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4to (32.5 cm). XII, 68, [2] pp. 30 plates. Original publisher's wine cloth, boards framed with a gilt-ruled panel, spine lettered in gilt, top edge gilt, fore- and lower edges untrimmed (binding slightly sunned, stained, and rubbed at extremities, endpapers somewhat toned). Limited to 600 copies. The tenth book printed for the First Edition Club. A landmark exhibition catalogue and one of the earliest serious studies of historic bookbindings written from the perspective of the modern bibliophile and connoisseur. The volume illustrates and describes thirty exceptional bindings selected from the First Edition Club's Seventh Exhibition, held in 1926 and drawn from many of the greatest British private collections of the period, including those of Henry Yates Thompson, Lt.-Col. W. E. Moss, Sir George Holford, Dr. H. M. Davies, G. S. Tomkinson, Alfred Ehrman, Sir Edward Sullivan, and the author himself. The bindings span almost three centuries, from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth century, and represent many of the principal schools and styles of European decorative binding: early Oxford work, Venetian bindings, French Renaissance gold-tooling, the celebrated "Canevari" style, five bindings made for Jean Grolier, Henri II bindings, Lyonese work, the distinctive Wotton style, Parisian inlaid bindings, Spanish and German bindings (including pierced vellum examples), French armorial bindings, English royal and Restoration bindings--including examples made for Samuel Pepys and bearing the monograms of Charles II and James II--together with bindings attributed to Florimond Badier, Cleeve, Richard Steel, Jacques-Antoine Derome, Richard Dymott, and an important Dublin binding executed by Abraham Bradley in 1773. Each plate is accompanied by a detailed bibliographical and technical description recording the book, binding material, dimensions, provenance, decoration, and comparative observations. Hobson's substantial introduction surveys the history of English binding exhibitions, from South Kensington (1861) and the Burlington Fine Arts Club exhibition of 1891 to the present exhibition, while also addressing questions of attribution, workshop practice, and the persistent problem of forged bindings. Particularly important is his reassessment of the traditional attribution of many Restoration bindings to Samuel Mearne, distinguishing several different workshops within the group formerly assigned to Mearne alone, together with his discussion of celebrated binding forgeries that had entered nineteenth-century collections. Beautifully printed on thick laid paper by the Chiswick Press, it is itself a notable example of fine English book production. An important milestone in twentieth-century bookbinding scholarship and an essential reference for collectors, librarians, curators, and historians of the decorative binding.
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