Roger Payne

Artist Info

Roger PayneEton, 1738 - 1797, London

LC name authority rec.n82115546

LC Heading: Payne, Roger, 1739-1797

Payne, Roger (bap. 1738, d. 1797), bookbinder, was born at Eton, where he was baptized on 8 December 1738, the second of the five children of Thomas Payne, bookbinder (d. 1759), and Elizabeth Godwin (d. 1762). Shortly after his birth the Paynes moved to Windsor, but they were back in Eton by November 1747.

Payne and his younger brother Thomas took over their father's binding business after his death in May 1759. They worked for Walter Bowman in whose account for 1759 and 1760 they are mentioned as bookbinders in Eton. In 1761 Bowman refers to ‘Roger Payne of Windsor’, but in the following year he is again mentioned as ‘Roger Payne of Eton’. A 1757 Birmingham Virgil is signed ‘Eton. Bound by R. Payne’. It was presented by Henry Sleech to his pupil P. Bouverie in 1764 and is now at Cambridge University Library. Only a few bindings of Payne's Eton period are known. Both Roger and his brother Thomas are still mentioned as bookbinders in Eton in 1765 and they occur in the Nugae Etonenses of c.1766. About this time Roger Payne went to London, where, according to Dibdin, he worked for a few years for Thomas Osborne, bookseller of Gray's Inn (d. 1767). Though Payne does not mention Osborne in his bills or letters, he does refer to another bookseller, Samuel Baker of York Street, for whom he bound a copy of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene in 1772. In the late 1760s and early 1770s Payne was probably working independently in Leicester Square, having been set up in business by his namesake (but no relation) Thomas Payne, bookseller in Castle Street, Mews Gate. It is clear from several files and letters that Payne worked for Thomas Payne, paying off (some of) his debts.

Payne was joined in London by his brother Thomas and the brothers worked together, probably most of the time and certainly up to 1796. They both worked for A. M. Storer MP (d. 1799) and there are several fairly plain bindings signed by Roger and Thomas, probably dating from the 1770s, in Storer's library (now at Eton College). Another patron of Roger Payne during the late seventies was Michael Wodhull (1740–1816). An early binding for him covers a copy of Giordano Bruno, De progressu et lampade venatoria logicorum (1587), bought by Wodhull in 1778 for 2s. 6d. and bound by Payne for 4s. 6d. (B. Quaritch, Catalogue 166, Jan 1897, 195).

Both David Wier and his wife appeared to have worked for Payne. Mrs Wier, who apparently was a capable mender and restorer as well as ‘an excellent hand at ruling red ... lines on prayer books’ (Jaffray, 4.182), was, according to Dibdin, ‘pretty constantly and most successfully employed’ (Dibdin, 517) by him, probably before 1774, while her husband (according to the same source) worked for Payne from 1777. The partnership was not a happy one—‘Wier happened to be as fond of “barley broth” as his associate ... They were always quarrelling’ (ibid., 515)—and they parted company.

The bookseller John MacKinlay (d. 1821) also provided Payne with work. Throughout the 1790s Payne worked for the Revd C. M. Cracherode (1730–1799), whose library, now in the British Library, contains well over thirty books bound by him between 1790 and 1798. A 1694 Cambridge Euripides, bought in 1794, has Payne's bill (BL, C19.e.3). Another of Payne's patrons whose library is also in the British Library was the Hon. Thomas Grenville (1755–1846). He served many distinguished book collectors of the time, such as Topham Beauclerck (1739–1780), the author William Beckford (1759–1844), John Dent MP (1750?–1826), Colonel Stanley (d. 1818), the topographical author Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1758–1838) for whom Payne worked from c.1795 to c.1797 and for whom several bindings with their bills survive, and, best known of all, Earl Spencer (1758–1834), whose library is now in the John Rylands University Library, Manchester. Payne worked for him both directly and through the bookseller Thomas Payne, and Lord Spencer's 1480 Lascaris (JRL 7319) was bound by ‘The Book-binders Roger and Thomas Payne’ in dark blue straight-grain morocco. Several of Payne's bindings for Lord Spencer have either manuscript notes or bills, and several more are mentioned in the bookseller Thomas Payne's book bills to Lord Spencer, preserved at Althorp.

