Studio: international art (36.1906)

Ornamental Bookbinding in Ireland

EGONT ELEVATION

ground Plan

N W ELEVATION

5 W ELEVATION

FIG. 7.—PLAN OF A HOUSE NOW BEING BUILT ON DROMENAGH ESTATE

C. R. ASHBEE, ARCHITECT

plan them that they can be added to later without
spoiling the effect—the possibility of later exten-
sions is being considered in each case. The plan
(Fig. 3) will serve to illustrate this. The house
was built originally quite square (see Fig. 2), but
the several annexes are designed on a cruciform
arrangement, and of these the first has just been
added.

Passing now to the house shown in Fig. 6,
we have again a different type, very happily
expressed in Mr. Griggs’ drawing. The two
gables facing south by south-west are designed to
stand on to a little square gravel court with clipped
Irish yews, with pleaching and topiary work on
three sides, while a lawn - tennis court will be
laid out in front of these yew-trees, the pines and
oaks being utilised to shade the lawn and screen
the house from the road. C. R. Ashbee.

The Editor, who is always pleased to receive
drawings and photographs of newly completed
architectural work with a view to their reproduc-
tion in the pages of The Studio, desires to point
out that they should in all cases be accompanied
by plans to scale, as in the absence of these the
details cannot be so readily grasped. Especial
interest is attached by him to schemes for the
decoration and furnishing of interiors. Such
schemes are, of course, most effective when
carried out in colour, and may be submitted

52

with a view to their reproduction in the original
tints.

ORNAMENTAL BOOKBINDING
IN IRELAND IN THE EIGHT-
EENTH CENTURY. BY SIR
EDWARD SULLIVAN, BART.

If a really comprehensive history of decorative
bookbinding ever comes to be written—a history
dealing with the rise, progress, and culmination of
the subject in every part of the world—the writer
who avails himself of information already published
will find but scanty reference to the binding which
has been produced in Ireland. He will, perhaps
learn that the earliest named European binder since
classic times in Rome was an Irish monk, Dagaeus
who flourished in the sixth century ; that another
ecclesiastic in Ireland called Edtan is mentioned as
having followed the calling of bookbinder in the
ninth century ; that a few names of persons asso-
ciated with the craft are mentioned here and there
in local chronicles of the country as having worked
as bookbinders in the seventeenth century; and
that some scattered allusions are made in treatises
on British binding to the work done by Irishmen
at the close of the eighteenth century, but which
convey really nothing as to either the general artistic
forms adopted by binders in Ireland or the character
of the details of which their designs were usually
built up. There is hardly a nation in Europe which