e
bibliotheque_ or study during generations--if the subject of which it
treated had to be handled, a vicarious copy in working raiment doing
duty for it. For it is not a book in the ordinary acceptation of the
word; it is a _souvenir_ of the past, a message and a voice from
remote times, ever growing remoter, or an _objet de luxe_, a piece of
literary, or rather bibliographical, dandyism. In any case, its
identity is to be preserved and held sacred.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Hazlitt's edition, 1871, iii. 193.

CHAPTER XIII

English and other national binders--Anonymous bindings--List of
binders--The Scotish School--Mr. Quaritch out-bidden--The vellum
copy of Boece's _Chronicles of Scotland_--Most familiar names in
England--Embroidered bindings ascribed to the Nuns of Little
Gidding--Provincial binders--Edwards of Halifax--Fashion of
edge-painting--Amateur binding--Forwarding and finishing--A
Baronet-binder--French liveries for English books--Bedford's
French style--Incongruity of the Parisian _gout_ with our
literature--List of French binders--Ancient stamped leather
bindings of Italy, Flanders, and Germany copied in
France--Ludovicus Bloc of Bruges--Judocus de Lede--Rarity of
early signed examples in France--Andre Boule (1508)--Enhancement
of the estimation of old books in France by special bindings--The
New Collector counselled and admonished--What he is to do, and
where he is to go.

THE English School of Binding brings before us a roll of names borne
by artists of successive periods and of varying merit, from the last
quarter of the fifteenth century to the present time. That it is by no
means exhaustive is due to the circumstance that in the case of many
of the older, and some of the more recent, masters, there is no clue
to the origin in the shape of an external inscription on the cover, as
we find on foreign works, or in that of a ticket or a signature. As it
so frequently happens with old pictures, the style of a binder was
often, indeed generally, imitated by his pupils or successors, and we
are apt to mistake the original productions for the copies, unless we
engage in a very close study of minute details.

In the English, Scotish, and Irish series it is equally true that the
preponderance of bindings are unidentified. The monastic liveries, in
which so many venerable tomes have come down to us, were executed
within the walls of