and by their foreign predecessors. The late Mr. Weale and the late Mr. Gordon Duff made us realize the interest of these Tudor bindings, for which collectors now pay high prices. But the history of bookbinding in England did not begin with Caxton, and the Tudor covers are not to be fully understood without some enquiry into their antecedents both here and on the Continent.
A much neglected subject has now been authoritatively discussed by Mr. G. D. Hobson in a finely printed and superbly illustrated folio version of his recent Sandars lectures at Cambridge. Here he brings together all that is known about early English leather bindings, and gives large and excellent photographs of them. The oldest of all covers the MS. of St. John's Gospel which was taken from the coffin of St. Cuthbert and is now at Stonyhurst. Mr. Hobson unhesitatingly declares that the binding was contemporary with the saint, who died in 687 ; the simple interlacings certainly recall the ornament on the Northumbrian crosses and look older than the Lindisfarne Gospels. From this unique little treasure we pass on to the Romanesque bindings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some of which are English, while others are French or German. Mr. Hobson, on the evidence of the contents or the stamps or both, is able to localize several at Durham, several at Winchester and at least three in London, while Canterbury is known to have produced stamped bindings at an early date. After these come another gap, before we arrive at the Gothic bindings dating from 1450 to 1500 and produced not by monks but by laymen. These stamped bindings were introduced from the Continent, though the stamps used sometimes include old Romanesque patterns among the new designs. Mr. Hobson's detailed examination of them is of special interest in connexion with the early English printers, Caxton, Roode and Hunt, Lettou and the rest. We are introduced, for example, to a Bruges binder who probably came over with, or soon after, Caxton, and to two Cambridge binders whose work is preserved in the college libraries. The craft was then mainly in foreign hands, whereas in the twelfth century it had been—as the author maintains with vigour—a native product. Mr. Hobson's scholarly monograph and his excellent illustrations put the subject on a firm basis. It will now be possible to appreciate the early sixteenth century stamped covers ; even these, if the author is right, were probably of foreign origin, but they are very attractive and curious.
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