| When I saw the quality of the reproductions in the Wassermann 1913 catalogue: Les livres composant le cabinet de M. Eugne v. W***. Wassermann, Eugene Von. Published by Bruxelles, 1913. I went all out to get a copy, they are rare and should be hard to find but I was surprised find one even today (see this) I have mentioned this catalogue previously and the Malvaux heliogravures (see this). The reproductions in this catalogue are so good it is almost as good as having the actual book, maybe better in someways. However the hard cover examples of this catalogue are not good for scanning. The paper is thick and warps. so I had to buy yet another copy that is not hard cover and even this was not easy to scan but with some trial and error I managed to get these all important high resolution scans. see this Fetil binding at 1200dpi. Now the next thing I needed to know is whether these heliogravure reproductions are at 100 percent scale i.e. exactly the same size as the book itself. You would think that would be like asking for a miracle that they could reproduce the bindings exactly, but I had the perfect test. |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, we see the miracle of man's ingenuity in 1913, far better than it is today with all our modern high tech and poor printing standards. (and its all about saving money). The heliogravure example is as close to 100 percent scale as you could ever hope to make it. This means that I can show you here with a minimum of difficulty some highly enlarged, and perfectly scaled images of Rene-Francois Fetil imprints. Where should I start, perhaps with this roulette that may be a chronologically important indicator of when Fetil switched to this roulette. |
| Working with high resolution scans greatly simplified locating an obvious unit that was repeating. However when I compared my measured roulette with Barber's ROLL 3, I was wondering if it was even the same roulette. This roulette has irregular spacing and more! So it is no simple task to find the length with repeating units. Finally I had to extract a strip of this imprint from my reproduction of Barber's W.Cat.502. to find out if this was the same as Barber's ROLL 3 and then we see, yes it is, we find the same markers. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, we see a very close relationship between these two bindings, the panel centerpiece fleuron is the same, catalogued by Barber as FL 11, the panel corners decorated with SP 34 as were all the examples that we have looked at so far in these new pages, the pallet 96 and palette 29 that has also been employed in all examples. |
| The PAL 96 example is from W.Cat.502 and the detail is actually better than on our high resolution scan of Wassermann's No. 96. |
| We can see from Barber's messy example of this palette that he never found a good one to show us. This palette has been employed on all of these 60Õs examples that we have been looking at. Its very hard to see and or photograph, often damaged at the bottom of the spine, however with the combination of these few examples we get a better picture of this 'rodeo palette' it is composed of drawer-handles in a very similar way as the Dubuisson tool of this type and is used in the same manner as it was employed by Dubuisson at the bottom of spines, it was perhaps even a René Dubuisson tool. In any case, it appears on bindings in the 40's. The similarity being that where the drawer-handles meet and there is a pod balanced on top of the join, the ends of the handles are missing in an alternating pattern, this appears to give the pods arms or shoulders in one case and not the next. This is identical to the design of the Dubuisson roulette of this type (dubbed by me the 'rodeo palette'. Barber shows many examples of this very popular palette, one has to wonder what is going on here… this is very reminiscent of the acanthus frieze craze that dominated decorations for thousands of years (see this). |
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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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