| The binding shown above is found in the British Library Database of Bookbindings shelfmark 685a27 (click here to see it). I must thank the British Library for allowing me to show you this binding and remind everyone that all the images from the British Library are under copyright. Now on the previous page I attempted to show that the doublure found in another British Library example 688a10 as well as Esmerian's No. 68 were not made by Boyet, but were made rather by Padeloup le jeune. There are a number of things to consider in this speculation. The first is that Boyet had perhaps already passed away or retired when these dentelles were made. Secondly it may be that the comte d'Hoym wanted his bibliotheque to become more uniform and gave the binders exact directions on how this should be accomplished, namely with black leather covers, his large armorial block in the center of the boards and his crowned monograms in the spine panels, inner dentelles were a different matter. Now my theory was that it was only Padeloup that made these uniform black bindings, however I started thinking about a few niggling details as concerns these identical doublures. The outer framing roulette appears to be very similar to Boyet's P roulettes, and I do not remember seeing Padeloup employing this type of roulette, although probably everyone had one or more of these. So I wanted to try another test to try and confirm that Boyet did not make this binding, this is why I show here BL 685a27. This, I think is quite an obvious Boyet binding, with an inner dentelle made with a Type B roulette (click here to see this roulette type). My plan is to test the comte d'Holm arms to try to establish whether or not Padeloup had his own version of this stamp. |
| It so happens the armorial stamp on the covers of the Boyet binding BL 687a27 is very similar in size to that of the 688a10 binding that, according to my theory is a Padeloup binding. After I had enlarged these two stamps at exactly and precisely the same scale, I arranged them in Comparative Diagram 2. |
| In Comparative Diagram 2, I was surprised to find that these two stamps are very nearly identical in size and form. I carfully oriented both imprints with a perpendicular green line through the center in the lower copies, then copied example 'c' and inverted it and reduced it to a 50% transparency, to then place it over a copy of 'a'. As both imprints were already aligned this overlay was a simple matter, the two imprints seemed identical. |
| I then decided to enlarge a small section of the detail to compare them microscopically. In Comparative Diagram 3 we see something amazing, these two stamps have been made so precisely that you could barely notice a difference, a heavier application of gold alone could mask any differences that you might notice, the details have been carefully copied down to the thickness of a hair, each detail section is just over a centimeter in size i.e. smaller than a fingernail. Hold your finger up to the screen and try to imagine this detail carefully engraved on to it. |
| In Comparative Diagram 4, we see that the central ovals are not exactly the same the empty space in the center and below the center band is larger in the BL 685a27 Boyet example, also the hatching is denser in the BL 688a10 example therefore we know that there is a difference and that it is unlikely that Boyet would use a different stamp of this size. This again suggesting that Padeloup was the author of the BL 688a10 binding with elaborate sharksteeth dentelle. |
| In Comparative Diagram 5, we discover that there are 3 sizes of the comte d"Hoym arms. within these examples we do not see any major differences, suggesting the the large stamps were the same no matter who was using them similarly with the medium size in Comparative Diagram 6. One might speculate then that these tools were owned by Hoym who loaned them to the particular workshop that was doing the work. The differences detected in the hatching of the small stamp employed on the binding of 688a10 may not be all that significant, we need another way of finding out who actually made the sharksteeth dentelle. |
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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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