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Any researcher following up Gruels discovery would automatically assume that all the tools on this binding were those of Derome himself. Thus we can imagine why Louis-Marie Michon made so many incredible attribution errors concerning bindings that were decorated by Dubuisson and that he mistakenly attributed to J.-A. Derome!
Now all the rest follows on the 1956 publication of Michon's Les Reliures Mosaiquées du XVIIIe siècle. All the experts from that date onwards including Esmerian, Mirjam Foot, and Giles Barber have all relied heavily on the work of Michon, that turns out to be a pack of lies mainly due to this one simple error of Gruel, who was certainly, a well respected artist and researcher. Gruel however fell into the trap of binders signing their works with tickets. We know that Antoine-Michel Padeloup, one of the most famous and celebrated bookbinders of all time started this craze of putting tickets inside bindings quite early in his career, however as time wore on and he was getting on in age and possibly over worked, he employed Pierre-Paul Dubuisson to decorate his larger bindings with elaborate and spectacular dentelles, however still pasting his ticket inside these Dubuisson decorated bindings. This is a known fact and we can show proof of this. The result being that Dubuissons work and tools have long been mistaken as belonging to Padeloup. What was not known or even expected is the fact that J.-A, Derome also hired Dubuisson for the same service, that is, to add decorative dentelles to the bindings that he was making. There can be no other explanation that will resolve this question of Derome's ticket in the binding shown at the top of this page.
However Dubuisson's work and even his name has been been lost in the period of the last 200 years. Pierre-Paul Dubuisson, if truth were to be known was certainly one of the best decorative artists of the 18th century, certainly his talents and creative genius was way ahead of his contemporaries who could only make their names by carefully copying Dubuisson's tools, methods and elaborate designs, Derome le jeune was but a poor copy, and yet his fame is declared far and wide, what an injustice! What a tragedy, that Dubuisson was robbed of his proper place in the history of French 18th century bookbinders, simply due to Leon Gruel being fooled by Derome's worthless ticket, that was later transformed by Michon into a nightmare of confusion and misinformation of which Gilles Barber was very much a victim, even in these modern times.
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