| The reproduction of the binding shown above is found in a 1921 Maggs Bros catalogue that you can see at the Hathitrust site (click here to see this catalogue) of course the image is not very good, in fact I wasn't going to use it however as we have already catalogued most of the imprints found on this binding, it can still be very useful. I am hoping that I will be able to find the imprints that we have not already catalogued in Barber's catalogue. If you enlarge this image you can still see that it has a Fetil roulette 5, the same one that we looked at on the previous page, and if you can see that then the reproduction is not that bad. Now when you start researching this author you discover that he died in 1756, therefore offering to the King in 1760 a handwritten revision of a work that he published in 1740 seems unlikely. After calculating the size of this binding in terms of the imprint s and over lays, the result is a binding that is between 22.2 and 22.7 cm in height |
| In Comparative Diagram 1 with an overlay, we have achieved two things, first we have shown that Barber's FR 77 imprint is found on this Maggs Bros item 374 and that it has been resized to its correct scale. |
| I made Comparative Diagram 2 to show a better image of these imprints than Barber's FR 77 models, I have extraced my examples from a not so great Maggs Bros catalogue as you can see above, yet still my imprints are better than Barbers models. In this exercise I discovered that the 374 imprint that was used in Comparative Diagram 1, is actually about 2 percent too large. |
| Just to be sure of the size of this binding I made one more overlay with Barber's DCR 11. and an imprint from a binding that has been scaled to 22.7 cm in height. The result is that the 374 imprint is marginally larger as you can see in the overlay, Probably the actual binding measures about 22.2, a binding of this size is a small quarto. Now we are faced with a few possiblities, one is that someone had Drevetière's revised manuscript copy of La découverte des longitudes avec la méthode facile aux navigateurs pour en faire usagebound four years after his death to present to the King... or the Drevetière himself presented this to the king at an earlier date. I find no trace of this manuscript or it's having been presented to Louis XV. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3 we can see that there is a strong possibility that the 374 imprints are in fact the same as the Douceur imprints d-17 pair, this is quite an exciting find, another distinctly Douceur tool used by Fetil around 1760. |
| Wow! lucky to find this is in Barber's catalogue, FL 52, I show this in Comparative Diagram 4, there is hardly any doubt that the imprint from 374 ia a match for Barber's model, here is another potential lead to another Fetil binding, W.Cat 577. |
| In Comparative Diagram 5, we see that the 374 roulette has the same characterisitics and excentricities as the Fetil roulette rf-R5, this a further confirmation that this Maggs Bros binding 374 was probably decorated by René-François Fétil. |
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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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