Morocco leather takes its name from Morocco, whence sumac-tanned goatskins reached Europe via Spain and Italy as early as the sixteenth century. The binders of François I and Grolier adopted it for luxury bindings, and it has never since relinquished pride of place: the royal workshops of the seventeenth century, Padeloup, Derome and the Bozerians in the eighteenth, Thouvenin, Trautz-Bauzonnet and Marius Michel in the nineteenth, and then the great binders of the twentieth century all employed it for their most ambitious decoration. According to the grain and finish, one speaks of long-grained morocco, crushed-grain morocco, or Levant morocco. Jansenist morocco, for its part, denotes not a grain but a style of decoration: a morocco binding with no ornament whatsoever, whose very austerity is its chief merit.
The bookseller identifies morocco by its natural, regular grain of small round pebbles, and by its suppleness and durability; he describes its colour, grain and the quality of the gilding, and, for early bindings, the freshness of the tints, since the red and lemon moroccos of the eighteenth century have often faded. A contemporary binding in full morocco, signed or attributable, adds considerably to a copy; a modern morocco binding on an early book is judged on the quality of the binder's work.
Confusion often arises with related leathers: chagrin (shagreen), a goat- or sheepskin with an artificial grain, tighter and harder, often used in the nineteenth century for half-bindings; basil (a smooth, fragile sheepskin); and calf, smooth and fine-grained. Mechanically grained leathers imitating morocco, common in publisher's bindings, are distinguished by the excessive regularity of their grain. A morocco rubbed at the head-caps and corners, or with crushed grain, should be described with precision.
