Books As Objets d'Art
This is all very interesting, of course. But the real reason for keeping the book, what really stays the dumping hand, so to speak, is the cover. The strange mixed fonts of the white lettered title, obscured behind the thin black cord of the money bag, and, stranger still, by a gold halo - why the halo? Not to mention the grasping white paws beneath, one hand rather fleshy with oddly blunt fingers, the other smaller, skinnier and even more deformed. On second looks, are they grasping, or are they throwing the moneybag, like a basketball? The whole palette of gold, black and white blocked into the dark blue grosgrain just too characteristic of the era. Who could resist this oddity, who throw out this feast for the eyes? The book is a work of art.
The realization quickly sends one back to the three-deep shelf in search
of more pretty covers, to the library in search of more information about
book covers in this period, and, naturally, to the web in search of same.
A Little History
Modern bookbinding could be said to have begun in the 1830s. Up until that time, books were generally produced without covers or in plain paper wrappers. Either the bookseller, or the final buyer of the book, would have it bound to his liking by a specialist in the art. With the advent of new bookbinding technology, however, it became economically feasible for publishers to mass-produce books fully bound between hard boards. The books could be covered in paper or cloth and decorated. With this "case binding", the spine of the binding is completely separate from the back of the text block, which greatly simplifies the whole process of decorating the exterior binding of the book. (For a fuller explanation, click here)
It was a while before truly decorative
covers were produced. Early cloth bindings may have had some decorative
border, but they were generally quite plain. For a few decades, enabled
by advances in printing technology, cheaply printed paper bindings were
made. In England, these so-called Yellow
Backs (they were block-printed in three or four colors on a glazed yellow
paper) thrived beginning in the 1840s (some say early 1850s), but they were
gradually superseded when the art of truly decorative mass-produced cloth
bindings began in around 1880, and had more or less disappeared by 1900.
Generally, cloth covers were decorated using a technique known as "blocking".
Blocking is similar to other "intaglio" or "relief"
printing methods in which the design is raised from the surface, in this
case on a metal "block". ("Blocking" is an English term
- in America one would generally call it "stamping"). The color
is laid over the cloth board and the block, usually after being heated,
is impressed on it, using a block press, to stamp the color into the board.
Gilt and "blind stamping" (impressing without using any color)
were used in the 1830s, with other colors generally coming later. Obviously,
designs with more than one color require blocking as many times as there
are colors to be impressed. By the time of the true golden age of decorative
covers (say, 1905 - 1915), there could be as many as six different blocking
operations in the production of one multi-colored cover.
In the library in downtown Los Angeles, the best book available on the subject is The Twentieth Century Book, Its Illustration and Design, by John Lewis, published in this country by Reinhold Publishing, NY, 1967. (Grab a copy if you see one going cheap - it'll cost you upwards of $40 on the web, maybe a tad less for the 1984 revised and updated edition). The roots of twentieth century illustration, typography and cover art, according to Lewis, can mostly be traced either to Art Nouveau or to the private press movement most prominently exemplified by the extraordinarily influential arts & crafts school of William Morris (1834 - 1896) and his Kelmscott Press in London. These two influences were, on the surface at least, totally opposed to each other. Art Nouveau professes to be anti-historical, completely "new art" - even though, in fact, it is clearly heavily influenced by oriental art, particularly 19th century Japanese prints beloved of such exponents as James McNeil Whistler. The William Morris school, on the other hand, is deliberately medieval, rejecting the art of the Renaissance and going back to earlier roots, emphasizing the painstaking care and craftsmanship of medieval work and the predilection for quality, also, in materials. According to Lewis, the art of the book, from the 1880s when art nouveau began to flourish until well into the twentieth century, was completely bound up, so to speak, in these two remarkably persistent threads.
It quickly becomes clear, though, that
Lewis is concerned mostly with the inside of the book - the typography,
layout and illustrations. There is very little material on the illustrated
"case". He mentions an edition of Robert Herrick illustrated by
Edwin
A Abbey (1852 - 1911) and published by Harper & Brothers, New York,
in 1882; this has a cream colored case binding blocked in gold, black, red
and green with a design showing medieval influence in the font and art nouveau
in the illustration. He shows the 1889 Tess of the D'Urbervilles
designed by the very influential Charles
Ricketts (1866 - 1931), and a couple of covers decorated in a style
reminiscent of medieval illumination from the 1890s. To show the roots of
the illustrated case-binding, he offers The Astonishing History of Troy
Town by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, published by Cassell & Co., London,
1888, as a modest piece of early work in commercial cover illustration printed
with a black design and with gilt-blocked lettering; and, in contrast, a
beautiful art nouveau German cover by Ferdinand Freiherr von Reznicek (1868
- 1909), showing very clear lineage from French poster art of the nineteenth
century, for Die Frau in der Karikatur by Eduard Fuchs, published
by Albert Langen, Munich, 1906. And there are a few other examples from
the early 1900s, when commercial cover art really began to hit its stride.
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