| As soon as I saw this item on eBay I suspected that it was a Dubuisson, mainly due to the palette at the bottom of the spine, as well as what looked to be a rodeo palette decorating the Tomb label. However the fleuron that was used as the centerpiece for the spine compartments was not one that I recognized as being a Dubuisson imprint. Anyway I was determined to bid on this item and started researching the book inside the binding to try to estimate what sort of price this item might fetch. The book itself was from a set of possibly six volumes this would bring down the price, however the arms on the boards could drive the price up if they belonged to someone famous. Then there was the maps inside that could be of interest to collectors and this too may push the price beyond the norm. First I will present some of the sellers photos. |
| The first thing to do is check WorldCat for this publication (click here and here to see it). It turns out that this edition began printing in 1742 and was printing our volume 5 by 1744, however this same set was still being printed with more and more volumes (click here to see this at archive.org) and the set was up to 80 volumes by 1790. However if we are correct in assuming that Dubuisson bound these books the maximum number of volumes he might of bound and decorated could be around 17 volumes as of 1761. Trying to pin down just when Dubuisson actually did this work is not easy due to the fact that he used these same palettes from the beginning to the end of his career, in fact tracking down when was the first time he used them is rather difficult. However after a long search I managed to find a 1744 example in an online Camille Sourget catalogue (click here to see it) even though this is a relatively low resolution image I have decided to use it as the exact size of the binding is given in the description. |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, item (A ) is a photograph of the bottom of 1744 spine, (B) is a high resolution scan of the same, (C) is the roulette from the 1744 Naudot, the photo has been rescaled to match the scan and the roulette (C) is at the same scale as the scan (B). The roulette appears to be, in fact, used as a palette in our 1744 binding. When I was making this page I remembered that I had seen another Dubuisson Freemason binding, and managed to find my copy, here was a bit of fortunate coincidence in as much as this binding ties together this palette/roulette as a distinctly Dubuisson tool, (shown below) this reproduction is from a 2012 Sotheby's online auction catalogue (click here to see it) |
| The Sotheby's 'experts' have attributed this binding to Augustin Duseuil, however by this time Duseuil had already passed away at the age of 72 in 1746, and to make matters worse, nobody seems to have ever found a real Duseuil binding, except perhaps Michon who is famous for attributing bindings to the wrong people. The attribution of this binding to Dubuisson is a simple matter, with the most obvious tool in the corner pd-12, and of course now with this saw tooth palette/roulette. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, we see that the palettes on these bindings were probably made with the same tool. A tool, that in all likelihood, derived from the workshops of Pierre-Paul Dubuisson and his father René. |
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I decided to try to test this 1744 palette once more having found a Dubuisson example that is beyond contesting. It comes from 1753 Almanach Royal that is found in the Royal Library of Spain (click here to see it) Fortunately inside this Almanach we find Dubuisson's ticket. The Royal Library's web site is a mine of information including enlarged examples of many of the imprints found on their bindings, which is where I found the palette illustrated in Comparative Diagram 4 (click here to see it). Thus example (B) is the palette from the 1753 Almanach and I have placed it alongside our 1744 example (A). If you study these palettes closely I think you will find corresponding details which then prove that these palettes derived from the same Dubuisson tool. These imprints have been greatly enlarged and yet still leave some room for speculation, I think they are the same, you might not agree, a sceptical view point is one of the reasons that science is constantly discovering new things. We are however pushing the limits of our research when a 2400 dpi photo still does not reveal in a convincing way, the proof that we are looking for. Some day in the not so distant future, a 3D scanner will quickly solve such problems. On the next page we will try to show that the palette used for the tomb label is also a Dubuisson tool, namely the rodeo palette. |
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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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