University of Virginia Library

The introduction of publishers' cloth in the 1820's was an unfortunate day for bibliographers, since the description of bindings has turned out to be perhaps the most troublesome aspect of the description of nineteenth- and twentieth-century books. Other parts of the description, which generally apply to earlier books as well, have become by now reasonably standardized. The bindings on earlier books, since they are products distinct from the process of publication, are not ordinarily the concern of the descriptive bibliographer; and specialists in the history of bookbinding have developed a vocabulary for dealing with them.[1] Even publishers' "bindings" (or casings), of course, are not bibliographical objects, strictly speaking, since they are not part of the letterpress. However, aside from the fact that binding variants can sometimes help to determine the priority of an issue,[2] the cloth is part of the dress in which an author's words are presented to the public, and its appearance therefore deserves to be recorded by the historian of such matters, the descriptive bibliographer.

To frame in words an adequate description of a cloth binding requires essentially some kind of notation of the texture, or "grain," of the cloth and some indication of its color. The first of these problems, though by no means solved, has received a great deal more attention than the second and is much nearer solution. Michael Sadleir, in his

pioneering Trollope: A Bibliography (1928), used such terms as "silk-grained" or "morocco-grained" to describe binding cloth, a gain in precision over "grained cloth" or simply "cloth," if one could visualize what the words implied; and two years later, in The Evolution of Publishers' Binding Styles, 1770-1900, he furnished photographs of four common cloth grains (facing p. 46). Then John Carter, the other pioneer historian of edition binding, made the next step forward in Binding Variants in English Publishing, 1820-1900 (1932), with his preliminary section on "Terminology of Grains and Designs" (pp. xvi-xviii). Here he supplied a plate illustrating twelve grains and provided a table of equivalences between descriptive terms like Sadleir's and the letter designations in use by Winterbottom's, the principal supplier of book cloth.

This table suggests the inevitable dichotomy in the verbal presentation of visual data: one may either use a precise, technical term, which often has little immediate meaning for the uninitiated reader, or else a more readily visualized term, which often is less exact and which breaks down when fine discriminations are needed. Carter declared his preference for the Sadleir terms — that is, "diaper" instead of "H" cloth, "sand-grain" instead of "C", and so on — but not all bibliographers have agreed with him. The two most important recent sources for photographic identifications of cloth grains represent these two approaches. Sadleir, at the end of the first volume of his great catalogue, XIX Century Fiction (1951), includes four plates showing twenty-four grains and giving them descriptive names; Jacob Blanck, at the front of each volume of the Bibliography of American Literature (1955- ), illustrates twenty-eight grains, assigning them the letter symbols used in the trade.[3] Either of these sets of photographs provides a basis for standardization of nomenclature, if followed scrupulously by bibliographers. Perhaps a chart should be issued making these standards more readily accessible, and perhaps bibliographers should, for precision, use both terms — such as "bold-ribbed (T) cloth."[4]

When one turns to the other basic ingredient of the description of cloth, the indication of color, one is surprised to find that practically no attention has been given to the matter. In the Bibliography of

American Literature, for example, the careful specification of cloth grains is in sharp contrast to this comment about color: "No attempt has been made to give other than a brief statement regarding color, and commonly accepted designations are used; variations in tone are recorded" (I, xxxiii).[5] One does not expect bibliographers who strive for precision in most respects to emphasize the casualness of their approach to color, as in these remarks:

One is not surprised, however, given the subjective nature of color descriptions produced in this casual way, to find that any two bibliographers in the past, treating the same book, have been likely to come up with two different designations of the cloth color. Thus T. J. Wise, in his Browning bibliography (1897), describes the wrappers of Pippa Passes (1841) as "yellow" (p. 7), though he explains that they are sometimes "pale cream" or "light brown"; the Broughton-Northup-Pearsall bibliography (1953), on the other hand, calls these wrappers "light apple-green" (p. 4). Similarly, J. W. Robertson (1934) sees the covers of Poe's Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829) as "purple" (p. 38), while for Heartman-Canny (1943) they are "grey-blue" (p. 23). Sometimes the difference is a matter of emphasis, as when Duval (1939) designates the cloth of Aldous Huxley's On the Margin (1923) "blue-green" (p. 28) and Muir-van Thal (1927) finds it "greenish-blue" (p. 20); or when McDonald (1925) considers D. H. Lawrence's The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914) to be "red" (p. 32) and The Prussian Officer (1914) to be "dark blue" (p. 35), while Roberts (1963) finds them, conversely, "dark red" (p. 24) and "blue" (p. 25). Even the relative proportions are not constant, for Hogan (1936) labels Edwin Arlington Robinson's The Man Against the Sky (1916) and Merlin (1917) equally as "maroon" (pp. 11-12), while

