Mr. Sanderson mentioned by name a few of the great binders such as Le Gascon, and some of the patrons of bookbinding like the Medicis, Grolier, and the wonderful women who so loved books that they lent them some of the perfume and grace of their own strange lives.  However, the historical part of the lecture was very inadequate, possibly necessarily so through the limitations of time.  The really elaborate part of the lecture was the practical exposition.  Mr. Sanderson described and illustrated the various processes of smoothing, pressing, cutting, paring, and the like.  He divided bindings into two classes, the useful and the beautiful.  Among the former he reckoned paper covers such as the French use, paper boards and cloth boards, and half leather or calf bindings.  Cloth he disliked as a poor material, the gold on which soon fades away.  As for beautiful bindings, in them ’decoration rises into enthusiasm.’  A beautiful binding is ‘a homage to genius.’  It has its ethical value, its spiritual effect.  ’By doing good work we raise life to a higher plane,’ said the lecturer, and he dwelt with loving sympathy on the fact that a book is ‘sensitive by nature,’ that it is made by a human being for a human being, that the design must ’come from the man himself, and express the moods of his imagination, the joy of his soul.’  There must, consequently, be no division of labour.  ’I make my own paste and enjoy doing it,’ said Mr. Sanderson as he spoke of the necessity for the artist doing the whole work with his own hands.  But before we have really good bookbinding we must have a social revolution.  As things are now, the worker diminished to a machine is the slave of the employer, and the employer bloated into a millionaire is the slave of the public, and the public is the slave of its pet god, cheapness.  The bookbinder of the future is to be an educated man who appreciates literature and has freedom for his fancy and leisure for his thought.

All this is very good and sound.  But in treating bookbinding as an imaginative, expressive human art we must confess that we think that Mr. Sanderson made something of an error.  Bookbinding is essentially decorative, and good decoration is far more often suggested by material and mode of work than by any desire on the part of the designer to tell us of his joy in the world.  Hence it comes that good decoration is always traditional.  Where it is the expression of the individual it is usually either false or capricious.  These handicrafts are not primarily expressive arts; they are impressive arts.  If a man has any message for the world he will not deliver it in a material that always suggests and always conditions its own decoration.  The beauty of bookbinding is abstract decorative beauty.  It is not, in the first instance, a mode of expression for a man’s soul.  Indeed, the danger of all these lofty claims for handicraft is simply that they show a desire to give crafts the province and motive of arts such as poetry, painting and sculpture.  Such province and such motive they have not got.  Their aim is different.  Between the arts that aim at annihilating their material and the arts that aim at glorifying it there is a wide gulf.