About the book:
The Songs and Sonnets of William Shakespeare, compiles the musical verses and sonnets integrated throughout Shakespeare’s famous plays and standalone poetry. The book is famous for its intricate artwork by Charles Robinson, a prominent artist of the Golden Age of Illustration and features twelve tipped-in colour plates.
This is an original 1915 publication by Duckworth & Co, designed as a premium large-format edition to capitalise on the massive Edwardian appetite for beautifully illustrated gift books. It brought a delicate, artistic sensibility to William Shakespeare’s deeply personal verses.
The book features a distinct turquoise/cyan colour palette for its ornamental features, including full page drawings introducing each major section and the small text flourishes. The layout of the contents includes decorative elements like dropped capitals (initial letters) and artist tailpieces (little decorative illustrations seen throughout the book).
About the binding:
- A full leather stub-binding bound in blue/grey leather.
- The stubs are folded from pink and blue paper.
- The covers of the book have intricate embroidered detail, sewn over coloured leather onlays.
- The embroidery stitches include: French knots; running stitch; whipped stitch; couching and seed stitch.
- Edge-to-edge blue/grey leather doublures are patterned in the same way as the cover, with the design flowing around the edges of the boards.
- Top edge hand-painted with acrylic paint.
- The foredge and bottom edge are hand-deckled.
- Leather-jointed endpapers.
- Double-core leather covered endbands sewn with silks.
- Spine title embroidered with thread.
- The book is housed in a cherry wood box, titles with a leather panel backed with 23ct gold leaf.
Design Description:
Because Shakespeare’s sonnets deal with heavy abstract themes like aging, time, and love, the illustrator Charles Robinson moved away from his usual grand theatrical scenes. He focused instead on quiet, symbolic imagery that complemented the rhythm of the text. He became famous for his delicate line drawings, whimsical fairytale imagery and mastery of watercolours and his art is highly recognisable for its fluid, organic elegance.
The design for the cover of this binding is based on one of the detailed watercolour plates from within the book that accompanies the caption:
“On a day – alack the day!-
Love, whose month is ever May,
Spied a blossom passing fair
Playing in the wanton air.”
Each of the plates is accompanied by coordinating lines of poetry, which in the original binding were printed onto a loose translucent tissue guard to protect the plates. Due to the nature of the paper they were printed onto, these were very fragile and creased so I opted to cut out the quotes and adhere them under the plates using a paper window.
The title panel on the spine of the book is designed to compliment the flowing fabric of the female’s dress worn in the illustration the binding is based on.
A blog post about how this binding was made will be following soon!