Douglas Cockerell (1870–1945)

Douglas Cockerell has quite a different perspective from Zaehnsdorf, even if both of them are hoping to improve the quality of book production. He was heavily involved in the Arts and Crafts movement, having been trained by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson. His brother was William Morris's secretary. He taught at what became the Central School of Art and Design, and wrote this book as a textbook for his students. It's a thing of beauty in itself, and it focuses on bookbinding and book design as a craft, paying little or no attention to horrid things like machines and cloth bindings. The most interesting parts are the chapters where he goes through the process of how you would design the decoration for a leather binding, and there are also some interesting chapters on the archival qualities of bookbinding materials. People were just beginning to notice around 1900 that all was not well with the industrially produced leathers and papers of the last seventy years or so, and Cockerell was involved in a big research project to find out what caused their rapid decay. Obviously all the detail of this was superseded long ago, but it's still fascinating to read about.… (plus d'informations)