Art and Handcraft in the Woman's Building
of the World's Columbian Exposition

74 ART AND HANDICRAFT impetus in the last five or six years. Until that time there was practically no attention paid to the proper decoration of book covers. Even the best publishers, except, perhaps, on those rare occasions when an expensive volume was to be issued, were guilty of offering the most preposterous inconsistencies to their patrons. BOOK COVER, XVI CENTURY. M. A. Shelden. United States. clubs as the Grolier and Aldine A publisher was quite likely to bring out, let us say, a volume of critical essays with a bunch of daisies thrown, across the cover, with a careless disregard of all rules of balance and composition. Among books of a higher char- acter, it was a common thing to find an illustration extracted from the contents of the volume and re- produced on the cover. We hardly know to what to attribute the gen- eral revolt among the publishers and the public against this puerile perversion of the art of binding. Perhaps the establishment of such las had more to do with the reform in this matter than anything else. Through frequent exhibitions the members of these clubs have been able to study, and, better still, to put before the public, the treasures of private collectors. It was inevitable that the contrast between the beauty of treatment and design seen in the Grolier, Dérome, and kindred styles, and the entire absence of these qualities in the current pub- lications, should be strongly felt. The effect of this influence has been such that publishers have come to realize that a salable book must have an attractive cover. It is not expedient to have hand-tooled leather and such other expensive bits of handicraft as we have inherited from the bibliophiles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but even in this age of machinery, and the endless publication of cheaply bound books, very charming and artistic cover effects BOOK COVER. Boston Collection. United States. are within the reach of the cultivated and enterprising publisher. Book-cover work presents a wide field, ranging from the thor- oughly formal conventional sixteenth-century cover to something- appropriate for the so-called railroad novel. It is here that the