Preface

That book-binding is an ancient, honorable, and esthetic employment, will not be gainsaid by any intelligent student of industrial art, and yet it is only within the last quarter of a century, that it has begun to receive the attention to which it is deemed entitled by that small, but constantly recruited band of enthusiasts, who delight in fine books fitly bound, and who for this and other idiosyncrasies in regard to books, have been mercilessly satirized ever since the days of that ironical old scribe Sebastian Brant. Prior to this comparatively recent period, writers, both here ch2-4and abroad, taking their cue, it may be, from the crusty author of “ The Ship of Fooles ” and his equally caustic translator, aider, and abettor, Alexander Barclay, Priest, appear to have regarded the topic as a trivial one, and of too little general interest to justify the expenditure upon it, of even a modicum of their energies and talents ; but of late the times have vastly changed in this respect, and the art which is to so great an extent preservative of the Art of Printing—for without a binding the leaves of a book would speedily part company— has now a surfeit of notoriety. Those past masters in Bibliopegy—the Eves, Le Gascon, Padeloup Le Jeune and the various members of the numerous and talented family of Deromes, would, I fancy, start in amazement from their long, dreamless sleep, could they hear the pæans now chanted in praise of the handicraft they carried to such perfection, in their quiet eyries aloft amid the cooing and circling doves, ch2-5under the eaves of the steep-pitched roofs, of the old city of Paris.