The bookbinding of the Low Countries was always fine; but the great improvement which was first introduced there was the use of the panel stamp, invented about the middle of the fourteenth century. It was not till after the introduction of printing, and when books were issued of a small size, that this invention became of real importance; but at the end of the fifteenth and during the first twenty or thirty years of the sixteenth centuries, innumerable bindings of this class were produced. The majority of Netherlandish panels are not pictorial, but are ornamented with a double row of fabulous beasts and birds in circles of foliage; round this runs a legend, very often containing the binder’s name. _Discere ne cesses cura sapientia crescit Martinus Vulcanius_ is on one binding; on another, _Ob laudem christi hunc librum recte ligavi Johannes Bollcaert_. Some binders give not only their name, but the place also—_Johannes de Wowdix Antwerpie me fecit_. Though there are few pictorial Flemish panels, some of these are not without interest. A number were produced by a binder whose initials are I. P., and who was connected in some way with the Augustinian Monastery of St. Gregory and St. Martin at Louvain. One which contains a medallion head, a small figure of Cleopatra, and a good deal of arabesque ornament of foliage, is his best; while another panel, large enough for a quarto book, with a border of chain work, and his initials on a shield in the centre, is his rarest, and is in its way very artistic. At a still later date the binders in the Low Countries produced some panels, which, though still pictorial, show how rapidly the art was being debased. The designs are ill drawn, and the inscription, originally an important part, has come to be degraded into a piece of ornamentation without meaning, cut by the engraver purely with that object, ignoring the individual letters or legibility of the inscription, and anxious only that the finish which an inscription gave to his models might be apparent to the eye in his copies. A similar debasement is not uncommon in late English examples. Italian and Spanish binding, though interesting in itself, affords little information as regards printers or stationers. No bindings were signed, and the designs are in all cases so similar as to afford little clue to the place from which they originally came. The earliest English bindings are extremely interesting and distinctive. Caxton, our first printer, always bound his books in leather, never making use of vellum or pigskin. Bindings of wrapping vellum, which he is erroneously said to have made, were not used in England till a very much later period. His bindings, if ornamented at all, were ruled with diagonal lines, and in the centre of each compartment thus formed a die was impressed. A border was often placed round the side, formed from triangular stamps pointing alternately inwards and outwards, these stamps containing the figure of a dragon.