| Sometimes we can discover things that are so obvious we do not notice them, probably due to the fact that we do not expect to see them. If you look closely at the spine shown in the photograph above you will not see anything unusual. below I show an enlargement. I was contemplating extracting all of the imprints here, and catalogueing them, when I noticed something... |
| ... the lowest spine panel, that is often somewhat larger than the others, has been decorated with the same tools as the others and yet they have not been dispersed to occupy the larger space in the normal fashion, while the imprints in the upper panels seemed slightly cramped in the given space... this was an "AH HA" moment as I remembered that I had seen something similar on a Gosselin spine. This is easy to test with an overlay diagram. |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, I show the lowest spine panel 'a' and the panel directly above it 'b' below this I have placed 'b' over 'a', 'b' has been rendered to a 50% transparency and colour inverted to enable us to see more easily the differences in these two panels, further to this i have rotated 'b' slightly and shifted it off to one side to allow the light colored imprints of 'a' to be seen underneath it, by adding contrast we get a better view of what we were hoping to discover and that is that ALL the imprints match up and are aligned with each other. This can only mean one thing and that is that these are not individually tooled imprints but are rather the result of a single plaque. Last year, I dicovered this very same technique being used by Gosselin (click here to see this). For centuries the tradition of the gold tooling of spine panels had been faithfully repeated with mirrored pairs of tools being used in the corners, now this old tradition was crumbling, but no one noticed due to the cleverness of these plaques. Fortunately I did not waste any time trying to extract and catalogue these non existant tools. Then I remembered that I had seen a similar spine and placed it in diagram showing a selection of Jubert's decorative bindings. |
| The diagram shown above was made over 10 years ago and the spine to which I am referring is shown in the upper left without a reference, fortunately I found the source of this spine, it comes from one of my favorite catalogues: LIVRES ILLUSTRES du XVIIIe siècle A Paris, Librairie Giraud-Badin,128 Boulevard Saint Germain, 1955. Lot #8 shown on Planche III, reproduced below at 150 dpi with the corresponding text, click to see an enlargement. |
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We know that this is a binding by Jubert by the imprints found in the corners of the boards, Derome le jeune never used a tool of this type. Even at the relatively low resolution of the reproduction we can still see that the two imprints in Comparative Diagram 3 derive from the same tool. According to the catalogue information this binding contains 2 separate works, Adonis 1775 and Origine des graces, par Mlle D**** (Dionis du sejour) Paris 1777 and was bound by Jubert possibly in the same year for a very prestigious client, la comtesse de Provence, future wife of Louis XVIII. Even though the Bibliotheque national de France has not yet even recognized the existence of this important binder, we see that his clients were at the very top of the social ladder! |
| In Comparative Diagram 4 we can see the obvious parallels in the decoration of these spines, the palettes are probably the same, now we are tempted to try another overlay test on this 1777 spine. |
| Are we opening a giant can of worms here? Now again in Comparative Diagram 5 we find that this spine has been decorated with a small plaque and not individual small tools, even if we expect the corner imprints to be lined up in a similar way, the stars and dots are not likely to also be precisely aligned. Another tell tale sign is that the decoration in the one panel that is larger (a), does not spread out to fill the space as one would expect if it was decorated with individual small tools. A careful assessment of the decoration of spines in the last quarter of the 18th century is likely to turn up more surprises. |
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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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