| Sometimes we get lucky, this was the case with this inner dentelle, I decided to check all of the Royal Library Almanach Royal examples starting with the first which is a 1734. When I looked at the 1745 example I suddenly noticed something amazing, something that I had overlooked before. It was a small decorative palette or roulette, that some might call a dog toothed palette, it is used primarily as a border around spine compartments or outer border, framing the boards. This very palette had become problematic in as much as I had not seen another Dubuisson example, and finally here it is, perhaps it is only found on the 1745 Almanach... and then, not by a conincidence I found that the inner dentelle of the 1745 Almanach is the same as our 1744 eBay example. This I show below in Comparative Diagram 1, including the Royal Library scale that accompanies their enlargement. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, I have extracted some of the 1745 Almanach Royal examples of this dog toothed palette, granted these are poorly defined when enlarged to this degree, however I think that these are probably from the same Dubuisson tool that is found on our 1744 Histoire Universelle example, especially now, given that the inner dentelle matches as well. However this work is not finished I need to find examples of the other tools that are used in these spine panels. While I was searching though the Royal Library Almanachs, I made another shocking discovery, I show it below in Comparative Diagram 4. |
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In Comparative Diagram 4, I show a 1737 saw toothed palette compared with the Dubuisson examples shown on the first page of this section. This is a shock as the earliest work that I know of by Pierre-Paul Dubuisson is a 1742 binding found in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (click here to see it). In the whole of time that I have been researching Pierre-Paul Dubuisson, I have not identified any bindings by his father René. Here is perhaps the first clue to the work of René Dubuisson. How many of Pierre-Paul Dubuisson's tools were actually those of his father? On another page we have detailed how Derome le jeune continued to use the tools of his father, particularly a palette that both used in the same way at the bottom of the spines. Here is what may be a similar case, a Dubuisson palette that was shared by father and son. When I started these pages I was not 100% sure that this was a Dubuisson binding and part of the mystery was the fact that this binding, from this set of books could have been made from 1744 to 1762 or even later if it was made by Delorme with Dubuisson's tools. Now this 1745 Almanach Royal seems to have nailed down the case to being somewhere closer to the publication date of 1744, i.e. an early binding by Pierre-Paul Dubuisson. |
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| Even experts are sometimes wrong, before you spend thousands on a book, please do your own research! Just because I say a certain binding can be attributed to le Maitre isn't any kind of guarantee, don't take my word for it, go a step further and get your own proof. In these pages I have provided you with a way of doing just that. |
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