The Art of the French Bookbinder
 

ELSIE GRIESBACH
 

I S IN other fields of art, the design and style of book¬
binding have always reflected the current cultural and
political climate; and this is true today. On the other
hand, e\'en in this Machine Age, the techniques used in hand-bind¬
ing remain nearly unchanged from those practiced in the monas¬
tery workshops of the Middle Ages.

It was in this medieval period that French monks made their
first bindings by covering their parchment manuscripts with
wooden boards and wrapping them in skins. To mark the owner¬
ship of the circulating "book" they used cold metal tools for
"blind-tooling" impressions into the skins. For luxurious bindings
leather or textiles were decorated with gold, silver, enamel or
ivory, or adorned with embroidery and precious stones. The pur¬
pose was rather to ornament a high altar than to preserve a valu¬
able manuscript or embellish the volume itself. In the later Middle
Ages books sometimes looked as heavily covered with metal as
their feudal owners in rich and bulky armour.

When the monastic art of binding passed into the hands of lay¬
men, and after thin paper had been introduced into Europe from
Arabia, boards made by pasting together layers of paper were
used for covers in place of wooden foundations. Calf and sheep
leather, dyed brown, were used as covering material, and were
often tooled with rounding wheels, or "roulettes," which inspired
designs of flowers, known as "fleurons," and emblematic figures.

The influence of the French kings was decisive in the great
development of art in the Renaissance. They brought to Paris
Italian craftsmen with their knowledge of the techniques of im¬
pressing leather with hot tools on gold leaf. When the great biblio¬
phile Jean Grolier recognized the importance of the contact be-

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