| The binding shown above is found in a 1934 Maggs Bros. catalogue A selection of books, manuscripts, bindings, sporting prints and autograph letters remarkable for their interest, rarity & beauty. (click here to see it) When I first saw this binding I was surprised to see some unusual tools, tools that I had not catalogued before, I wondered if perhaps they were Padeloup tools, but a thorough search did not find a Padeloup connection here, what is sure is that most of the tools are Dubuisson tools. I was going to show individual tools compared, however in Comparative Diagram 1, you will see a corner detail of a Dubuisson dentelle a l'oiseau, an obvious Dubuisson compared with this 193 example. a few imprints matchup assuring us that this is the work of Dubuisson. |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, I show the corner of what I think is a contemporaneous early binding by Dubuisson, probably the style of these bindings is from a period of 1748 to 1749. What is certain is that the central large open tool pd-7-5 is rarely seen and my initial type model of it a bit faulty, now corrected in Comparative Diagram 2. |
| In the Comparative Diagrams above I show imprints from a binding that I have personally scanned at 1200dpi. thus I know the imprints to be 100 percent accurate, I show the binding in black and white next to No. 193 at a corrected scale. In Comparative Diagram 4 I show imprints that I know are accurate and I have rescaled the 193 imprint to match this. This rescaling is accurate to within about a quarter of a millimeter as shown by the blue lines, and I am confident that the size of binding 193 is now within 1 percent of actual size. The green arrow is indicating a flaw in this imprint that is also just visible in the 193 example. In the next diagram I compare a 193 imprint with a Dubuisson pd-10-2 imprint. In my old catalogue I see that my type model for this imprint is incomplete which indicates that I have not encountered this imprint very often. The comparative imprint comes from another very important, possibly early dubuisson binding, shown below No. 54. |
| The reproduction of the binding shown above, No. 54, is from an invaluable 1955 catalogue LIVRES ILLUSTRES du XVIIIe siecle Librairie Giraud-Badin, Paris. This is a giant folio sized binding and I am not sure that it is as early as the other two bindings that I show on this page. What seems to happen with giant sized dentelles is that the binder often resorts to using his whole arsenal of tools to cover it, so perhaps here we see simply the vast collection of Dubuisson tools including some that he has not used in a while. What ever the case, we find here more examples of rare Dubuisson tools. This binding has been attributed to Padeloup, and we know that in the early period of Dubuisson's career, he was hired by Padeloup to decorate his bindings and even so did not hesitate to put his etiquette inside. The result is that for centuries 'experts' have confused Dubuisson's tools and dentelles as the work of Padeloup... even though you never see a single trace of a Padeloup tool on these bindings, When I first saw the 193 binding I thought just maybe here was a mixture of Dubuisson's tools with those of Padeloup however a closer inspection reveals that these unusual imprints do not derive from Padeloups tools. |
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In Comparative Diagram 6, we see some unusual imprints found on binding No. 193, these are more than unusual they do not even belong in the middle of the 18th century, they would fit into the middle of the 17th century. Although Boyet and Padeloup specialized in retrospective bindings, I searched thoroughly through my examples of Padeloup spiral tools, he never had anything like A and A2 shown in this diagram. On the next page we are going to look at another binding that Dubuisson made for Madame de Pompadour. |
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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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