| Now we come to an investigation of the 1695 corners, at first it is not so obvious or easy to decide what the whole corner tool might look like. If your memory is not as sharp as it was several decades earlier, then you will be forced to search through a few hundred Boyet bindings to try to find anything similar. |
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In Comparative Diagram 1 we see the actual full sized corner compared with the 1695 partial corner imprints. This is again an example of how only part of the tool has been employed in the decoration. I found complete examples of this corner tool on page 77 of the 2002 publication of Isabelle de Conihout et Pascal Ract-Madoux:
Reliures françaises du XVIIe siècle : Chefs-d'oeuvre du musée Condé. It is hard to find examples of this particular set of Boyet corners. I have tackled Boyet corners on a 2019 page, however one could write a book on this subject, Barber seems to have ignored these tools, as he only shows a single example SP 41. How to illustrate and catalogue these imprints remains subject to debate. If we consider the spine panel arrangements where these tools are usually found then we notice that the imprint in the North-West corner is the same as found in the South-East but has been rotated 180 degrees. Let us consider only the idea that there is a west and east side and then a top or bottom, so that the South-West corner will be bottom West and the South-East corner is bottom East, we could easily call them bottom right and bottom left however this may puzzle some readers who would not be sure which was left or right. Therefore bottom West can be catalogued as lab-corner-3W and bottom East will be lab-corner-3E. |
| In Comparative Diagram 2, I show a spine panel from a Boyet binding found in Esmerian's 1972 catalogue, Volume 2, number 53, here we see only just barely the same Boyet corner 3 pair as well as wings. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, we have placed our 1695 lab-3W over the Conihout No.30 example and reduced the transparency to 50 percent as well as inverted the color. Even though the Conihout example becomes blurred with enlargement we can still observe that the details match, particularly important are the dots, if this was not the same imprint, you can be sure that these dots would never align so precisely. |
| Comparative Diagram 4, is an enlargement of a high resolution photo, where I have pointed out some important diagnostic features. These are so distinct that they will allow us to identify these imprints with a high degree of certainty. The green letter 'a' designates a lab-corner-3E whorl, it is distinguishable from the whorl of lab-corner-3W, marked 'b' that is thickening near the center. The green arrows 'c' and 'd' are pointing to the wedge shaped cuts that do not completely separate these terminating beads, while the cut at 'e' makes a distinct separtion of the beads. This is perhaps the most obvious detail that will help to identify these imprints. |
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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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