ginning. He, therefore, has a
task quite different from that of the painter or sculptor, whose
materials are not at the outset attractive. This condition is so
strongly felt that many booklovers leave their bindings untooled,
preferring the rich sensuous beauty and depth of color in a choice piece
of leather to any effect of gilding or inlaying. This initial beauty of
the undecorated book does not, however, form an impossible challenge, as
witness the work of the Eves, Le Gascon, and the binders of such famous
collectors as Grolier and de Thou.

It may be well to consider more particularly what the problem of the
book decorator is. Though perfectly obvious to the eye and clearly
illustrated by the work of the masters, it has been sometimes lost sight
of by recent binders. It is, in a word, flat decoration. In the first
place he has a surface to work upon that is large enough to allow
strength of treatment, yet small enough to admit delicacy; then,
whatever in beautiful effects of setting, relief, harmony, and contrast
can be brought about by blind tooling, gilding, and inlaying, or by
rubbing the surface as in crushed levant, or variegating it as in "tree"
or marbled calf, all this he can command. He has control of an infinite
variety of forms in tooling; he has only to use them with taste and
skill. There is practically no limit to the amount of work that he can
put into the binding of a single book, provided that every additional
stroke is an additional beauty. He may sow the leather with minute
ornament like Mearne, or set it off with a few significant lines like
Aldus or Roger Payne; all depends upon the treatment. If he is a master,
the end will crown the work; if not, then he should have stopped with
simple lettering and have left the demands of beauty to be satisfied by
the undecorated leather. Above all, let every decorator stick to flat
ornament. The moment that he ventures into the third dimension, or
perspective, that moment he invades the province of the draftsman or
painter. One does not care to walk over a rug or carpet that displays a
scene in perspective, neither does one wish to gaze into a landscape
wrought upon the cover of a book, only to have the illusion of depth
dispelled upon opening the volume. Embossing is, to be sure, a literal
not a pictorial invasion of the third dimension, but its intrusion into
that dimension is very slight and involves no cheating of the eye. It
has now practically gone o