the surface of half-bound books is usually inartistic and even ugly.
He proposes to use old scraps of brocade, embroidery, Venice velvet,
or what not; and doubtless a covering made of some dead fair lady's
train goes well with a romance by Crebillon, and engravings by
Marillier. "Voici un cartonnage Pompadour de notre invention," says
M. Uzanne, with pride; but he observes that it needs a strong will
to make a bookbinder execute such orders. For another class of
books, which our honest English shelves reject with disgust, M.
Uzanne proposes a binding of the skin of the boa constrictor;
undoubtedly appropriate and "admonishing." The leathers of China
and Japan, with their strange tints and gilded devices may be used
for books of fantasy, like "Gaspard de la Nuit," or the "Opium
Eater," or Poe's poems, or the verses of Gerard de Nerval. Here, in
short, is an almost unexplored field for the taste of the
bibliophile, who, with some expenditure of time, and not much of
money, may make half-binding an art, and give modern books a
peculiar and appropriate raiment.

M. Ambrose Firmin Didot has left some notes on a more serious
topic,--the colours to be chosen when books are full-bound in
morocco. Thus he would have the "Iliad" clothed in red, the
"Odyssey" in blue, because the old Greek rhapsodists wore a scarlet
cloak when they recited the Wrath of Achilles, a blue one when they
chanted of the Return of Odysseus. The writings of the great
dignitaries of the Church, M. Didot would array in violet; scarlet
goes well with the productions of cardinals; philosophers have their
sober suit of black morocco, poets like Panard may be dressed in
rose colour. A collector of this sort would like, were it possible,
to attire Goldsmith's poems in a "coat of Tyrian bloom, satin
grain." As an antithesis to these extravagant fancies, we may add