| As promised on the previous page we are going to look at an imprint (fleuron) that appears in the corner decoration of this 1757 catalogue. I show it below in Comparative Diagram 1. First I must qualify my justification for regarding this imprint as deriving from a rare or possibly non Dubuisson tool. As the reader may know I have been intensively researching and cataloguing Pierre-Paul Dubuisson tools for well over a decade, even the smallest tools have been catalogued, and hundreds of Dubuisson bindings thoroughly scoured for new tools to be added to the Dubuisson collection, therefore I feel qualified in saying that this pd-2021 imprint has not been seen on any previous Dubuisson bindings. That is not to say that this tool does not come from the tools of his father Rene Dubuisson or his successor Delorme, however I have not or do not remember ever seeing such a tool. For me this is rather mysterious and if we ever find another example we will be able to say more on this subject. What I can say though is that Giles Barber who catalogued hundreds of tool imprints from many of the 18th century French decorative bookbinders including bindings by Dubuisson, never recorded or catalogued this particular imprint. |
| The next high resolution imprint that I want to show, is one that I have encountered many times in the past, however it may be that it is only now that I appreciate the importance of it. This is one of a number of so called bird tools or fer à l'oiseau. I noticed these tools early on in my research of Dubuisson's tools and was inspired by the fact that almost all examples were incorrectly attributed to Derome le jeune who employed a very similar looking tool a full decade after Dubuisson. In fact dentelles incorporating this tool were often called dentelle à l'oiseau and automatically attributed to Derome, correcting this injustice became my obsession. Soon I discovered that Dubuisson possessed a number of these tools and as I catalogued them in the order in which I found them, this turned out to be problematic. I was often working with modern printed reproductions of limited image quality, I did not realize that my original pd-4 example had an almost identical twin, this had to be then called pd-4-2 and Dubuisson's larger example of this tool recatalogued as pd-4-3. Even now as I discover better high resolution examples of these imprints I am beginning to suspect that more "twins"may exist. The main difference between Dubuisson's tool pd-4 and pd-4-2 and the nearly identical Derome tool is that the bird is facing in the opposite direction. Derome's bird is facing to the right and Dubuisson's bird to the left. One would think that such an obvious difference would eliminate a lot of confusion however such has not been the case for more than 200 years, and even now in this age of instant information, certain "experts" are still repeating this error, not to mention that the entire subject has been further complicated by Jubert who also employed similar looking tools, in his dentelles, in the same manner as Dubuisson, Derome, Delorme and others. First we can look at our 1757 example which is a pd-4-2 |
| When I first started to study these enlarged pd-4-2 imprints from the ANL digital reproductions I wanted to compare them with some verified Dubuisson examples as well as Delorme examples so that we could show that Delorme was in fact using this same tool post Dubuisson. This I show in Comparative Diagram 2, presenting an example from Ricci's signed binding number 15, that he unfortunately attributed to Padeloup on the basis of the Padeloup ticket that is found inside of a 1757 Dubuisson publication. Ricci was obviously not familiar with Dubuisson's work or he could never have made this mistake, all the imprints found in the decoration of this binding derive from the tools of Dubuisson. Furthermore it is obvious that he would be decorating the bindings of his own publication. However it can be shown that Padeloup employed Dubuisson to decorate bindings in which Padeloup afterwards glued his own tickets. We know too that Padeloup died in 1758 therefore we can absolutely fix the dating of this binding as being 1757 or 1758. Unfortunately Dubuisson was forced to cramp the pd-4-2 examples with his centrepiece decoration thus the upper part of the imprint has been obscured. None the less, the great importance of the dating of the imprint excuses our use of it in Comparative Diagram 2, where we also show and example from Rahir's 1935 catalogue troisieme partie item 817 (see this binding) Comparing binding 817 and a dated 1774 Delorme binding (see this binding) leads us to suspect these bindings to have been contemporaneous. Even though of these imprints are separated by a decade or more these examples reveal enough corresponding detail to allow us to pronounce that the imprints were indeed made with the same Dubuisson tool. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, I point out some of the corresponding elements on the ANL example, A casual observer might think that this imprint is not the same, certain details appear to be missing. After a careful study I am forced conclude that it is also a pd-4-2 example however the ANL examples were executed in a way that allowed an excessive amount of gold to obscure some of the details. A similar effect can be seen when a tool becomes worn from many years of use, however I doubt that this is case here, as many of the other imprints appear normal. I make this distinction as it would be logical to guess that the ANL binding would have been made in 1757. |
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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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