For many of us who study the history of the craft, the binding pictured here could easily be guessed to be the work of Edgar Mansfield. If we were unsure that it is his own work, we could at least feel confident in saying that it is influenced by him, done in his style. The same feat of identification is possible with any number of modern binders’ work. Philip Smith’s work will be recognized as Philip Smith’s. Ivor Robinson’s gilding is instantly identifiable. These bindings are so easily placed with their maker because these modern binders’ aesthetics are markedly and memorably individual, their style expressive and personal. The creations lead quickly to considering their creator. What is remarkable is how few bindings before the twentieth century evoke the same response. The number of binders before the turn of the last century whose work can effortlessly be identified, who cultured an aesthetic that led one to consider the binder rather than the style, is remarkably small. Some of these most famous binders are in fact constructions based on style and product alone, known by the tools they used, the court they served, or the collector who commissioned them.
Philip Smith, in his Four Levels of Book Arts Making, begins his essay with a four-part diagram representing the “functions of man the creative maker”. Smith’s conception of homo faber is unabashedly Galenic in its balanced, four part division of the creative faculties, with each function associated with or residing within a part of the maker’s body. According to Smith, each Book Artist has within them a Designer (governed by intellect, residing in the mind), an Artist (emotion, the heart), a Craftsperson (motor functions, the hand), and ultimately a Creative Maker, the synthesis of these first three. Smith admits that while each of these functions “is of equal importance in playing its role,” it is also true that particular work exhibits different predominances.
Despite Smith’s system seeming in tune with Renaissance conceptions of man and artist, our historical understanding of the bookbinder does not envelop all four of these functions until relatively late in the craft’s existence. From the early Renaissance through the 18th century, the most accomplished binders were often executing the deigns of others, and their heartfelt emotion and subjective experience was rarely expressed in their output. How and when, then, did the Artist and Designer join the Craftsperson to create Smith’s complete Creative Maker? How, five hundred years after the birth of the artist as individual, did the bookbinder finally shed anonymity?
An immediate reaction might be that to ask why bookbinding did not share in the 16h century development of the artist as an individual is to misunderstand the craft. Vasari’s painters, sculptors and architects were working in media that lent themselves to the sort of pre-mannerist styles that allowed for individualism. What’s more, there might be a serious category problem in trying to equate a functional craft such as bookbinding with these purely decorative arts. So long as bookbinding was not fully able to move from craft to art, due to limitations set by function, so too were binders unable to move from relatively anonymous craftsmen to individualized artists.
This argument, though, seems rooted in several misunderstandings. To take the last first, imagining that the limitations set on the craft restricted expression and creativity is to misunderstand the creative impetus created by limitations of form. To be given boundaries to push up against and a limited set of tools to work with has rarely stifled expression in any art, and almost invariably leads to rich creativity. As Cobden-Sanderson expressed in his Ecce Mundi,
the life of bookbinding is in the dainty mutation of its mutable elements - back, bands, boards, squares, decoration. These elements admit of almost endless variation, singly and in combination, in kind and in degree.
The second misunderstanding is to assume that it is the nature of the craft that would not allow the shift towards individualism. This seems to ignore the number of functional crafts that did produce men of great fame and supposed genius, such as gold-smithing’s Cellini, and the claim also overlooks the great fame and genius of the architects of the period and the strong parallels between architecture and bookbinding.
Despite our arguments for the possibility, however, bookbinding rarely produced the same sort of famous ‘geniuses’ as other arts or crafts. There were, of course, binders of repute, and some certainly achieved great fame during their time, but the craft waited some time before a binder emerged who was of great interest as an individual, as an expressive, subjective Creative Maker. The first man who we might consider fitting this ideal is Roger Payne, whose most active years were in the last half of the 17th century and beginning of the 18th. Roger Payne and His Art, the first and still most complete exploration of Payne’s life and work by the bibliophile William Loring Andrews, begins, “The story of the life of Roger Payne, the most noted English binder of the eighteenth century, is unfortunately the common one of many men of genius.” Here, in the first sentence, then, we have Payne being treated as a tortured genius who might have been comfortable in the pages of Vasari. As for individualism, Andrews later assures us that Payne’s fame was “formed by the force of his taste and genius, a style of ornamentation of his own”.
