| The binding shown above is found in a LIBRAIRIE SOURGET - MANUSCRITS ET LIVRES PRECIEUX - CATALOGUE N° XXI published in the year 2000. page 410, lot 166. The Sourget experts have attributed this binding to Douceur, however this is an unlucky guess. This binding derives from the same workshop that has produced the bindings that we have been looking at in the last few pages. What we see are the tools of Boyet. Below in Comparative Diagram 1, we compare a 1728 Boyet roulette with this 1746 example, this is no easy test, there are no obvious flaws in this roulette from which we could easily calculate the length of the roulette. Certain excentricities do seem to occur and can be traced with the roulette strips alligned so at to match the corresponding details, even this relatively simple method, is a great test of observational skills and memory. Often you are looking for a small break or flaw, to do this you have to magnify the image and look at only a small part of the roulette then zoom out to look at the whole diagram to try and locate it elsewhere. The result is that you have proof that this is the same roulette, that derives from the same tool and workshop. |
| The binding shown above is found in the same LIBRAIRIE SOURGET - MANUSCRITS ET LIVRES PRECIEUX - CATALOGUE N° XXI published in the year 2000. page 360, lot 144, however the Sourget experts have not attributed this binding to Douceur. Below I show the same roulette experiment in Comparative Diagram 2, and here we have found a very small flaw that has helped to align these roulettes proving that they are in fact the same and derive from the same tool. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, we see something that ought to set Boyet fans into long discussions, we do not know if Boyet decorated his own bindings, the evidence against it is very slim indeed, it started with a rumor spread by Thoinan the same kind of romor that he spread about J A Derome, that at the time of their deaths these celebrated bookbinders appeared to possess none of the tools necessary for this work. We know now that Derome le jeune certainly inherited his father's tools and that J A Derome certainly did some of the gold tooling on certain of his books. We also know from our investigations that the tools from the early bindings of Boyet were still being used more than 50 years later by the same workshop. Now in the next few pages I am going to investigate the roulette shown in Comparative Diagram 3, I can show that this roulette was in use extensively in the period 1684 to 1688, how can we explain it here found on a 1728 binding? This tool followed Boyet his entire career, obviously it belonged to him, and not to just some doreur that he happened to hire. The second thing I wish to point out is that Boyet made some incredibly precisioned dentelle bindings, bindings that could have only been executed by a Grand Master of the art of gold tooling... if there was any such Master working for Boyet he would not have remained a secret for long... Padeloup himself could not match the precision of this work, and he would have been the first to know the name of the artist who surpassed him in every detail, I think it will be very surprising if this Master was not in fact Luc-Antoine Boyet! |
| Here is something really amazing Comparative Diagram 4 we see the same Boyet palette C-5 being used in 1746 as well as 1728 and a 1705 Metivier example, the overlay is the 1705 reduced to 45% transparency and placed over the 1746 example, here we see that all these imprints derive from same Boyet tool that he was using perhaps from early in his career. |
| Isabelle de Conihout and Pascal Ract-Madoux show in their 2002 book Reliures françaises du XVIIe siècle : Chefs-d'oeuvre du musée Condé a Boyet binding (No. 36, page 86-87). they estimate that Boyet produced this binding from around 1690 to 1700. This binding has a palette that they have catalogued as Type VI and illustrated in their catalogue of Boyet tools. In Comparative Diagram 4, we compare their rubbing of this palette VI with what appears to be exactly the same palette on our 1746 Semaine Sainte. How is this possible? the same tool that Boyet used in the early part of his career now found on a binding made more than a dozen years after his death. This palette is so excentric in its design that there can be no doubt that the two imprints shown in Comparative Diagram 4 are one and the same. I have already worked on these Dolphin Semaine Saint bindings (click here to see this) however to find one that has been produced in 1746 is quite a surprise. |
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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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