the representatives of so many trades far less
important in the nature as well as the influence of their products.
All the early typographers, at all events from the sixteenth century,
were members of the Stationers' Company, and the investiture of books
in liveries of different kinds became the function of an unprivileged
and unchartered body, of which our knowledge is on that account even
more limited and imperfect than it would otherwise have been. It is
only through occasional and casual notices in correspondence or
diaries that we hear of those who bound volumes for the older
collectors, and we have to wait till we come down to the Harleian
era, before we find artificers of this class in possession of a
recognised calling and competent staff. Three employments, which have
long been independent and distinct, those of the printer, stationer,
and binder, were therefore at first and during a prolonged period in
the same hands and under the same roof.

Anterior to the introduction of printed books, the literary product or
record was either rolled up (_volutus_) or stitched, with or without a
wrapper; and hence, when there were no volumes in the more modern
acceptation in existence, there were rolls. We do not agree with the
editor of Aubrey's _Letters_, &c., 1813, where, in a note to a letter
from Thomas Baker to Hearne, he (the editor) remarks that the term
_explicitus_ was applied to the completion of the process of unfolding
a roll: it always signified the termination of the labour of the
scribe, and even in early printed books occurs in the form _explicit_
to convey the same idea on the part of the printer.

The most ancient binders were the monks, who stitched together their
own compositions or transcripts, or, when the volume was more
substantial, encased it in oaken boards, which a subsequent hand often
improved and preserved by a coat of leather. But laymen were
occasionally their own binders, as we perceive in the note to Warton's
Poetry,[3] where a "Life of Concubranus" in MS. is said to have been
bound by William Edis, afterward a monk at Burton-on-Trent, while he
was a student at Oxford in 1517.

At Durham and Winchester there were notable schools of art of the
present class in the Middle Ages, and specimens occasionally occur,
though rarely in good state. A very fine Winchester piece of work was
sold in 1898 among William Morris's books (No. 580), and all over the
country and abroad, even down to the pr