We are more fortunate than the Shakesperian commentator in that we have before us two copies of this Book of Common Prayer bound in the style that he describes, one of which, an heirloom in the family of Mr. Beverly Chew, contains the binder's ticket, H. I. Megary, a New York stationer, printer and publisher in the early part of the last century whose name is well and favorably known to collectors of engraved pictures of the City of New York. The other copy, belonging to Mr. Bowen W. Pierson, is in the same style, and the same tools were employed in the decoration, but were worked after a different design. The lettering on the back is in Gothic type, a character we would not be surprised to find employed upon the back of a black-letter " fifteener," but its use on a modern book is quite exceptional.
The artistic binding and exterior decoration of books, so long a neglected study, may be said without exaggeration to have latterly become a rage. Annual exhibitions of richly-decorated bindings, are conspicuous features of our Metropolitan bookshops, and treatises more or less erudite upon the Art of Book-binding, follow one another in rapid succession from a press whose watchful pilots are ever closely scanning the literary horizon, and stand prepared to trim their sails hourly, if need be, in order to catch the shifting winds of capricious popular fancy. Thus the pendulum swings to and fro, and we vibrate from one extreme to the other in our tastes and temporarily ruling passions. The Bibliography of books upon Bookbinding, published in 1893 by Miss S. T. Prideaux, herself a successful practical exponent of the Art, embraces four hundred and seventy-five titles. In the years that have since elapsed additional works by the score have made their appearance, many of which are little more than compilations from the writings of previous authors. A small proportion, such as essays by those whose own trained and skillful hands have produced fine examples of book-binding, have made us, no doubt, more conversant with the technical methods and the mysteries of the craft, but from an historical point of view the subject was exhausted long ago. We have been told with tiresome repetition of the books "so fairly bound " which graced the famous libraries of those munificent patrons of the arts, Maoli, Grolier, Canevari, De Thou and those " light and airy ladies " of fastidious taste in books and bindings, Margaret of Valois and Diana of Poictiers; of the books elaborately tooled and richly painted for the kings, queens, princes, prelates and statesmen of Italy, France and England, which long since were allotted their rightful place among the priceless art treasures of the world; of the Eves, Gascons, Padeloups, Monniers, Deromes, Capes, Trautz-Bauzonnets, Chambolle-Durus and Cuzins: the Mearnes, Roger Paynes, Lewises and Bedfords: the French tinselled and silk - embroidered bindings, and those deftly fashioned and patiently wrought by the pious hands of the nuns of Little Gidding, but few and faint are the whisperings that fall upon our listening ears, concerning Bibliopegy on this side of the broad and boisterous Atlantic.
In the report of a French delegation of artisans to the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition* sixteen pages are allotted to a description of the American bindings there displayed, which were, however, largely composed of the commercial bindings of the time and the heavily stamped and floridly gilded outward covers of the Pictorial Histories, and huge illustrated Family
* " Exposition Universelle de Philadelphie, 1876. DELEGATION OUVRIERE Libre RELIEURS." Paris, 1879.
Bibles, which were the pride of our forbears and lent an air of distinction to the parlor centre table, in all well-to-do and well-regulated households. Mr. Brander Matthews in his " Book-Bindings Old and New" descants at some length upon Modern bookbinding in the United States, and we find here and there in other publications * curt paragraphs of a disparaging tenor similar to the following, which we quote from Octave Uzanne's "La Reliure Moderne" but in respect to the practice of the Art in this country prior to the days of William Matthews the silence is, we repeat, well nigh profound. " L'Amerique [writes M. Uzanne] se rejouit de posseder Matthews, que les New-Yorkais considerent comme un demi-Dieu et qu'ils inondent de centaines de dollars,
* " L' Art dans la Decoration Exterieure des Livres en France et a l'Etranger," Paris, 1898, devotes a page and a half in a book of 275 pages to American bindings and mentions the names of Matthews, Bradstreet, The Club Bindery, Smith and Stickerman (Stikeman).
lorsque celui-ci daigne, des ses propres mains, revetir une belle edition de brown or red maroco. Matthews a cree une genre d'ornamentation; c'est un original, et ses reliures peuvent hardiment se comparer a celles de MM. Marius-Michel, sauf peut-etre ce (je ne sais quoi) qui tient la grace francaise et qui ne saurait passer les mers sans y perdre son caractere." Have a care, Monsieur Uzanne. Evidently some one has been imposing upon your credulity, for I can and do here testify of my own knowledge that Mr. Matthews's charges for his finest bindings were moderate in the extreme. They were done, be it understood, for friendship's sake and not for gain, and Mr. Matthews would not, I am quite certain, have undertaken the elaborate binding of a book for any and every one, no matter how many " centaines de dollars " might be cast at his feet. The Frank in matters of Art is sufficient unto himself. As for book-binders, he believes in his heart of hearts that there never were nor will be any outside of his own beautiful and adored city of Paris, worthy of the name. That the Parisian book-binders stand, and always have stood, in the front rank of their profession, no bibliophile the world over will deny. But is not variety the spice of life? The gastronome, if restricted to a single article of diet for a length of time, finds that it palls upon his palate, even though the dish be concocted with all the culinary skill of a Careme or a Vatel. We of the Anglo-Saxon race - more catholic, if less refined, in our tastes than the perhaps hyper-esthetic descendants of the ancient Gauls, enjoy the lesser art achievements of other nations, in which the French dilettante manifests little or no concern, simply because they are not the products of the skill and genius of his own countrymen.
Apologetical of this indifference and neglect on the part of our own, as well as European writers upon Bibliopegy, the undeniable fact may be adduced that our book-binders had not, until the last thirty or forty years (except for a brief period immediately after the close of the Revolutionary War which ended as unaccountably and precipitately as it began), shown themselves able to produce work that could be pronounced artistic. A survey of the Art as it flourished in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries leads us through the winding paths of a well-ordered garden bright with the variegated colors, and redolent with the fragrance of lovingly and patiently nurtured flowers; whereas a study of Bibliopegy, as it was haltingly and laboriously developed in this country during the corresponding period, conducts us for most of the tiresome way over a field of brown and withered winter stubble. For many years the Bindery in the United States remained a subsidiary but necessary adjunct to the Printing House, and nothing more. It required a generation of book-lovers and collectors, and the imperative demand thereby created, to establish Artistic Bibliopegy in our midst as a separate and distinct occupation. But books have been bound by our native workmen after one fashion or another, and better, on the whole, than might have been expected, for the past two centuries and a half, and the story of the craft from its humble beginnings in New England, in the seventeenth century, to modern times, should not be devoid of interest to the American bibliophile, if to no other, and he assuredly is the one to be reckoned with in the immediate future of book-collecting, for he happens, just now, to be the possessor of the best lined purse, and by virtue thereof, master of the situation.
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