| Before we start to look at this early Derome le jeune binding, I must thank the British Library for this full view of the boards along with the all important spine. It is the spine that becomes critically important in determining whether this work was executed in 1764 or earlier. However I need to state firstly, for those of you who do not believe in coincidences, that as I was working on the time consuming job of extracting the imprints to assemble them in Comparative Diagram 1, I noticed that it was already 6 am, long passed my bed time. However, once in bed I could not stop thinking about the need of more bindings like this one, where the presence of so many Jacques-Antoine Derome tools, makes you wonder if it was not actually he who applied this gold tooling. After 2 sleepless hours of this I decided that for once I will not bother sleeping at all and went back to the computer and entered again Jacques_Antoine Derome into Google search, trying every combination that might bring up something, including those that I have tried 20 times before, mainly scanning the endless image files that are associated with anything Derome. When you are searching through trillions of documents you can always hope for a miracle. and sure enough a miracle occured. I discovered yet another early binding like the one shown above. It is found on the University of Glascow Library flickr pages among their 10,626 Photos on flickr (click here to see it). This was a great find but even more exciting was their description of this binding... |
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Binding of Petrarca, Francesco: Canzoniere e Trionfi. Petrarca, Francesco: Canzoniere e Trionfi. Add: Leonardus Brunus Aretinus: Vita di Petrarca. Padua: Bartholomaeus de Valdezoccho and Martinus de Septem Arboribus, 6 Nov. 1472. Front cover of binding: France, 18th-century olive green morocco with gold-tooled dentelle decoration; ascribed by J.B. Oldham to Jacques Antoine Derome in his Notes on bindings in the Hunterian and general libraries in Glasgow University (University of Glasgow Library, MS Gen. 759, p.4). Sp Coll Hunterian Bg.2.12. |
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Here I had discovered not only a Derome binding but one that has been "ascribed" to Jacques Antoine Derome, and not only that it was a binding that covered a 1472 Petrarca publication, you will notice below in the British Libray data, that the above binding is also covering a Petrarca that possibly dates to 1474? Nooo thats not a coincidence! I must tell you though that this is not the only Derome dentelle that the Glascow University Library show on their flickr pages and the other example is nearly identical to a binding that we have already examined, it is found in the British Library and has a Derome le juene ticket, it seems to be more like the work of Derome le jeune that we expect however this binding has also been "ascribed" to Jacques Antoine Derome by J.B. Oldham, so before getting too excited we might suspect that Oldham could be wrong, we will get to that on the next page. |
| In Comparative Diagram 2 have reconstructed the missing "coiffe". Now some of you are bound to say that this is pure invention however, the remaining bright gold dot in the original gives us an important clue as to what the original looked like |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, we compare these compartments to the original Jacques-Antione Derome model, below in Compartive Diagram 4 we see the assorted tool imprints that have been used to decorated these compartments. J A Derome tools are present in all of them. Especially interesting is the use of the small ring jad-28, in the first three examples a-c, six rings have been distributed in an identical fashion, in the 1764 example this pattern changes. Although a very early date has been suggested initially for the J A Derome binding, it would seem very likely that this binding is one of the last bindings J A derome made, possibly in 1759 (or he used this 6 ring pattern for a long time). I have forgotten to include the 5 petaled flower dj-29-3 as well as the 1764 pomegranate in the list of spine tools. So far I do not have a non distorted pomegranate imprint. Barber does not show an example of it in his tools catalogue. Also of critical importance is the jad-p-1 palette, this is found at the top and bottom of the spines of early Derome le jeune bindings |
| Below we see more spine details with 6 rings, this binding is on a 1752 publication, here we see mainly Jacques-Antoine Derome tools, and in fact some that we don't ususally see... could this be a binding by J A Derome? Certainly this palette is a sign of his workshop, whether it was a tool that his son, Derome le jeune continued to use or applied by his own hand, it is a palette to be on the lookout for. |
| Here again in this spine decoration, that dates to possibly, 1754 we see J A Derome's tools, and the six rings. We have documented this binding on a previous page (click here to see it) all this is pointing to pre Derome le jeune dentelle à l'oiseau, a shocking possibility that we cannot ignore. |
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click here to return to the HOME page. click here to see the INDEX of the 2017 pages. see below links to previous work |
| 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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