| As I was assembling the strips of dentelle for Comparative Diagram 1, I remembered that there was an example in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, and I have added it to the top of the list. While I was on the BnF page I noticeed their references to Giles Barber (click here to see these notes). If we turn now to his book The James A. de Rothschild Bequest at Waddesdon Manor : Catalogue of Printed Books and Bookbindings. Waddesdon Manor: The Rothschild Foundation, 2013. we find an interesting illustration on page 436 which I show enlarged below in Comparative Diagram 2. |
| I was a bit surprised when I first saw this 'palette' by Giles Barber, I supposed it was the same Padeloup decoration that I have seen elsewhere. However it did not seem to me to be the way of Padeloup, quick and easy was not his thing. His father probably instilled in him early in life that masterpieces are never made with quick and easy methods. The supposed 'palette' dentelle that Barber illustrates looks very much like the BnF example D-41634 shown at the top of this page, in size they are identical. I decided to examine this dentelle to see if I could find Barber's palette. To see this better I brightened all the individual dots that accompany the fleurons, in doing this exercise, which requires a close inspection of all the elements, I realized that there were no patterns emerging, there was no palette evident. If we now look again at Barbers illustration, you will see that I have placed beside it, example (B). This is my idea of what this kind of palette, if it exists, should look like, the dots should be nice and orderly. We can see in fact that this 'palette' probably only existed in Giles imagination. Click on Comparative Diagram 3 to see the enlargement, you will notice that the feet of these fleurons do not always overlap and are sometimes not even touching the next fleuron, these are individual tools, that have been laid down meticulously one by one. |
| After this test I thought I better check to see if this BnF binding, D-41634 with a doublure and inner dentelle was in fact really a Padeloup, and although it looked very much like his style the tools on the cover were not ones that I recognized, in fact there was not a single classic Padeloup tool that I knew or had catalogued, this was a bit unsettling, the spine was even less descript although I did see a trace of some very small tools that could be the pj-14pair, these are so small almost all of my scanned inventory did not produce any clearly defined images of them, and anyway the imprints on the spine are deformed by the shape. this was kind of a conundrum and frustrating to think I had no clear way of proving that this was or wasn't a Padeloup. It is unusual to find a Padeloup binding where he has not used a least a few of his usual tools, in the enlarged detail shown below we see really only 3 fleurons used, these I do not remember in which case I am usually quite suspicious. I had never seen a Padeloup binding quite like this one. |
| However by a strange bit of luck one of the very imprints that we have been looking at in high resolution on the previous pages, happened to be just what I needed, it turned out that the imprint pj-13b-2 (that I suggested might be the male of the pair) is the tool that Padeloup has made extensive use of. You can see this for yourself in Comparative Diagram 4, however bear in mind that this is a 1200dpi enlargement, without which you would not be able to see enough detail to be able to state conclusively that these are one and the same imprint. |
| Before we look at the imprints found on the BnF D-41634 Reliure en maroquin brun a decor de compartiments mosaiques, Paris, atelier d'Antoine-Michel Padeloup. I want to remind the reader that this binding is very small, not even as tall as your average cell phone. I have had to enlarge the imprints to 1200dpi to even show them and this is the limit of the amount you can magnify the digital image from the BnF. In fact some of the the images are blurry but for our purposes good enough to make a perliminary inventory of the imprints. |
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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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