Читать книгу Thomas Berthelet, Royal Printer and Bookbinder to Henry VIII., King of England онлайн

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Another early English book of great interest is a Latin Psalter of the eleventh century, in its original binding of thick oaken boards covered with brown leather. On each side is a sunk panel, and in one of these is a copper gilt figure of our Lord in the attitude of the crucifixion. The corners and clasp are of thin brass stamped with patterns, and are most likely of later date than the rest of the binding. A very interesting point about this book is, that it was used as the official coronation oath-book by all the English sovereigns from Henry I. to Henry VII.; it formerly belonged to the Exchequer, and was subsequently the property of the Marquis of Buckingham, who kept it in his beautiful library at Stowe; it is now in the British Museum.

With the exception of these two instances, all the English books bound in leather before the time of Thomas Berthelet are ornamented, if at all, with blind-stamped work only. In the cutting of stamps for this form of decoration, as well as in the designing of them, English artists in the twelfth century particularly are considered to have been superexcellent. The subject has been most ably and lucidly considered by Mr. James Weale, lately Art Librarian at the South Kensington Museum. He finds that such work was produced especially at Durham, Winchester, Oxford, and London, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, after which there was such a marked irruption of foreign binders and foreign stamps that the English work became obscured, and on its recovery was of an entirely different character. But it is now generally conceded that these early English blind-tooled leather bindings are indeed the finest of the kind made anywhere.