Where, however, we find work on English books distinctly unlike
anything in France or Italy, it is reasonable to assign it to a native
school, and such a school seems to have grown up about 1570, in the
workshop of John Day, the helper of Archbishop Parker in so many of his
literary undertakings. These bindings attributed to Day, especially
those in which he worked with white leather on brown, although they have
none of the French delicacy of tooling, perhaps for this reason attack
the problem of decoration with a greater sense of the difference between
the styles suitable for a large book and a small than is always found in
France, where the greatest binders, such as Nicholas Eve and Le Gascon,
often covered large folios with endless repetitions of minute tools whose
full beauty can only be appreciated on duodecimos or octavos. The English
designs with a large centre ornament and corner-pieces are rich and
impressive, and we may fairly give Day and his fellows the palm for
originality and effectiveness among Elizabethan binders. In the next
reign the French use of the seme or powder, a single small stamp, of a
fleur-de-lys, a thistle, a crown, or the like, impressed in rows all over
the cover, was increasingly imitated in England, very unsuccessfully,
and, save for a few traces of the style of Day, the leather bindings of
the first third of the century deserve the worst epithets which
can be given them.
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