| This binding was probably made at least 250 years ago, it was made back in the times when people ate with their hands and had baths once a year, whether they needed to or not. Toilet paper and toilets had not yet been invented. The average life expectancy in France was was below 30! The New World if you even heard of it looked a bit like the map below… and yet here in my hands is a book that was bound and decorated back then, hundreds of years ago and it still shines like new, it looks as good as it did when it was made… who knew then that this sacred work of theirs would still be a testament to their skills and know-how hundreds of years later. Today you won't find many who know even how it was done, by what magic did they learn how to bind gold with leather so perfectly that it never wears off and remains shiny and glittering for centuries. And it was not just some lucky thing that they did perfectly once but something they could repeat flawlessly for decades. And now… it is here on my shelf, what is it worth this masterpiece, this treasure from the past? Why even try to estimate the worth of something that is an ancient and unique piece of art? One cannot measure the immeasurable. |
| When I first saw this treasure on eBay last month, I thought it must be a binding by Derome le jeune however the decoration of the spine was not like anything by Derome, I tried hard to imagine how Rene-Francois Fetil could have decorated the spine and Derome the rest. Never-mind I said to myself I must try to acquire it and solve this spine dilemma later. |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, we are again resizing photos to match a scan of 1200dpi. and thus to be able to see it clearly and know the exact size. I will not bore you with why I thought this was by Fetil, once you see it clearly you discover something incredible. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, I extracted the imprints from 2 different panels. Then reversed the 'B' panel and placed it over a copy of 'A' at a 50% transparency so that we see the 'A' beneath the reversed 'B'. Here was a shock that I wasn't expecting yet something I had seen before in the work of other binders, the panels were identical. The entire spine panel decoration with the exception of the fillets has be achieved with the use of a small plaque. This means that these imprints were not made by individual tools and you will waste your time looking for them anywhere else other than in spine panels! Voila, these are not the tools of Fetil, and by a complete fluke I found on the internet another Derome binding with the same spine decoration. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce this in anything but the reduced images that the seller has on the internet |
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Finding this second Derome plaque decorated spine was a shock in more ways than one. Here it is found on a 1756 Almanach Royal! So much for my theory that the decoration found on the bindings of Almanachs is usually/normally contemporaneous with the publication, however in this case, there are a number of indicators that this decoraton by Derome was not executed in 1756. The first is the drawer handle roulette, the second is the design of the dentelle that is more like that of the mid 60's (see this on a previous page).
Still I have to remind myself of the failing of other researchers who ignored red flags and continued flaunting their 'theories'. I am suggesting here that the Derome binding that I show at the top of this page was probably made sometime around 1770 and not in 1758 which is when the book that this binding is covering was published, below we are going to look at some evidence that supports this claim. |
| I love this SPECULUM binding because of the thorough Bodleian research behind it (see this). From this we know that this binding was made by Derome le jeune for Paul Girardot de Préfond sometime in 1769 or later. Here we see the same inner dentelle roulette and endpaper as found in our eBay Derome. |
| In Comparative Diagram 8, I show the Derome roulette dj-r-10, this roulette is so well made that it is hard to find the point where it repeats, and I have attempted to find this on a number of occasions, there are no obvious flaws, and as the imprints blure over time with repeated use of this tool, it becomes less and less easy, however I think that I have it correctly measured finally in this diagram. The eBay Derome binding shown at the top of this page was so well preserved that you suspect that it was rarely opened, and I did not want to force it wide open to put it on the scanner, as I sometimes do to get a high precision image of the inner dentelle roulettes, so I resorted to primitive methods to photograph it instead. I strongly suspected that this was the dj-r-10 roulette (see this for Derome roulettes) but I wanted proof, and that meant a lot more work. |
| In Comparative Diagram 9, we discover that the same roulette as found inside was also used to decorate the edges, this was perhaps not often the case, but provided an opportunity to test the dj-r-10 hypothesis, I could show a number of diagrams here but settled for Comparative Diagram 10. |
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In Comparative Diagram 10, we see matching details from both examples, here is a good way to ruin your eyesight, looking for microscopic details in roulettes. Compare the leaf shape indicated with the yellow dot with that of the one next to it. It is distinctly different, and that difference is matched in both the upper and lower imprints. This is not a surprise that we find in two Derome bindings the same marbled endpaper and inner dentelle roulettes. The fact that one is known to have been executed in or after 1769 would suggest that the other binding was very possibly made around the same period i.e. 12 or more years after the publication date of the book it is covering. |
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click here to return to the HOME page. click here to see the INDEX of the 2017 pages. see below links to previous work |
| 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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