seen amongst the family treasures of wealthy
mandarins books that had been handed down
from father to son during centuries, and nothing
in these works afforded any semblance that they
had been amongst the first books ever published
in the land. Some of them were thinly bound
in plaited rice-straw covered over with figured
satin, but one or two were bound in wood,
painted, gilt, and enriched with carvings. Copies
of the works of Lao-tsen, Meng-tsen, and
Koung-tsen (Laotius, Mencius, and Confucius),
evidently of great antiquity, were likewise found
in the summer palace at Pekin a few years ago,
and the binding in every case was such as to do
honour to the artists, whoever they were, and
whatever may have been the epoch of their
existence.

But perhaps we shall do well to confine our
notice of bookbinding to Europe, for, in the
absence of any certain documents to record the
march of civilisation in China and Japan, during
the long period of time when these nations were
unknown to the rest of the world, all statements
concerning their inventive skill must be more
or less hypothetical. When the history of the
Celestial Empire becomes better known to us,
as it no doubt will in a few years, we shall
probably be surprised to find that the humblest
of Chinese peasants were possessed of well-
bound books at a time when our haughty
mediæval barons were unable to sign their names.
As it is, we can state, upon the testimony of
well-nigh all the authors who have written upon
China, that there are three volumes that have
been favoured by succeeding generations of
Chinese boys and girls from time out of date;
three books of which every Chinese palace and
cottage has owned a copy (and probably a bound
copy) since four hundred years and more; and
these are San Koué-tchi (History of the three
Kingdoms), a work dear to soldiers as well as
schoolboys from the tales of war and strife
therein; Fa-youen-thou-tin (The Forest of
Pearls of the Garden of the Law); and
Si-Siang-ki (History of the Eastern Bower), the
pet tale of Chinese young ladies.

At Athens, in the time of Pericles, it was
customary to write either upon thin sheets of
ivory or upon tablets of wood spread over with
wax. This latter, as the most economical, was
naturally the most prevalent method. Authors,
philosophers, wits, and scholars, walked about
with their ivory or wooden tablets under their
tunics, and whenever they desired to note
down anything, they did so by means of a
pointed stylet made of gold, silver, or steel.
It was the melting and soiling properties
of the wax that led to the first European
attempts at binding. The young gentlemen
who attended the "At homes" of Aspasia, were
too particular to suffer stains of grease upon
the spotless folds of their garments, and the
idea occurred to them of enclosing their waxen
tablets between two slender sheets of ivory,
gold, or silver. The fashion "took;" it was
found that the two plates of metal not only
preserved the wax from the heat, but also kept
the letters traced upon it from being obliterated
by the air or the dust. Gradually, all authors
fell into the habit of writing their treatises or
plays upon wax tablets of an equal size, and
then, pressing all the tablets together between
two sheets of wood or metal; so that, seen from
a distance, an Athenian work of four hundred
or three hundred B.C., must have looked pretty
much like a book upon a modern drawing-room
table.

However, the reign of wax as a material to
write on did not last long. The Romans
inaugurated the use of parchment, which gave
an immense stimulus to scribbling, for parchment
was considerably cheaper than wax, and
much easier to carry. But the introduction of
parchment gave a blow to bookbinding. The
Romans, although they sometimes made up
their manuscripts into "libri plicatiles"—that
is, small tomes of the size of three or four
inches square, preferred rolling their parchments
round a wooden cylinder. Hence the word
volume, from volvere, a word which is absurd
in the way we apply it now.

Owing to the habit of using volumes, the art
of binding books made little or no progress so
long as the Romans ruled the world. And
after their sceptre had been broken, Europe
was too much occupied in fighting to think,
during many centuries, of anything like science,
art, or literature. A few monks, scattered here
and there in remote convents, were the only
people who wrote through all those troublous
times, and it was not until the beginning of the
eighth century that the clergy, having become
powerful and respected, began to spread works
of history, theology, and even of chivalry,
throughout Europe. Books were, however,
wofully costly at that period. The copying of
a single volume in plain writing, without ornament
of any kind, would of itself have required
a labour of many months, but plain books
would not have suited the taste of the ignorant
nobles of that time. Being for the most
part unable to read, what they looked for in a
book was a collection of gorgeously illumined
pages, and, above all, a sumptuous binding. So
long as these were forthcoming, they would
gladly have said of the rest that it was
perfectly indifferent to them whether there were
any writing or not; and it is thus that towards
the time of Charlemagne (who himself, by the
way, notwithstanding all his wisdom, could not
read), the illumining and binding of books
attained a degree of richness, which would
surprise us even now. There exists in the
Bibliothèque Impérial, at Paris, the prayer-
book which Charlemagne gave to the city of
Toulouse, and which that town presented to
Napoleon I. when he stopped there on his way
to Spain. It is marvellously illumined, the
pages are of purple parchment lettered with
gold, and the binding is of scarlet velvet, in a
perfect state of preservation.

As chivalry and knightly tastes continued to
spread, the love of handsome books increased,
until at last the supply, unable to keep pace