The fine
Harleian bindings let us down gently from this eminence, and then, after
a period of mere dulness, with the rise of Roger Payne we have again an
English school (for Payne's traditions were worthily followed by Charles
Lewis) which, by common consent, was the finest of its time. Payne's
originality is, perhaps, not quite so absolute as has been maintained,
for some of his tools were cut in the pattern of Mearne's, and it would
be possible to find suggestions for some of his schemes of arrangement
in earlier English work. If he borrowed, however, he borrowed from his
English predecessors, and he brought to his task an individuality and an
artistic instinct which cannot be denied.
After Payne and Lewis, English binding, like French, became purely
imitative in its designs; but while in our own decade the French artists
have endeavoured to shake themselves free from old traditions by mere
eccentricity, in England we have several living binders, such as Mr.
Cobden Sanderson and Mr. Douglas Cockerell, who work with notable
originality and yet with the strictest observance of the canons of their
art.
Moreover in the application of decorative designs to cloth cases England
has invented, and England and America have brought to perfection, an
inexpensive and very pleasing form of book-cover, which gives the
bookman ample time to consider whether his purchase is worth the more
permanent honours of gilded leather, and also, by the facts that it is
avowedly temporary, and that its decoration is cheaply and easily
effected by large stamps, renders forgivable vagaries of design, which
when translated, as they have been of late years in France, into the
time-honoured and solemn leather, seem merely incongruous and
irreverent.
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