There were then, as now, good and bad bookbinders. Cicero, in his letters to Atticus, asks for two of his slaves who were very clever _ligatores librorum_ (bookbinders). Bookbinding, however, was not an art very generally known, for square books, notwithstanding the convenience of their shape, had not yet superseded rolls; but we see, in the Notices of the Dignities of the Eastern Empire (“Notitia Dignitatum Imperii), written towards 450, that this accessory art had already made immense progress; since certain officers of the empire used to carry, in the public ceremonies, large square books containing the administrative instructions of the emperor: these books were bound, covered with green, red, blue, or yellow leather, closed by means of leathern straps or by hooks, and ornamented with little golden rods disposed horizontally, or lozengewise, with the portrait of the sovereign painted or gilt on their sides. From the fifth century goldsmiths and lapidaries ornamented binding with great richness. And so we hear St. Jerome exclaiming:--“Your books are covered with precious stones, and Christ died naked before the gate of his temple!” “The Book of the Gospels,” in Greek, given to the basilica of Monza by Theodelinda, queen of the Lombards, about 600, has still one of these costly bindings. A specimen of Byzantine art, preserved in the Louvre, is a sort of small plate, which is supposed to be one of the sides of the cover of a book; on it we find executed in bas-relief the “Visit of the Holy Women to the Tomb,” and several other scenes from the Gospels. In this example the beauty of the figures, the taste which dictated the arrangement of the draperies, and the finish in the execution, furnish us with evidence that, in the industrial arts, the Greeks had maintained till the twelfth century their pre-eminence over all the people of Europe. In those days the binding of ordinary books was executed without any ornamentation, this being reserved for sacred books. If, in the treasures of churches, abbeys, and palaces, a few manuscripts covered with gold, silver, and precious stones were kept as relics, books in common use were simply covered in boards or leather; but not without much attention being given to the binding, which was merely intended to preserve the volumes. Many documents bear witness to the great care and precision with which, in certain monasteries, books were bound and preserved. All sorts of skins were employed in covering them when they had been once pressed and joined together between boards of hard wood that would not readily decay: in the North, even the skins of seals and of sharks were employed, but pig-skin seems to have been used in preference to all others. [Illustration: PANEL OF A BOOK COVER. Bas-relief in Gold Repoussé. Ninth Century. (in the Louvre.)]