BOOK-BINDING is a fashion that has suffered many vicissitudes.
In the eighteenth century no really elegant gentleman would consider his library presentable unless all the volumes were uniformly bound in calf and stamped with his bookplate in gold on the outside. Nowdays, to dress books in uniform like soldiers would be considered vandalism (though no less an authority than Mr. Gordon Craig has advocated the bookplate on the outside boards), and the uniform binding has become the badge of the public lending library -and of its most thumbed sections at that. But there are many sorts of books for which one may legitimately desire a binding more durable and more distinctive than issues from the ordinary publishing house, and book-binding is not merely an innocent, but a very amusing and absorbing pursuit.