Roger Payne's bills and letters frequently describe in some detail the work carried out, and their tone is on the whole one of self-satisfaction and pride in his craftsmanship, as well as a justification for his prices. From these it is clear that he himself did some repair work, as well as doing both the forwarding and the finishing, and that, contrary to popular belief, he did not cut his own tools. He did, however, pay some attention to matching the tool design with the subject of the book in question. He also worked according to a pattern which, at least in some cases, was either specified or approved by the future owner. His typical and best-known bindings were usually in brown russia; red, blue, or green straight-grain morocco; or smooth olive morocco, frequently with purple or brown end-leaves and tall green headbands. Many have leather joints and doublures consisting of a leather frame and a paper centre panel. He used mainly small, naturalistic tools and most of the typical bindings of the 1790s have very elaborately tooled spines, frequently with two or three panels lettered, and the date of printing nearly always in Roman numerals. He was an excellent craftsman and, notwithstanding his reputation for a fondness for strong drink and his self-confessed ill health, his finishing was first rate. He charged his physician, Dr Benjamin Moseley, a special price out of obligation for the latter's professional services and several letters and bills exist in which reference is made to his health and to the doctor's orders and ‘Learned Advice’. Nevertheless, his health deteriorated and his last work, the binding of Homer's Iliad on vellum (Venice, 1504) for Lord Spencer, remained unfinished.

The original watercolour drawing of Payne in his workshop is preserved with R. Gough, Account of a ... Missal ... for John Duke of Bedford (London, J. Nichols for T. Payne, 1794) (Shawyer and Haywood, 2.2715); it was used by Sylvester Harding for his well-known etching made for Thomas Payne, a proof of which is in the British Museum, and a smaller engraving by William Angus illustrates Dibdin's The Bibliographical Decameron (1817). In these portraits he looks tall, thin, and unhealthy, with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes. His verse in praise of barley-wine accompanying the bill to Mr Evans for binding Barry's Wines of the Ancients (Dibdin, 509), his household accounts as quoted by Thomas Payne's son (ibid., 508), and other near-contemporary accounts suggest his intemperate habits, and in an undated letter to Dr Moseley, accompanying his copy of Fortunius Licetus, De Monstris (Amsterdam, 1665), he describes himself as ‘at times having been hardly able to stand to work without very great pains nights & Days even 30 Years since & upwards’.

Payne died, unmarried, on 20 November 1797 at his home at Duke's Court, St Martin's Lane, and was buried six days later in the churchyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields at the expense of his old benefactor Thomas Payne who, according to J. Nichols, had supported him financially for the last eight years of his life (Nichols, 3.736–7).

Mirjam M. Foot

Sources account books, bills, and letters, JRL, Spencer Collection · M. M. Foot, The Henry Davis gift, a collection of bookbindings, 1 (1978), 96–114 · Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, 3.736–7; 8.485 · T. F. Dibdin, The bibliographical decameron, 2 (1817), 506–19 · GM, 1st ser., 67 (1797), 1070–71 · R. Birley, ‘Roger and Thomas Payne: with some account of their earlier bindings’, The Library, 5th ser., 15 (1960), 33–41 · J. Jaffray, ‘A collection of manuscripts relating to the art and trade of bookbinding’, 1864, BL [typescript], vol. 4, p. 185 · C. Davenport, Roger Payne (1929) · C. H. Timperley, Encyclopaedia of literary and typographical anecdote, 2nd edn (1842), 795–6 · H. M. Nixon, Five centuries of English bookbinding (1978), no. 72 · M. M. Foot, Studies in the history of bookbinding (1993), no. 33 · N. M. Shawyer and J. Hayward, The Rothschild library: a catalogue of the collection of eighteenth-century printed books and manuscripts formed by Lord Rothschild, 2 (1954), 2700, 2705, 2708, 2715–16 · R. Colt Hoare, account book, 1776–1835, Hornby Library, Liverpool, 2 vols. · bills and letters, Eton · ‘Thomas Payne's bookbills’, Althorp, Spencer Collection · bills and letters, BL, Grenville and Cratcherode libraries · bills and letters, Morgan L., Toovey collection · bills and letters, Harvard U. · bills and letters, Hunt. L. · bills and letters, Trinity Cam. · parish register (baptism), Eton · parish register (burial), 1775–1802, St Martin-in-the-Fields, fol. 443

Archives Harvard U., Houghton L., bills and letters · Hunt. L., bills and letters · JRL, bills for binding [some photocopies] · Trinity Cam., bills and letters :: Althorp, Northamptonshire, Spencer collection, bills and letters in ‘Thomas Payne's bookbills’ · BL, Grenville and Cratcherode libraries, bills and letters · Eton, A. M. Storer's library, bills and letters · Hornby Library, Liverpool, Sir Richard Colt Hoare's account book, bills, and letters · JRL, Spencer collection, bills and letters · Morgan L., Toovey collection, bills and letters

Likenesses watercolour drawing, c.1794, repro. in N. M. V. Baron Rothschild, Two bindings by Roger Payne in the library of Lord Rothschild (1947), pl. I · W. Angus, engraving (after watercolour drawing, c.1794), repro. in Dibdin, Bibliographical decameron, vol. 2, p. 510 · S. Harding, etching (after watercolour drawing, c.1794), BM; repro. in Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, vol. 3, p. 737

Wealth at death believed to have died penniless: Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, 3.736–7; GM, 1070–71

Mirjam M. Foot, ‘Payne, Roger (bap. 1738, d. 1797)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/21654, accessed 19 Nov 2015]