THE BINDING OF BOOKS.
WE want a new system of book-binding. The art has never kept pace with that of printing, and seems at present to have come to a hopeless stand. Invention is exhausted in inventing new patterns and mountings, some rich beyond ordinary purses, others vulgar to a degree which must be intolerable to the publishers who issue them, but there is no new binding, no fresh substance employed, at once pretty, cheap, and durable. The old system of strong leather covers was in its way a good one, the binding was handsome if heavy, and usually lasted a good deal longer than the book ; the leather was well seasoned, the sewing substantial, and the stiffening material used in the back nearly adequate to its purpose, which is not, we beg to assure bookbinders, to prevent the back from breaking, but to prevent the sides from being wrung. This style, however, has passed away with the age of dear books, except in America, where they still bind large cheap books, such as gazetteers, in a very thick, badly polished, strong kind of whitish leather, made of we know not what, but as durable as russia, and very cheap. The modern substitutes for brown leather are all very inferior. Vellum of course is as good as ever it was, and vellum is now, as it was a hundred years ago, the neatest, handsomest,, and most durable of bindings. But it is an article fit only for times when the squire bought a book a year, and treasured it up in a case, and opened it reverently, and dusted it every six months, and bestowed as mich care upon it as if lie thought that some time or other he should be induced to read it. Eight shillings a volume is too much for binding in these days, when the great publishers often give us a book we really want to preserve for half a guinea. Morocco is handsome, but, besides the expense, it is liable to one fatal practical objection—it "frays." Let a morocco-bound book lie about for a month, and its freshness is all departed, the blots looking moreover all the worse for their contrast with the clear beauty of the remainder. "Half-bound in leather" is better, but even that is too dear, and the corners, absolutely necessary to its appearance, give way before the back has begun to tremble. All these bindings, moreover, exasperate that original disease of modern books —an inability to lie open. The book seems bound too tight, and the moment the finger quits the leaves, it shuts, a nuisance only to be remedied by breaking the back. We never could divine why publishers permitted this nuisance to exist so long. They know how to remedy it, for they do remedy it in some of the more costly specimens of the art. We have a black morocco Shakspeare before us now, which is to all appearance like every other morocco book, but which will open at any page, even the first and last, and keep open without being touched. Is the bit of elastic which secures this result so very expensive, or is it absolutely necessary to make the inner margin so small ? Limp covers cure the evil at once. Messrs. Booth and Son have just issued part of a Shakspeare in limp cream-coloured leather, or something that looks like leather, which is to our eyes the perfection of library comfort. It looks like a drawing-room book, and may be held for an hour in the hand without being soiled, or making the hostess inquire what you admire so much in her last present. But popular opinion and the shallowness of modern shelves are alike opposed to limp bindings, and they are no more likely to become common than the yellow paper, which we might have twice as strong for less than the price of white.
A cloth binding, if it were properly sewn, which it never by any chance is, might be made less liable to shut, but it has inconveniences of its own. The backs of books in cloth bindings are never strong enough. They come to pieces even in octavos, with very little rough usage, and they will not hold heavy volumes at all. The new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, at its low price, is of course bound in cloth. It is a very good specimen of stout binding, with no bad taste or ridiculous stamps about it, but the only device for keeping the volumes sound in that binding is never to use them. One slip from a chair or a table, and the volume is gone. Then cloth, though it resists the English climate tolerably—it rots in the tropics—very soon fades. We are not speaking now of those abominable colours, mauve, and violet, and magenta, which a popular mania has forced upon publishers who know better, which come off on the fingers, and look, in a week, like a child's lips after he has been eating blackberries. Nor do we mean silver grey oloth such as is used for a book like King's Antique Gents, perhaps the handsomest of all bindings to the eye, but not meant to keep very long. We mean decent, " sonsy," darkcoloured cloths which never soil, but quietly and patiently grow white as if they were suffering from old age. First the edges go, then the inside of the stamp, and lastly the book itself. Even red and green, the best of the colours, fade and look dingy, as Mr. Bohn, for example, with his long serials, must know to his cost. The gilt letters, too, besides not looking so clear on cloth as they do on leather, wear out with very short handling, the minute wrinkles of the cloth shaking off the metal. Why we should always be condemned to gilt letters on a depressed surface is a bookbinder's mystery. Letters could be done in relief as well as intaglio, and if white or black on a
colowed leather would look better than gold. Nor is cloth really so cheap a binding, considering its want of durability and the price of the books it is intended to cover. Every shilling which must be spent on binding, except for deliberate ornament, is so much loss to :the publisher and author, and we look on it as an axiom that no binding is really good for general use which costs more than a sixth of the price of the book itself.
The claims of paper may be at once set aside. Pasted on boards, it is sure to rub off with handling, and by itself it is not a binding at all, but merely a cover, very inferior generally in taste to the plain white paper with which publishers have the good sense to bind "pamphlets." The horrible designs struck on some of the cheap shilling books, designs in which a red woman is generally flying, with purple hair, from a dark green man who advances with a knife from out of a sea of mustard-coloured edging, have been of themselves enough to condemn paper, which has besides every other possible disadvantage. It is not durable, is very limp, will not take dark colours kindly, and is a constant and irresistible attraction to children's finger-nails. The world wants a cheap, strong binding, which will hold the book together, take any colour, show any stamp, and last as long as the paper it is intended to cover. Surely such an article must be within the reach of the keen brains and active fingers employed in the trade. An Austrian exhibited some time since paper made of iron, which was exactly like paper, and indestructible except by fire. Would that not do ? Then there is vegetable parchment, cheap enough in all conscience; does not experience bear out its inventor's claims to durability ? There is a kind of prepared canvas used for trunks, which experienced travellers know to be about six times as durable as the costly boxes purchased by stupid people under the name of ".solid leather," and which cut, when brought in contact with a brass-bound box or sharp edging, like so much butter. That canvas will not do for binding, but the principle of the thing is there—a cheap, hard, very durable substitute for leather. The existing system is no advantage to anybody : not to publishers, who really lose by their inability to bring down some books to the figure the public will give; not to the trade, which loses custom from the inability of the majority of buyers to rebind their books; and not to the public, which is tired of buying articles sure not to last six months. It is, we presume, vain to hope for a great reduction in the cost of the workmanship, though why a machine should not sew a book as well as a wristband it is not very easy to discover. But one economy is enough at iitime, and the one now wanted is a cheap but practically indestructible stiff book-cover.
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