| We are now going on a fantastic voyage of investigation via the advantage of high resolution scanning and photography. Originally I had just the idea to show the imprints of this 1698 spine compartment greatly enlarged, then I noticed some unusual details, first I noticed how perfectly the end pods seemed to sit on the curls of the corner imprint, however at high resolution I saw that these pods were not the same, that was an ah ha moment, I should have known this anyway, the pods are part of the tool, the curls dots pods and rings are all one tool! |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, we see two corners from one spine compartment, I have rotated one to show that this is the same tool (corner A) then I have tried to extract or reconstruct just the isolated corner imprint. However when I was trying to photograph these imprints I noticed that in the top spine compartment there seemed to be some extra pods between the corner imprints, at first I thought that they might be part of the imprint that separates them, in the high resolution photo below you will see what I mean the pods are marked with green arrows and there are two rings on either side of them, marked (A) and (B). It dawned on me at last, that these pods and rings might be part of the corner imprints. |
| My memory slowly slipping into gear, I seemed to remember something like this in some other of Boyet's corner imprints. To find them I had to go through all the Sourget catalogues (I wish I had them all) then through the Rahir Catalogues and finally I found a Boyet with a corner that may be the same, this is from Rahir's catalogue and although his reproductions are amazing this one No. 1599, is limited by a number of problems that may be due to the rough leather of the binding. I show it below it is on one of Boyet's retrospective bindings, that Isabelle de Conihout and Pascal Ract-Madoux have shown in their 2002 book Reliures françaises du XVIIe siècle : Chefs-d'oeuvre du musée Condé . They claim that Boyet produced these bindings from around 1690 to 1700. |
| In Comparative Diagram 2, I have assembled a collection of Boyet imprints that derive mainly from these retrospective bindings, however what I needed to do was make sure that this collection, that I created more than 10 years ago were at a precise scale, and if so then I could measure them with the Rahir to see if it was at a precise scale. If we want to compare our 1698 corner imprint with the example on this retrospective binding, the imprints will have to be all at the same precise scale. Fortunately I found a clever way to do this, by going to the Bibliotheque nationale de France and finding their one only digital Boyet example (click here to see it). By viewing this binding (which is another retrospective) with Gallica you can zoom in and select an enlarged detail to download at a precise scale, I show the detail I selected below, this then I compared with the same imprint in my collection in Comparative Diagram 2, it matched perfectly for size so everything was at 600 dpi, I then took one of the imprints from Comparative Diagram 2, and measured it against the same imprint found on the Rahir reproduction, everything was a perfect fit at 600 dpi. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, I have extracted both corner (A) imprints from the Rahir No. 1599 reproduction and placed a 1693 corner (semitransparent reversed color) on top of it. The result I show below enlarged with scale included. We can see that these imprints match, we have discovered the secret of Boyet's 1698 spine compartment corners. He has used only a part of this larger tool to decorate these corners. The extra pods that are seen in the high resolution photo, are barely discernable in the Rahir corner imprints, hopefully one day we will find a better quality comparative example. |
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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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