At the close of the fifteenth century or rather earlier, the custom became popular of having _Horae_ and other manuscripts owned by wealthy secular personages bound in velvet, richly decorated with embroidery in gold and silver thread and silk mixed with a great number of seed pearls. The arms, badges and initials of the owner are the commonest designs for these embroideries.
Some of the German examples of this class of binding are especially elaborate and magnificent; but on the whole this method of decoration is not at all suited for covering books.
With regard to books on the subject of early bindings; it is much to be regretted that existing works, of which there are a great many, especially in French, all begin just about the period when bindings of the greatest interest and the truest artistic value were no longer made. Plenty has been written about the costly bindings in which Grolier, Maioli, and other wealthy book-buyers had their purchases encased, but no work exists on the bindings of the mediaeval period, when, frequently, the covers of a manuscript were as much a labour of love as the illuminated pages within. The sixteenth century binders, who worked for Grolier and other rich patrons of art, lived at the verge of a commercial epoch, and though their works are often very pretty and technically of high merit, yet they cannot be compared, as true works of art, with the bindings of the period before printing was invented.
_The present value of illuminated manuscripts._ On the whole a fine manuscript may be regarded as about the cheapest work of art of bygone days that can now be purchased by an appreciative collector. Many of the finest and most perfectly preserved manuscripts which now come into the market are actually sold for smaller sums than they would have cost when they were new, in spite of the great additional value and interest which they have gained from their antiquity and comparative rarity.
For example, a beautiful and perfectly preserved historiated Anglo-Norman _Vulgate_ of the thirteenth century, with its full number of eighty-two pictured initials, written on between six and seven hundred leaves of the finest uterine vellum, can now commonly be purchased for from £30 to £40. This hardly represents the original value of the vellum on which the manuscript is written.