While Payne seems to be an ideal candidate for a binder of famous expressive genius, we have to be aware of the lens through which he is often presented to us. Loring Andrews was writing in the 1890s, in the height of late Romanticism, where men like Payne, who, despite his incredible skill, lived in poverty in a garret apartment and fought alcoholism and depression, were seen as an attractive model of the ideal artist. Loring Andrews paints Payne as a sort of Keats of binding, and it is necessary to emphasize his expressive, inward genius in order to complete this vision. Should Payne, then, be rejected as a true genius and individual of binding? There is, interestingly, one concrete characteristic of his that argues in his favor. Payne’s bills for his services are unlike any others up to his time. Here we find detailed, personal explanations of the meaning behind each ornament and line. Payne explains in his bills which parts of his work are excellent in conception and expression and which are not. In short, though his work may seem purely decorative and impersonal, to him it was something much more, and he could not let it out of his hands without proper edification of the meaning it had to him.
It is not Roger Payne, however, who is often thought of as first embodying Smith’s complete Creative Maker, containing Designer, Craftsperson as well as Artist. Many would point to T. J. Cobden-Sanderson as first exhibiting all these traits. Cobden-Sanderson, working during the turn of the last century, was finely in tune with the subjective, individual nature of his craft. The “well-bound beautiful book,” he wrote, “it is individual; it is instinct with the hand of him who made it . . . it is the original work of an original mind working in freedom simultaneously with hand and heart and brain”. It is hard to tell if Cobden-Sanderson’s sentiment was the root of Smith’s four-part theory, but it is obvious that he shared the ideal of unifying emotion, skill, and intellect. Cobden-Sanderson represented new heights in autonomy for the craft. He turned away from the divided labor of the traditional trade binderies, insisting on both forwarding and finishing himself. The book was a product of his hand and his heart alone, and his balanced, delicate finishing, often made with tools he designed himself, could be startlingly expressive and intimate.
Roy Harley Lewis, in his Fine Bookbinding In the Twentieth Century, aims to trace the shifts from Cobden-Sanderson to modern binders working today. Harley Lewis, despite occasional teleological slips of the tongue, is not following a progression from, for example, this binding of Cockerell’s from 1899 and Christopher Shaw’s contemporary binding for ‘The Thames’. To speak of a progression is to assume a goal or ideal, an idea that may have appealed to Cobden-Sanderson, but that most of us would now find flawed. Harley Lewis does, however, map out the space between these two bindings, pointing out influences and departures that link the two.
Harley Lewis works chronologically, but tends to trace the expanding influence of the few men who he believes have affected the greatest shifts in style over the past century. We find Cobden-Sanderson’s graceful aesthetic and art nouveau sensibility being taught by Douglas Cockerell to binders such as William Matthews, who continued to loosen and play with the decorative gold-tooling style. Eventually, we have the truly Modern experimentation of Edgar Mansfield and his followers. We can trace the influence of Mansfield’s work, as well as geometric French Art Deco design, to the varied contemporary aesthetics found in today’s ‘Design Binding’ movement.
With the modern Design movement came quite a bit of disagreement. These debates are often framed in two ways, one focusing on the idea of the book as a physical and mechanical object and the other focusing on the idea of the book as a container of a text. The first debate is epitomized by the reaction of Roger Powell to some of the output of Designer Bookbinders’ work which he saw as going to far in deconstructing the traditional form of the book. “We mustn’t deny the form and mechanics of a book in the way that it handles in order to satisfy your needs,” he wrote when he resigned his honorary fellowship. “Many [of the Design bindings] are bas-relief and fine as hangings, but not as the cover of a book to be opened.” Philip Smith’s beliefs seem to support this notion somewhat unabashedly. In ‘Four Levels of Book Arts Making’, he equates forwarding, and the general act of ‘binding’ itself to stretching a canvas for a painting.
