PSALMS
ELEGANT EMBROIDERED BINDING
The Whole Booke of Davids Psalmes.
London, Printed for the Company of Stationers, 1628.£10,500.00
12mo. pp. 439 (ix). Roman letter. T-p within typographical border. Woodcut initial. Printed musical settings throughout. A very good copy in fine quality contemp. embroidered silk over boards, fruits, flowers, insects and birds in green, red, yellow, blue and silver thread on white ground, slightly faded, a few small lightly abraded areas, in very good condition, all edges gilt, pink silk pastedowns. C17 autographs to t-p and Bb1r (marking a favourite setting?) of Mary Curtis, Lathbury, and of Mary Taylor Shenly, Cotage to rear fly. Recent autograph and cat. no. to front fly. In folding box.
A charming C17th embroidered binding depicting flowers, prettily designed and expertly executed, including a rose, bunches of grapes, a bird, snail and moth, on this popular collection of metrical psalms by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, first published 1549, set to music and with settings of various liturgical pieces, prayers and hymns.
The needlework on this copy is very fine: ‘There certainly were amateur needlewomen who produced embroidery for bookbindings in the seventeenth century … The great majority of the embroidered bindings of this period, however, were undoubtedly professional work. In 1638 certain milliners with shops at the Royal Exchange addressed a petition to Archbishop Laud protesting against a Star Chamber decree which limited the sale of Bibles, New Testaments, and Psalm Books to stationers. The milliners said they had been selling such books bound in ‘rare and curious covers of embroidery and needlework,’ and that both they and the embroiderers would suffer severely from this new regulation’ (Mirjam Foot and Howard Nixon, The History of Decorated Bookbinding in England (Oxford: 1992), pp. 54-55).
ESTC S90765. Darlow & Moule (rev.) 417.