Fore Edge Friday
This week’s example for #Fore Edge Friday comes from our copy of British editor and Milton specialist William Aldis Wright‘s 1903 critical edition of The Poetical Works of John Milton printed by John and Charles Felix Clay for Cambridge University Press. It is bound in what is known as a prize binding, a finely-bound book given as a prize or award at European educational institutions. This tradition is known from at least the mid-17th century, and in England special prize bindings persisted until the mid-20th century. Prize editions are often bound in dark goatskin with raised bands, gold stamping and tooling, the cover stamped with the logo of the school, and the edges treated with gilding or, as in this case, marbling.
This particular prize binding was given to a student named C. A. Fletcher by England’s famed Charterhouse School, and the cover bears the school’s crest with its motto “Deo Dante Dedi” (God having given, I gave). The abbreviated text stamped in gold at the bottom of the spine, “Schol. Carthus,” makes reference to the school’s original early-17th-century founding on the site of an old Carthusian monastery. To this day pupils and alumni of Charterhouse are referred to as Carthusians. The edges on all three sides of the text block and on the endpapers have been marbled in what is called a Spanish pattern.