The second debate echos a much older concern about the bookbinder in asking to what degree the binder should be aware of, and should be reacting to, the content of the book they are binding. Three hundred years before, in binding manuals and descriptions of the trade, we find some mention of the general dangers of binders reading the material that they are binding, but after the dawn of the fine presses, with Cobden-Sanderson’s theories of balanced unity and the Book Beautiful prevailing, it was generally accepted that craft binders should understand and react to the text itself. This notion has been challenged by several members of the Designer Bookbinders set, most notably by Ivor Robinson, who believes that it is ‘bloody naive’ to expect that the average binder could understand and be capable of interpreting many of the texts that they bind, and that it is unnecessary for a fine binding to be a reaction to the text that it holds.
It might be possible to look at these debates less from the vantage of the product or text and more from that of the binder. What if we apply Smith’s “four functions of man the creative maker” to the shifts in modern binding and the debates that they have raised? In tracing this history, we will allow ourselves, as Harley Lewis has allowed, as most historians of the craft allow themselves, to equate single binders with their less famous influences, with their co-innovators across the pond, and with the students that perfected their rough thoughts. From the perspective of Smith’s system, we can probably say that Cobden-Sanderson went a long way in bringing Smith’s ‘Designer’ function into the bookbinder, and certainly had a firm understanding of how the individual could approach Smith’s ‘Creative Maker’ (I can’t help but feel that Cobden-Sanderson, as a mystic, would have been appreciative of Smith’s theory). It is often felt, however, that while Cobden-Sanderson may have brought the Designer and Craftsperson functions together in a way that few had before, certainly in a way that had been abandoned by the trade binderies of his period, his work was more decorative than artistic. Those who worked under the direct influence of Cobden-Sanderson, such as Douglas Cockerell and his students, did much to playfully push the boundaries of the decorative style, but from the perspective of Harley Lewis and many modern binders, it is not until the influence of Edgar Mansfield that the Artist fully joined the Designer and Craftsperson, allowing the binder to become the true Creative Maker and, under Smith’s system, for bookbinding to become the Book Arts.
If we accept Smith’s claim that “particular work exhibits different predominances” of the four functions, then I think Roger Powell’s complaint would be that some of the Designer Bookbinders’ work shows the heavy hand of the Artist at the expense of the Designer’s understanding of the work as a balanced object, and perhaps also at the expense of the Craftperson’s careful attention to mechanics. Ivor Robinsion’s argument could be expressed as the desire for the Artist to be freed from the text, freed from the worries of being bound to the text and perhaps a flawed understanding of it. Robinson’s own abstractions play with and seem to be responding to the form of the book, and I think that it is safe to say that his Designer and Artist are very intricately connected. The attentions of Robinson’s Artist seem to burrow into the binding itself much more than those of Smith’s, whose Artist seems to address the medium of the binding, the “stretched-canvas” as a transparent vehicle for expression. One always gets the sense, in both his work and its explanation, that for Smith, the inner Craftsperson and Designer exist to serve and facilitate the inner Artist, who tellingly sits at the heart of things.
The study of bookbinding, the means by which we speak about the craft, and the conversations that bindings spur and that surround them, are all called upon to change in the era of the binder as individual, as unified maker and artist. Crafts can be, and often are, spoken about in ways that escape or evade the complex questions of creative aesthetics and expression, but when a craft embraces the maker as individual, the product as personal expression, a host of complexities demand to be examined.
Pictured here is a binding that has captivated me for some time. It is by Roger Powell, and the text is The Languages of the Minoan and Mycenaean Civilizations. When I look at this binding it is charged with politics; while it does exist as an beautiful, playful binding in itself, it is also an argument for a style, and certainly an argument against certain other possibilities. My reaction to this work is intimately caught up in Roger Powell the individual, in what I know of his biography, of his beliefs, and his personal aesthetic. My thoughts run effortlessly from the binding to to the binder, a binder who is not a construction based on the style, but quite the opposite. Though Powell’s techniques are ancient and subtle, and his product could fit very easily into the anonymous past of binding history, the challenges and complications in my reaction to his work are largely the result of Powell himself: Powell the Binder, the Creative Maker, the individual.