| in-8. XLIV. 673. 1 feuillet. (17,5x11cm). Plein maroquin rouge de l'époque. Dos à nerfs orné et titré en lettres dorées. Elégante frise dorée au petit fer en encadrement des plats. Frise dorée sur les coupes et intérieure. Gardes dorées. Reliure un peu frottée. Petits accidents aux coins, aux coupes. Coiffes et nerfs un peu élimés. Feuillets légèrement brunis. Quelques rousseurs, taches et traces de mouillure. Carême. Semaine Sainte. Temps pascal. La marque de la Compagnie de Jésus figure dans le bandeau au-dessus de la préface. Exemplaire élégamment relié en maroquin rouge à l'époque. Reliure qui mérite une restauration. |
| I spotted this binding on eBay, and because there is such a mixture of tools, I was not sure that this binding was from any binder that I have documented previously. The photo was not great, but at least it could be enlarged, and I started searching through my files to see if any of the tools could be identified exactly. There was one particular tool that seemed to stand out and as I remember that Barber had catalogued similar 'basket' imprints, I dug around in my scattered copies of Barber's catalogue pages and sure enough found one that seemed to match. Now you might encounter this same situation in a catalogue, where you find a binding that is presented in such a way as to make imprint comparrisons tricky. I have a way of getting around this, and I thought I might as well present it here, for those of you who are obsessed enough to attempt something similar. Of course you will need to know your way around Photoshop, I use an old version that will not even run on the newer browsers. The 'new' photoshop is for the birds, as far as I am concerned... you need to sell your computers soul to the "cloud" if you want to use it, not to mention learning everything all over again. |
| The first thing you need to do is copy your image of the binding in question and paste it onto a signigicantly larger page. What we want to do is to eliminate the perspective view of the photo, to make the binding square and of the right size, exactly as given in the item's description (17,5x11cm). |
| In the Photoshop (version 8 CS) Edit menu, you scroll down to the Transform sub menu and choose Distort making sure that you have selected your image. You then drag the corners until you get a roughly square board of the right size. |
| Probably your binding will not be exactly the right size, so we want to resize it to its proper size, select a part of the binding that you want to be exactly the right size, as far as height goes. Copy and paste this into a new image file. |
| In the diagram above you see the new file with the part of the binding that you want to make an exact size, the dimensions of the image are as shown. |
| Now we have changed the height of the image to 17.5 cm and as well as set the Pixel Dimensions to percentage. The amount that we have changed the image is shown as a percentage i.e. 75% of the original size, we can then return to our distorted image and reduce it to 75% of the original, which should produce a binding that is 17.5 cm in height. |
| Above I show this proceedure to resize the binding to its proper scale, i.e. 17.5 tall and a 300 dpi resolution (75% of the original). The width is only roughly correct, however there are a number of methods by which you can achieve a correctly proportioned width. |
| We notice that there is a circular imprint in the corners, this is lucky as it will be a simple matter to find out if our distorted imprints are in fact now circular. By carefully selecting the circle and copying it we can inspect it's exact size, the data shown is indicating that the circle is about 6 - 7 % too wide, i.e. the whole binding is this amount too wide. |
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By setting the image constraints as I show them above, we can change only the width to 94% to get the correct width for this binding which will then be a correctly scaled size, we can extract the imprints and compare them with examples from other binders such as Douceur, who had similar looking tools. On the next page I show the extracted imprints and discover something rather surprising. |
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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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