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The picture shown above is from an online publictity brochure for The James de Rothschild Bequest at Waddesdon Manor Printed Books and Bookbindings (click here to see it). Inside this brochure we can view pages from Giles Barber's book entitled Catalogue of Printed Books and Bookbindings: The James A. de Rothschild Bequest at Waddesdon Manor available at Amazon for only $821.94!!! Fortunately we can see a few pages of this book for free online. Under this reproduction there is a subtitle that I have not added to my copy of it, it reads... "W.Cat.454 [The Dutchesse du Maine].Grandes nuits de Sceaux. 1715. Folio. Bound by N-D Derome with his ticket." Giles Barber chose this binding of all the Derome bindings that he must have encountered and all the tools that he carefully catalogued, as being representative of the work of Derome le jeune? otherwise why show it, and after all it has Deromes ticket inside. If I ever write a book, presenting my self as a learned expert, I hope and pray that I do not make a mistake as big as this. This large dentelle was not made by Derome, if he actually bound the book we have to wonder. We cannot look at this binding and say yes this is a Derome, because there is not a single Derome tool in evidence. This binding was decorated by Gosselin and we see here the vast array of Gosselin tools, some of which I have carefuly cataloged recently (see this page). I am not going to put dozens of comparative diagrams to prove this point, partially because I only have this low res example of the binding from the brochure to work with. |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, we can see that these spines share an identical palette as well as fleurons. These are not shown in the partial inventory of Gosselin tools below, however you will be able to see many of the those tools within the dentelle. The question then arises once again, why does this binding have Derome le jeune's ticket inside if he did not make it. I think we can assume that Derome hired binder/doreurs like Gosselin and Jubert to do the hard work of such large folio sized dentelles. We have heard that Derome commanded a high price for his work, I suspect that he could easily hire a quality doreur to do the dentelles and still make good money.... further to this he may have just been getting too old to have the steady hands and clear vision required for such precision work. I think we often forget that the 18th century was not a time of power tools and flourescent lighting, who knows how they worked on bindings on a dark winter's day, furthermore I doubt that you could do the work of applying gold tooling and hold a magnifying glass at the same time. The precision that we see in these dentelles, of one fleuron carefully attached to another at just the right angle is truly astonishing and probably requires more eye to hand skill than can be mustered today given the same limitations of the working environment. So yes, we could be a little more simpathetic with Derome's case and the story of his tickets. |
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click here to return to the INDEX of the Etiquette pages. click here to see the INDEX of the 2017 pages. click here to return to the HOME page. see below links to previous work |
| 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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