The English provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders to 1557Duff, E. Gordon (Edward Gordon)
History
The English provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders to 1557
Duff, E. Gordon (Edward Gordon)
Book industries and trade -- Great Britain; Printing -- Great Britain -- History
The bookbindings that can definitely be assigned to Siberch are
at present few in number. He used one fine roll divided into four
rectangular compartments, containing a pomegranate, a turretted gateway
with portcullis, a Tudor rose, and three fleurs-de-lys, all surmounted
by a royal crown and within canopied archways. Below the fleurs-de-lys
are his initials. This is a purely English design, and the tool was no
doubt made for him after his arrival in Cambridge. Immediately Siberch
gave up work, about 1523-24, the tool passed to Speryng, who mutilated
it, so that we know fairly well the period during which it was used
when undamaged. Its use in conjunction with other tools enables more
of Siberch’s material to be identified. In the University Library
is a copy of the _Epistolæ_ of Paulinus, bishop of Nola, printed at
Paris in 1516, whose binding is impressed with two well-executed panel
stamps separated from each other by this roll. On one is depicted St
Roche tended by an angel for the plague and a dog bringing him food,
on the other St John Baptist, standing on a mound and preaching to
four persons seated below him. These two saints were popular subjects
for binding panels, and a number of varieties, mostly copied one from
another, are known, but this particular pair are especially well
designed and engraved, and were chosen by Dibdin to reproduce in his
_Bibliographical Decameron_.
On a folio in the library of Clare College, Siberch’s signed roll
is found used with another roll or band containing figures of seven
peasants, one piping, the rest dancing with hands joined, a very
favourite design with Netherlandish binders.
The two panel stamps and this second roll are all foreign in
appearance, and were no doubt brought by Siberch from abroad. After
he gave up work they remained in England. I have a work of Erasmus,
printed in 1532, certainly bound in this country, which has the two
panels on the binding, while the roll with dancing figures occurs on a
binding in St Paul’s Cathedral Library, lined with waste leaves of an
Almanac for 1544. It is not improbable that Siberch had other panels,
for we find, soon after he ceased to bind, stamps which were certainly
his used in conjunction with others exactly similar in style. I saw
lately a work of Erasmus, dated 1524, on which this St Roche panel was
used, and with it was a panel with St Michael, and these two occur
together elsewhere. One point, however, must certainly be noticed. The
one panel binding that we can with certainty attribute to Siberch has
three bands on the back, as was usual in the case of English bindings.
Every other binding with his stamps which I have seen has four bands,
and a binder would be most unlikely to change his habits on such a
point.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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