Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE EYE STYLE. Under the patronage of De Thou, Nicholas and Clovis fire so much improved on the Grolier type of design that they are justly entitled to the credit of originating a new style. The geometrical layout of their designs is perfect, the surrounding of the compartments with scrolls and branches of laurel original, and the covering of the entire field of the cover with delicate tooling is the perfection of richness in book decoration. They adopted graceful scrolls and small floral figures in place of the Moresque characters of Grolier's time which were so entirely superseded that they are seldom used in book ornamentation but to exemplify the Grolier style. The quantity of compartments in the com- position of the design, with their beautiful variety of shape, and the laurel-branch decoration which surrounds them, are the distinguishing features of this style. I know of no feature of book decoration that has received more favor than the laurel-branch as introduced by Nicholas five. The style was practiced at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries. It is quite appropriate to modern books, and no richer can be chosen. LE GASCON. This is a style which can never be mistaken. Using a similar framework to the fives, Le Gascon made a novel change in scroll ornaments used for filling in the compartments by making the face of them fine dots instead of solid line. In addition to novelty, it gave great delicacy to the treatment of book decoration. From the time of Aldus the ornaments had gradually been getting finer, until now they had reached the extreme point of delicateness. LE GASCON. In the latter part of his career, Le Gascon abandoned even the solid-line framework and made up his designs hy the dotted ornaments alone. When this sty...