English Bookbinding Styles, 1450-1800 (review)

The aim of this interesting and useful book is to provide a guide to recognizing and dating English bookbindings made between 1450 and 1800. Although the book covers all kinds of bindings, from lavishly decorated presentation bindings or collectors' pieces to temporary or interim structures, it is most successful in its description and attribution of second- and third-division bindings, those aimed at the middle market, books as they were or could be provided by the booksellers, ready bound or bound to order, for their common run of clients, plain or decorated, according to the many available options depending on quality and price. It is laudable that a chapter has been devoted to 'cheap and temporary' bindings, books in part-dress, in interim structures, or temporary covers of limp parchment or paper, or in boards; but their survival rate is small and they are notoriously difficult to date and locate.

At the other end of the scale, collectors' pieces have too much individuality — whether or not directed by their owners — to fall happily into Pearson's general categories of roughly fifty years' duration. Moreover, prevailing decorative (and sometimes structural) fashions reached England from the Continent, from Italy and France, or from the Low Countries. Styles and designs were often imitated to such effect that even placing these bindings in a particular country can be very tricky. A first-class piece of work by the Morocco binder, made in London in the 1560s, could at first and second glance just as convincingly be attributed to a Paris atelier of five or ten years earlier, while the tools used by several English late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century binders have deceptively close parallels in the Netherlands. It is in such cases that tool identification remains a necessity.

However, there is a vast range of bindings made of leather or parchment, some limp, but usually over boards, plain or decorated, with fillets, rolls, panels, larger corner- and centrepieces, or with individual hand tools, arranged in different patterns that can be attributed according to the shapes of the tools themselves, but more easily according to the way they were used and arranged. There are dangers in this approach, as many styles continue well beyond their most common appearance and many tool-shapes and patterns were successfully imitated by later users, such as those mid-fifteenth-century binders who produced 'Romanesque' designs with imitation twelfth-century tools (see for example Pearson's Figure 3.2). Nor are all of the seventeenth-century styles shown here limited either to England or to the seventeenth century. Pearson is of course well aware of this and his words of caution should be taken to heart.

Chapters on spine shapes and decoration and on edge decoration are useful, especially as most traditional binding literature concentrates on the covers, while spines and edges tell us something about book storage, as well as helping to indicate an approximate date — as long as the quite common habit of lettering or retooling spines at a later date is borne in mind. By including structural features, by showing a variety of more simply decorated bindings, and by articulating and illustrating those features that are common (rather than 'typical') in certain periods of English bookbinding, Pearson has done great service, especially to those librarians, book dealers, collectors, and students who are not specialist binding historians, but who need to know whether or not the binding in their hands is contemporary with the book inside and whether it dates from the beginning, middle, or end of a particular century.

The presence of so many illustrations, mostly, though not invariably, of reasonable to good quality, is invaluable and the colour plates are excellent and well chosen. It was an enlightened idea to illustrate different kinds of leather in colour. The diagrams in Appendix 1 do not add much to what has already been said and shown earlier, and...