panel stamps, has since that period had only two binders of any
reputation, Magnus and Poncyn, of Amsterdam, who worked for the
Elzéviers and Louis XIV. Of Spanish bindings few fine specimens
have been unearthed, and these are all early. Only England can boast
that, like France, she has possessed one school of binders after
another, working with varying success from the earliest times down to
the present century, in which bookbinding all over Europe has suffered
from the servility with which the old designs, now for the first time
fully appreciated, have been copied and imitated.

In this length of pedigree it must be noted that England far surpasses
even France herself. The magnificent illuminated manuscripts, the finest
of their age, which were produced at Winchester during the tenth
century, were no doubt bound in the jewelled metal covers of which the
rapacity of the sixteenth century has left hardly a single trace in this
country. But early in the twelfth century, if not before, the Winchester
bookmen turned their attention also to leather binding, and the school
of design which they started, spreading to Durham, London, and Oxford,
did not die out in England until it was ousted by the large panel stamps
introduced from France at the end of the fifteenth. The predominant
feature of these Winchester bindings (of which a fine example from the
library of William Morris recently sold for £180), and of their
successors, is the employment of small stamps, from half an inch to an
inch in size, sometimes circular, more often square or pear-shaped, and
containing figures, grotesques, or purely conventional designs. A
circle, or two half-circles, formed by the repetition of one stamp,
within one or more rectangles formed by others, is perhaps the commonest
scheme of decoration, but it is the characteristic of these bindings, as
of the finest in gold tooling, that by the repetition of a few small
patterns an endless variety of designs could be built up. The British