| On the previous page we looked at the inner dentelle of the 1744 ebay binding, and discovered that this same roulette was found on a 1745 Almanach Royal, (found in the web pages of the Spanish Royal Library). I decided to examine again the Almanach collection of the Royal Library. It seems that every year from around 1734 a Royal Almanach was presented to King Ferdinand VI, decorated with his Royal Arms. Careful research shows that the Dubuisson workshops were responsible for the decoration of these Almanachs. We can identify clearly Pierre-Paul Dubuisson's decorative work by at least 1749, however a Dubuisson plaque decorates a 1741 exmple suggesting an earlier date for Pierre-Paul's work, if we consider the plaques to have been made by him, even this is not certain. To try to clairify this situation somewhat I decided to assemble in one diagram the edges of these Almanachs. |
| As we learned from the previous page the 1745 Almanach Royal, shares imprints with our 1744 eBay binding, now another exciting discovery. In Comparative Diagram 2, we see that the 1745 Almanach shares the same edge decoration/roulette with a 1734 Almanach, i.e. the first in the Royal collection. I wanted to verify this as we need to be 100% sure of this discovery. At the top of the page I show flaws that I have identified in the 1744 eBay inner dentelle/roulette, armed with these I have created Comparative Diagram 3, to show that these flaws appear in these three examples 1744, 1745 and 1734. |
| Now that we have proved that these bindings derive from the Dubuisson workshops, we might suppose that it was in fact Rene Dubuisson who decorated the 1734 Almanach Royal. This is a very interesting possibility and even more exciting is the fact that this 1734 Almanach is covered with a saw tooth roulette similar if not identical to the ones that we examined on our first page. |
| We have come a long way in our analysis of this binding, one might easily claim that this is a binding from the workshops of the Dubuisson's. However we have not really solved this question, we have not identified anywhere in our Dubuisson imprint catalogues the main decorative imprints found within the spine compartments. Further to this, the edges of the eBay binding were nor decorated with a roulette, and is thus different from the Almanachs. On the next page we will investigate these remaining mysteries. |
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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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