| I would like to thank the British Library for letting me show you this rather special binding shelfmarked 676b1. I will need many pages to describe everything that needs mentioning about this binding but first, I want to show you something that will perhaps shock you. Below in Comparative Diagram 1, I have assembled 4 bindings, each one of these binding contains a Derome le jeune etiquette, three of the etiquettes fall into the Ract-Madoux catagory 'G', and should be found on bindings that are at least post 1780 and probably closer to 1785 considering that 'E' classification starts at 1780. The fourth is category 'I' which starts at 1785 and extends to 1789. Therefore these are not early Derome bindings as I first thought. More interesting is the fact that Jubert has decorated at least two with his own tools, and you can see that these Jubert bindings share certain tools with the 'Derome' bindings (meaning made mainly with Derome tools). None of these bindings could be considered pure Derome bindings, in as much as they all show at least some non Derome tools. Click to enlarge this diagram. |
| The binding number 88 shown above can be found in an archive.org reproduction of: The Royal Library, Copenhagen by Anker Kyster 1938 (click here to see this). Unfortunately this is not a high resolution reproduction but none the less very useful. In the information given for this binding they state that there is a Derome le jeune ticket inside that is the same as one shown by Seymour De Ricci in his 1935 publication French signed bindings in the Mortimer L. Schiff Collection number 46. I have reproduced this etiquette under the reproduction of number 88, this is the same etiquette as shown in binding 51 also from the 1935 De Ricci publication. Below I show De Ricci's notes for his Derome signed binding 51. |
| We can see by the above information that binding 51 was made sometime after 1780. It was decorated by Jean-Pierre Jubert with is own tools. I show above his fer a l'oiseau jj-4-3 which makes his work easy to distinguish from that of Derome le jeune. We see that the tools used to decorate the spine appear to be the same as those found in binding 88 and the same tools are found in the spine decoration of binding 76 |
| In binding 76 we find a Derome le Jeune ticket that appears after 1785 according to the Ract-Madoux classification, the fact that it shares a common palette with binding 88 as well as other spine tools would seem to suggest that 88 too is older perhaps closer to 1785. All of this points to the inescapable conclusion that binding 676b1 may have also been made around this time, and perhaps decorated by someone other than Derome le jeune. We see in the decoration of the spine compartments of 676b1 a tool that does not seem to appear in any other Derome binding, and is in fact very mysterious. We know that Jubert worked as a decorator for Derome for possibly more than a decade, (it would be hard to keep something a secret that long?). We see also that Gosslin worked for Derome, the imprints of his tools are found on bindings that have Derome's etiquette inside. This tool on the spine looks as though it is one of either Jubert's or Gosselin's HOWEVER!... a close very examination reveals an amazing surprise. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, we see that Jubert's 70 pair are very similar to that of Gosselin, however in high resolution photos easily distinguishable each from the other. This is not the case for a comparison with the 676bi example they, are so close to the Gosselin pair that without high resolution scans you are not likely to spot the difference even with an overly. Only a close study of the imprints shows that there is a slight difference which can be seen near the location of the green arrows. It would have been very easy to have declaired these to be the tools of Gosselin, but the fact that they are not opens another mystery waiting to be solved. |
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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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