ut of use, as has the heavy medieval
ornamentation of studs or jewels. In cloth covers, which are confessedly
edition work and machine made, the rules of ornament need not be so
sharply enforced. Here embossing still flourishes to some extent. But
the decorative problem is essentially the same in cloth as in leather
binding, and the best design will be one that triumphs within the
conditions, not outside them. The machines and the division of labor
have made sad havoc with binding as a craft. The men in America, at
least, who are masters of every process and of all the skill and cunning
of the early binders are few, and their thinning ranks are not being
filled. Will bookbinding, in spite of a high economic demand, share the
fate that has overtaken engraving, or shall we have a renascence of this
fascinating handicraft and delightful art, to take its name from the
present era?

PARCHMENT BINDINGS

There are certain things, the Autocrat informs us, that are "good for
nothing until they have been kept a long while; and some are good for
nothing until they have been long kept and _used_. Of the first, wine is
the illustrious and immortal example. Of those which must be kept and
used I will name three--meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems." May we
present another representative of the class which gathers value with the
"process of the suns," one as immortal and historic as wine and even
richer in associations--the parchment book cover? In this case it
matters not whether the object meets with use or neglect. So long as it
is not actually worn to pieces on the one hand, nor destroyed by mold on
the other, the parchment binding will keep on converting time into gold,
until after a few hundred years it reaches a tint far surpassing in
beauty the richest umber of a meerschaum, and approached only by the
kindred hue of antique ivory.

Here is a table full of old parchment-bound books, ranging from a tiny
twenty-fourmo, which will stay neither open nor shut, to thin, limp
folios that are instantly correspondent to either command. Those that
are bound with boards have taken on a drumhead quality of smoothness and
tension, especially the fat quartos and small octavos, while the larger
volumes that received a flexible binding resemble nothing in surface so
much as the wrinkled diploma on yonder wall, with its cabalistic
signature now to be written no more, Carolus-Guil. Eliot; but all agree
in a tint over which artists ra