| I stumbled upon this Derome le jeune binding on a small auction site called Versailles Encheres (click here to see it). How I found it I don't know, this must have been another Google miracle, certainly Versailles Encheres did not know they were selling a rare Derome le jeune binding in a lot of 3 books. I doubt if the three sold for more than 30 euros, although the enlargement that they were offering of these books was unusually clear, click on the auction details below to see it. I have tried to lighten this image up in order to better show the detail in my reproduction above however it is not much of an improvement. This is an unusual binding for Derome and I wondered what year Derome made it... the answer was in another Derome binding that I found on the same day. Initially all we have to go on is the 1760 publication date for this Semaine Sainte that is found in the absolute minimum of information given for these items. |
| The picture shown above is from a recent binoche et giquello auction LIVRES ANCIENS ET MODERNES Vendredi 07 Decembre 2018 14:15 Salle 2 - Drouot-Richelieu, 9, rue Drouot 75009 Paris (click here to see it). This is another Derome le jeune binding although they do not mention him in the information about this item, and this is another manuscript that concerns music and links us back to the folio bindings we were looking at on a previous page. Here again the mysterious 1760 date appears, suggesting I suppose, that they guess that the binding itself is from that period (Reliure vers 1760), however this manuscript was penned in 1782 as is shown on the first page and it seems just as likely that the binding is also from around this date. |
| Now when I saw the picture of the actual manuscript inside this binding, I noticed that the inner dentelle was unlike any Derome example that I could think of, and supposed that the date 1782 had something to do with that, i.e. this was a dentelle from the post 1780 period, however beyond that I gave the matter little thought, partially due to the fact that all the photos of this binding are relatively low resolution and hard to reproduce. However when I was working on the Semaine Sainte something clicked and I said wait a minute, isn't this the same roulette as the inner dentelle of the Manuscript? In Comparative Diagram 1, we see some really amazing things, first is that these two bindings are so similar in the use of tools and the tools selected, that it is as though I have discovered yet another pair of bindings that could have been made at the same time, this is the third in a week and seeming like more than just a coincidence. The other thing that we discover by putting these bindings together at the same scale is that although the inner dentelle roulette of the Manuscript looks like the Semaine Sainte outer roulette, it is in fact smaller, very similar but smaller. I must remind the reader that the 1782 date is based on the manuscript item 220. The item information suggests that the binding is from 1760, and it may be that this 1782 manuscript was placed in an older binding. In as much as these bindings are so similar in design layout it would seem obvious that they were made around the same time, if they both derive from 1760 they would be some of Deromes earliest bindings. However we see below in Comparative Diagram 2, a 1770 Almanach Royal found in Belles Reliures. Catalogue XII, Gumuchian and Cie, Paris, 1929, that is also very similar in design. |
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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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