evant morocco
(_maroquin de Constantinople_).

Down to the time of the earlier Stuarts the binding department more
than probably remained part of the printer's functions, and calf or
sheep was the usual material employed. Thomas Vautrollier, however,
the Elizabethan typographer, who carried on business in the Black
Friars, and who adopted the _Anchora Spei_ as a device on his
title-pages, seems to have occasionally bound copies of his own
publications in morocco with the same symbol on the covers in
gold--perhaps to order; and Lyonnese calf was another style in favour
at the same date. Some highly preserved specimens of the latter have
descended to us.

Another of the earlier essays in England in the direction of morocco
bindings appears to have had in view as a model the Grolieresque style
of decoration. A copy of a Latin Bible printed at Venice in 1537, and
presented in 1563 by the Earl of Arundel to Sir William Petre, bears
the crest of the Fitzalans, a white horse, on sides enclosed in a
painted design, the compartments filled in with a dotted pattern. But
examples of the same or a similar class are by no means uncommon. A
copy of a very common volume, Knolles's _History of the Turks_, 1638,
was sold among the Morris books in 1898 at a high price on account of
the very charming red morocco binding, richly gilt, with the unusual
feature of side-panels filled in with dotted scrolls.

Early Continental collectors more usually than our own registered not
only the place and date of purchase on the fly-leaf or title-page, but
the circumstances attendant on the binding, as we find in the volume
of tracts elsewhere mentioned, put into their existing covers in 1469,
in the nearly coeval assemblage of tracts formed and bound by Udalric
Ellenbog in 1476, and in the Latin _Petrarch_ of 1501, bound for
Antonius Kressen of Nuernberg in 1505, now in the British Museum.

The middle-period schools of collectors and binders, who displayed a
preference for morocco over russia and calf, were assuredly wise in
their generation. Much of the russia has perished, or is perishing
fast, under a variety of deleterious agencies; and the more modern
calf, at least, does not bear its years well. But morocco, at first
more expensive, withstands infinitely better and longer the incidence
of social life. What noble sets of books, as well as single volumes,
have almost crumbled away in damp country-houses, sometimes relegated
to the garret or t