| The 1774 Almanach Royal shown above is found in the Bibliotheque nationale de France digital reproduction unit, Gallica (click here to see it). The binding of this volume has been executed by Delorme as we have shown on page 6 and 7. On page 7 we showed a 1773 Almanach Royal where the decor is almost identical, being made with a pair of plaques, one for the corners and one for the sides. The plaques are then further embelished with a few accompanying imprints and armorial stamps. The great advantge with these BnF images is that we can zoom in and see the details as well as being able to see the inner dentelles and spine. Delorme employed some Dubuisson's tools to decorate the bindings, we do not know the source of the plaques however I am going to show that spine plaques were also used. |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, the green arrow is pointing to a gap which should not be there if conventional small tools were used to decorate the artificial panels. Placed beside the spine is a copy of the lower panel and placed over it is a semi transparent copy of the upper panel, the color has been reversed to make it easier to distinguish it from the imprint underneath. We can see that all the elements are perfectly aligned, this can only happen if these imprints were produced by a single plaque. |
| In Comparative Diagram 2, I show the bottom part of the 1773 Almanach shown on page 7, compared with this 1744 binding, we see that the main difference is only the few imprints separating the corner plaques. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, I have isolated these imprints so that we can get some idea of what is here, there are possibly 2 old Dubuisson tools in the mix otherwise these tools are Delorme tools. I have hesitated all this time to catalogue the Delorme tools, partially due to the fact that many of them are Dubuisson tools. |
| We got lucky in the Gallica collection of Almanachs as it turns out that 1773 is another Delorme binding similar to the 1774 example and almost identical to the 1773 example shown on page 7. This is a great comparative study and put a good fix on what Delorme was doing in this period, we notice that the additional tools here are different to those of 1774. Also the spine has been decorated with a plaque. |
| In the Comparative Diagram 6 overlay we can see that certain imprints are oriented somewhat differently. Somethings do match up however suggesting that both bindings are nearly the same size. |
| Now this is where things start to get interesting, the unusual central imprint separating the corner plaques appears to be Barbers DCT 28. Its hard to be certain due to his use of a double stamped imprint as his type model, almost as if he wanted to fool us, why would he do this, use a poor sample as his model? Anyway we can check his reference binding W.Cat 423. Even if he doesn't show this binding we can look through his entire tool catalogue to see if he has catalogued any other 423 imprints, a bit tedious, but a kind of treasure hunt none the less. On the next page I am going to show you the surprising results. |
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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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