Tag Archives: book bindings

Books

Sombre Bindings [2]

sturtcpsombre

Another example of a sombre binding (though strictly speaking a semi-sombre binding as it has a gilt roll to inner edges), this one with a panel design, on an interesting book, Sturt’s Common Prayer.

Sturt’s Common Prayer is engraved throughout (it was actually engraved on silver plates), with a volvelle on page five to ‘find all the moveable Sundays in the year’.

Sturt was apprenticed to White, himself a pupil of Loggan’s, and was well known for his miniature work, “it was said that he could engrave the creed on a silver penny, a claim amply reinforced by his best-known works: engraved versions of the Book of Common Prayer and of Laurence Howell’s The Orthodox Communicant, published respectively by subscription in 1717 and 1721. The first of these books, executed on 188 silver plates adorned with borders and vignettes, had a frontispiece portrait of King George I, the lines for which were composed of the creed, the Lord’s prayer, the ten commandments, a prayer for the royal family, and Psalm 21, all inscribed in minute characters” [See picture below] (ODNB)

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Books

Sombre Bindings

sombre1

An example of a  ‘sombre’ binding, this on a copy of Allestree’s ‘Whole Duty of Man’, they are usually, if not exclusively, found on religious and pious texts dating from 1670-1720 and seemingly supplied for mourning use and Lenten observance. Nixon in English Restoration Bindings points out that “mourning in England in the reign of Charles II was quite as ostentatious as it was to be in Victorian times” (Page 45)

The bindings are blind-tooled black morocco, sometimes with the page edges coloured black and without any gilt finishing, the tools are often acorns or tulip heads, they are generally geometric or panelled in design, and often with hatched lines. There are of course exceptions to the rules, the one pictured above has all edges gilt, and other examples have gilt rolls to the inner edges, and I have one example with attractive edge decoration (see below)

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I’m not aware of a monograph on sombre bindings, but Nixon’s English Restoration Bindings has four examples (the hardback edition has plates, the paperback edition does not) and The Henry Davis Gift Catalogue – Volume Two has the same example found in Nixon