The reproduction of the binding shown above is from the online catalogue pages of GAZETTE DROUOT (click here to see this). I was shocked when I saw this, at first there seemed very little Douceur about it, however the palette is a dead giveaway. I wanted to find out the size of this binding and started searching with Google with the exact references as given Heures Royales, contenant l'Office de la Vierge... Paris, Méquignon, 1741. Google had indexed about 30 trillion web pages, 7 years ago, they are not telling you how many it is now but you can imagine that the amount is increasing logarithmically... 130 trillion in 2016, it's safe to say that its a couple hundred trillion by now... and even with all that info... nothing, nada, no such animal, this book does not exist, even if you just search for parts of the name, like Heures Royales 1741, or even attempt something really desperate like searching for the title on the spine... we don't know really if this was book from 1741, but I have in my collection a Douceur with the same framing roulette, which was one of his favorites for a certain time... like this one a 1746 with the same platette (click here to see it). Or this one that is a 1739. |
In Comparative Diagram 1, we see a computer generated virtual bookbinding. By using a strip of the roulette from my 1746 example I resized this binding vertically and horizontally, why? because I want to compare the tulips, and I wanted them reasonably accurate. |
In Comparative Diagram 2, we see that these tulips should be the same, even though the sizes are not perfect i.e. one is a bit bigger than the other, due to having to estimate instead of having actual meaurement data. Now we need to search for more tulips like these... |
I found the reproduction above and thought this must be another Douceur tulipe BUT look closely it is not, the tulipe petals are curved at the top... even though the base looks identical, this means that there are clever copies out there, I found another in the British Library Database of Bookbindings. |
click here to return to the HOME page. click here to see an INDEX of the 2017 pages. 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. |
Virtual Bookings, created by L. A. Miller | return to the Home page of VIRTUAL BOOKBINDINGS |