| The bindings reproduced above can be found in a November 2019 Sotheby's online auction catalogue (click here to see it). The Sotheby's expert states this is a binding that has been very elegantly bound by Douceur! The interest for us on this page is to firtstly notice that the outer roulette is again the same one as found on the bindings shown on the previous page. |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, we can see that Louis Douceur was employing this framing roulette for a number of years although Barber only gives one other reference to it, below I show the extracted imprints from this 1754 binding definite proof that Douceur was the decorator employing some of his classic tools, the birds however are not his usual ones (should be catalogued as d-67a-4 and d-67b-4) |
| We have looked at the binding shown above on another page (click here to see it) This amazing binding by Louis Douceur covers Torquato Tasso's La Gerusalemme liberata. printed in Venice by Giambatista Albrizzi in1745. I show part of here as it has some things in common with the No. 143 binding shown at the top of the page that we know was made sometime after 1754. There may be a way of dating this binding by a comparative study of the Arms of Madame de Pompadour. We really need to find out when this binding was made, as it might help us with our Plumet research... yes we are still working on that... you can anyway see that there are common tools and especially the Bulbous Vase which is rare in this model. Barber who was a great collector of these imprints never found this model even though he studied many Douceur bindings. But let us get to the meat of the situation which is that we find the corner imprint DCR 17 on more than half of all the Plumet bindings that we have discovered as well as Fetil and Douceur bindings. The imprints on this Tasso are all or mostly all from Douceur tools so we need to look at this corner tool closely. |
| In Comparative Diagram 2, we are getting into high tech overlays that are complicated by the fact that the Tasso example, is distorted by the perspective of photo, however I wanted to see if all the small details in the crest of this imprint matched, I have used two different overlay techniques, normal and difference and I concentrated on aligning the crests while the outer parts may be distorted (and not well aligned) the crest will only be minimally so. The 'C' overlay is with the 'difference' setting, and the most effective. The alignment is so perfect that you can see the leather underneath i.e. if these imprints were the slightest bit out of alignment, there would be no hope of seeing the leather under the inprints, one or the other would block the view. Therefore we can assume that Douceur, Plumet, and Fetil all used this same tool and shared certain others as well. Chronology would help us a lot in this situation. if we were to discount the possibility that all three binders were working together at the same time with three different sets of tools and only a few shared. I see a possibility where Fetil could have been doing the gold tooling for Douceur from about 1757 onward, and Plumet may have been similarly employed by Douceur, perhaps before Fetil . In this scenario Plumet intoduced the DCT 17 loaned it to Douceur who then passed it on to Fetil. However in all of this speculation, we would like to know who exactly executed which bindings... or at least have a more exacting idea than the Sothey's experts who in December of 2019 were still attributing Douceur bindings to Derome le jeune! |
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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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