Beebe and Bulkley (1931) say that the first is "dark maroon" and the second plain "maroon" (pp. 14-15). For Currie (1932), Booth Tarkington's In the Arena (1905) is "dark olive" (p. 53), but for Russo and Sullivan (1949) it is "sage-green" (p. 14); for Williams and Starrett (1948), Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is "tan" (p. 18), but for H. F. West (in the Dartmouth catalogue, 1948) it is "yellow" (p. 5); for Parker (1948), Joyce's Dubliners (1914) is "plum" (p. 22), but for Slocum and Cahoon (1953) it is "dark red" (p. 12); both Stewart (1959) and Livingston (1927) agree that Kipling's The Seven Seas (1896) is "red" (pp. 136, 160), but for Martindell (1923) it is "maroon" (p. 53); for Sadleir (volume 12 of the Constable edition, 1923), Melville's Typee (1846) is "fawn" (p. 341) and Mardi (1849) is "dark green" (p. 348), but for Minnigerode (1922) the first is "yellow" (p. 102) and the second "dark brown" (p. 135).

Such a list could be extended indefinitely, but the process would be pointless, since confusion of this kind is to be expected when color names are chosen on the basis of personal preference, without recourse to any set of standards. There have been only a few signs in recent years that bibliographers are beginning to be concerned about the problem. John Carter, in his ABC for Book-Collectors (1952), understated the case when he said, "There has never been much precision or uniformity in describing the colours of cloth"; but he went on to make a specific suggestion: "until we all agree to use the official Dictionary of Colour Standards, this imprecision will no doubt persist" (p. 55). The following year Patrick Cahill, in The English First Editions of Hilaire Belloc, adopted standard 381c of the British Standards Institution, Colours for Ready Mixed Paints (1948; 3rd impression, 1951), and thus described his bindings with such terms as "dovegrey" or "deep buff" or "pale-crimson." Then in 1956 Raymond Toole Stott took up Carter's recommendation in his bibliography of Somerset Maugham and used one of the British Colour Council's publications — the Dictionary of Colours for Interior Decoration (1949). Though it may seem strange to read of "hay" or "biscuit" endpapers, the experiment was, as Stott recognized, "at least a step on the way to the systematized description of colours of binding cloth" (p. 8). And it was undoubtedly more efficient and precise than the method used by Frederick T. Bason in his earlier (1931) Maugham bibliography: the binding of Of Human Bondage (1915), labeled "petrol blue" by Stott

(p. 35), had been described by Bason as "dark sea-green cloth (a more distinct green than The Casuarina Tree)" (p. 33).[7]

These worthy efforts, however, did not convert other bibliographers from their subjective ways. Anthony Rota, reviewing Keynes' bibliography of Siegfried Sassoon (1962), remarked that "Sir Geoffrey's treatment of colours again points the need for the adoption of a common standard for defining binding shades"; and he quoted Keynes' description of The Old Hunstman (1917) as "drab or grey-blue" (with its ambiguous or, since the two colors do not seem synonymous) and of The Daffodil Murderer (1913) as "orange" (when to Rota's eyes it is yellow).[8] That this kind of confusion has not prodded bibliographers long before now to attack the problem of color designation is remarkable. On the other hand, this neglect can perhaps partly be explained by the fact that significant nineteenth-century binding variants generally do not depend on color differences alone; books were frequently issued in several colors simultaneously, and later bindings often involved a different cloth texture as well as color.[9] But in the twentieth century color variants may be more meaningful, since the simultaneous issue of multiple colors has not been customary. In any event, there should be a precise method for describing the color of a given binding whether or not the priority of an issue depends on its specification. No bibliographer would estimate the dimensions of a leaf without using a ruler; in the same way no bibliographer should make his own subjective estimate of a color without turning to a color chart, which ought to be an equally essential part of his equipment. The point is self-evident; there should be general agreement, in the words of the reviewer of Cahill's bibliography, that "it would be a great relief to all concerned if some standard scale could be adopted."[10]

The question then becomes the determination of the particular system best suited to the requirements of bibliographical description. And this decision is not to be lightly made; for any kind of standard, to serve its purpose, must be capable of wide acceptance and future

applicability. At the outset, it should be possible to agree that any system selected for bibliography must meet certain minimum conditions: (1) it must contain color chips or samples which can be compared easily with book covers; (2) it must include a sufficient number of different colors to be compatible with the degree of precision required in making the kinds of distinctions between bindings that are likely to be significant under varying circumstances; (3) it must assign to each color a name (not simply a number or symbol), avoiding names so fanciful as to carry no immediate connotation; (4) it must be compact in physical form and easily portable, so that the bibliographer can conveniently carry the standards with him to the libraries in which he is working; (5) it must be inexpensive enough that it can become a standard tool in every bibliographer's possession (for it is too much to expect, even for an accepted standard, that each collection in which one works will have a copy at hand); (6) it must provide strong assurance of continued availability in the future. The number of color systems which have devised since the time of Isaac Newton is vast,[11] and it is necessary to know something about the currently available ones in order to make an intelligent choice.