With regard to illustration, the essential thing, Mr. Walker said, is to have harmony between the type and the decoration.  He pleaded for true book ornament as opposed to the silly habit of putting pictures where they are not wanted, and pointed out that mechanical harmony and artistic harmony went hand in hand.  No ornament or illustration should be used in a book which cannot be printed in the same way as the type.  For his warnings he produced Rogers’s Italy with a steel-plate engraving, and a page from an American magazine which being florid, pictorial and bad, was greeted with some laughter.  For examples we had a lovely Boccaccio printed at Ulm, and a page out of La Mer des Histoires printed in 1488.  Blake and Bewick were also shown, and a page of music designed by Mr. Horne.

The lecture was listened to with great attention by a large audience, and was certainly most attractive.  Mr. Walker has the keen artistic instinct that comes out of actually working in the art of which he spoke.  His remarks about the pictorial character of modern illustration were well timed, and we hope that some of the publishers in the audience will take them to heart.

Next Thursday Mr. Cobden-Sanderson lectures on Bookbinding, a subject on which few men in England have higher qualifications for speaking.  We are glad to see these lectures are so well attended.

THE BEAUTIES OF BOOKBINDING

(Pall Mall Gazette, November 23, 1888.)

‘The beginning of art,’ said Mr. Cobden-Sanderson last night in his charming lecture on Bookbinding, ‘is man thinking about the universe.’  He desires to give expression to the joy and wonder that he feels at the marvels that surround him, and invents a form of beauty through which he utters the thought or feeling that is in him.  And bookbinding ranks amongst the arts:  ‘through it a man expresses himself.’

This elegant and pleasantly exaggerated exordium preceded some very practical demonstrations.  ‘The apron is the banner of the future!’ exclaimed the lecturer, and he took his coat off and put his apron on.  He spoke a little about old bindings for the papyrus roll, about the ivory or cedar cylinders round which old manuscripts were wound, about the stained covers and the elaborate strings, till binding in the modern sense began with literature in a folded form, with literature in pages.  A binding, he pointed out, consists of two boards, originally of wood, now of mill-board, covered with leather, silk or velvet.  The use of these boards is to protect the ‘world’s written wealth.’  The best material is leather, decorated with gold.  The old binders used to be given forests that they might always have a supply of the skins of wild animals; the modern binder has to content himself with importing morocco, which is far the best leather there is, and is very much to be preferred to calf.