| When I saw this binding on eBay I was thinking that it must be a binding by Boyet even though not really typical of his work I thought I saw some of his regular tools in the dentelle and promised myself to win it at all costs. Actually it did not attract any attention and I was the only person to bid, as the bids started quite high, this discourages bidders. The sellers photos were good enough to convince me that this was a Boyet, however the book itself looked well read and used, this was not a book that spent it's entire life in a quiet part of the library, this was a book that served it purpose. This is another reason why it went unnoticed on eBay, Breviarium are a dime a dozen, but this one if it was gold tooled by Boyet stands out as a rare early example and its value inestimable. I do not need to constantly praise the craftmenship and genius of Boyet, no other binder reached his level. |
| As soon as this book arrived I was quick to take some photos of the unusual palette that i could only just make out in the eBay photos I thought it must be the one that Jeanne-Marie Métivier illustrated in her paper entitled Luc-Antoine Boyet, relieur de l'Imprimerie royale (1704-1723) which was published in la Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, numéro 12, 2002. Shown below it is the bird palette at the top of the illustration. |
| The shock was that this was not the same as Metivier's illustration and I went into a kind of denial, but remembered that there was another place where she showed actual phototgraphs of the Boyet spines that she was working with. I show it below in Comparative Diagram 1, these are Metiviers photos that I have assembled here for comparative purposes. |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, we can see that spine example (C) is the source of Metivier's bird palette however example (D) also has what looks to be a smaller bird palette. (click on this diagram to see an enlargement) |
| In Comparative Diagram 2 we breath a big sigh of relief, after finding that these bird palettes do match, and we see also Boyet roulette/palette C-5 is probably another match (click here to see Boyet type C roulettes). While we are here we may as well look at another Metivier tool, it is the roulette at the bottom of her diagram, if you look at the scan below of our 1698 binding you will notice that the outermost roulette is probably the same that she has illustrated. In Comparative Diagram 3, we explore this further. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, I have placed Metivier's boyet roulette example in the midst of samples of the outer roulette of the 1698 Brevarium. When I was looking at Metivier's diagram I noticed what might be considered a sort of flaw, I have marked it with a green dot, and it just so happens that the flower bud that is placed between these floral elements, appears to be not well centered on its mid point stem, a careful search through all the these floral elements indicates that this off centerness only occurs with this bud it is indicated by the blue lines. While you might not agree with this analysis there is another thing that occures in all of the these roulette strips, and this is more convincing. Starting with the floral motif sitting on the green dot the next similar motif to its right has a smaller central space in the upper part of the stem, it is largest in the green dot example, the one next has a smaller hole and the one next to that and even smaller hole. This is well shown in Metivier's illustration (rubbing) and all of my Brevarium examples follow this progression, proving that this is the same Roulette and that it has the same flaws. |
| Fortunately a friend sent me a reference to Barber's notes on Boyet's tools, after searching through it I found his CDR 7 Roll, this is obviously the same imprint as you can see in Comparative Diagram 4. In the CDR 7 description, Barber makes no mention of Metivier who had already illustrated this Boyet tool in 2002. Unfortunately I have to point that he was wrong about the length of this roulette, that he describes as "Four repeats at 38 mm". My investigation of this roulette partially shown in Comparative Diagram 3, and further in Comparative Diagram 4 with green dots, demonstrates that it has a length of 11.11 cm. This roulette may be catalogued as lab-m-R-3 (Luc-Antoine Boyet Metivier roulette 3). |
| In Comparative Diagram 5, I want to draw your attention to an special imprint designated "fer a". In their small book entitled Reliures françaises du XVIIe siècle, Isabelle de Conihout & Pascal Ract-Madoux, Paris, 2002. devoted a chapter to the works of Boyet. In the back pages of this book the authors include a limited inventory of rubbings taken from the imprints of the tools commonly used by Boyet, in this we find their fer a I have detailed this on another page (click here to see it). This is another important proof that we are looking at a Boyet, binding however look carefully at the differences in these two examples the 1698 imprint has much more gold packed into it the details are not as clearly visible and one might even be tempted to say that these imprints derive from a different tool. I don't think so but this is something to bear in mind, and single imprint can appear in a variety of forms depending on a lot of variables. Only by looking at multiple examples can one attempt to give a really reliable appraisal. |
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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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