| This 1758 Almanach Royal with the arms of the King of Spain, has been elaborately decorated with many of the same tools that we have cataloged on the previous pages, as well as with a few additional new ones. There can be no doubt that this binding derives from the Dubuisson's workshop, the same tools being found on this whole series of Almanachs destined for the King of Spain, Fernando VI. |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, I have tried to show all of the main imprints found on this 1758 Almanach Royal, those shown with blue ink are new tools, that I have never noticed before and probably were not found on any almamach before. The imprint pd-8-2 shows up here for the first time in the spine compartments, I am not sure if I hve recorded it from an earlier date. We see here a good selection of tools that will help us to identify more Dubuissson mosaic bindings such as the one shown below. |
| The binding shown above is found in the British Library Database of Bookbindings, shelfmarked Davis564. I have included here their information on this binding, and note that they still attribute this binding to Derome, even though he was not officially a binder until 1761 (Il est reçu maître le 31 mars 1761 mais indique avoir succédé à son père Jacques-Antoine dès 1760). I have tried to convince them that this binding was decorated in the workshops of the Dubuison's probably by Pierre-Paul Dubuisson, who became the King's personal binder in 1758, the same year this Ofice (missel) was printed. We are going to show below, again that this binding has been decorated with some of the tools we have been studying. |
| On a prievious page we were looking at high resolution images of some particular Dubuisson tools, and I happened to mention by chance a small imprint pd-29-3, that can also be seen on the Davis564, shown above in Comparative Diagram 2. |
| I decided collect and study these imprints which is what you see in Comparative Diagram 3, amazingly none of these imprints were rotated, i have copied them from various locations on the binding and pasted them directly into this diagram. We can see they have maintained their orientation, then in Comparative Diagram 4 we analyse this imprint a bit more closely, We discover that it is an unusual 9 petal form and that a natural division between the 9 petals occures at a close to 45 degree angle to the standard orientation, here we see 4 large petals occupying half of the circumference, half of the pie is in 4 large slices while the other half has five slices, one is noticably smaller, number 5 appears wedged in between large slices. Another noticable detail is that the angle between slice 6 and 7 is not perpendicular to the center. These details will be hard to see in low resolution examples but anyway give us a way to recognize this imprint. Already it is quite unique with 9 petals, if someone wanted to copy your tools I doubt that they would choose this one. |
| In comparative Diagram 5 we see the results of this exercise, it is kind of an obvious result as we knew from the start that Davis564 is a Dubuisson mosaic, however we may need this pd-29-3 diagnostic tool in some future binding research. |
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click here to return to the Dubuisson mosaic INDEX. click here to see more Pierre-Paul Dubuisson 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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