Binding

POPULAR PRINTED MUSIC was usually sold in the 19th century in the form of a few pages of sheet music with attractive artwork on the cover or title page. The latest songs and dances were proudly exhibited in Malta's music shop windows of the time in order to attract customers. The invention of the upright piano made this instrument far more affordable to a larger public so that much of this sheet music was  composed or transcribed for pianists.  Owners of this flimsy sheet music sometimes chose to bind together several of their favourite pieces in order to preserve them. The binding was done locally.

BINDING: There are some beautiful bindings having leather spines with gold lettering and tooling. Often the owner's name is also fixed on a leather label with decorative gold edging on the front cover. This all shows the importance that was given to sheet music and also the prestige of ownership.

Gold tooling on leather spine of bound 19th century Music. ABC Collection

Bound Dance Music with leather spine and gold tooling. Private Collection

Music of the 19th century was not printed on standard sized paper or in standard format. Paper could be large or smaller, horizontal or upright. The binder always preferred neatness. This meant that during binding very often the larger formats suffered cropping in order to conform with the smaller sizes.  This produced some very unfortunate results such as missing titles, missing composer's name or publisher, and also cropped hand written dedications. 

This is one example of sheet music, published in 1856, that suffered unfortunate cropping to the title, the composer and the publisher's name. It should have read:

[The] 

Prin[cess] Royal 

Polka

par

[Charles D'Albert]

[publisher]

The parts in square brackets have all been mercilessly cropped. What a pity!

The Princess Royal of the time, to whom this piece of music is dedicated, was Queen Victoria's daughter, also named Victoria. 1856 was her 16th birthday. Less than two years later she was to become wife of Prince Frederick of Prussia (later Emperor Frederick III). 

A Piece of music by Dr Paolo Nani, printed by the Brocktorffs, suffered cropping in binding. The handwritten dedication by Nani is also cropped.

MARBLING:  Many of the 19th century music books have another type of binding. We find beautifully-coloured paper covers with mottled, veined patterns that look like marble. The 'marbling' patterns are the result of different coloured inks swirled manually and transferred on to paper. These are a few marbled beauties binding some of the music in my own collection - each one of them is a work of art and so fascinating!.

If you wish to find out more about different types of decorated paper, the University of Edinburgh has a wonderful collection that can be viewed on line:

University of Edinburgh Exhibitions | The Art of Decorated Papers