| I discovered this treasure on eBay, the seller had simply put a "buy it now" price of 60 euros... probably because he felt that the slightly defaced centerpiece would limit the value of this item. I snapped it up quickly as I recognized some of the tooling. It is easy to be fooled by bindings that may look very close to the work of a famous binder, but in fact are clever copies. I wanted to be sure about this binding and quickly found enough proof to convince me that is was indeed a binding by Jubert. How important is a binding by Jubert you might ask, well for my money his work is easily worth as much as that of Derome le jeune... why? because Juberts work is often mistaken as that of Derome. Jubert worked for Derome as the many signed Derome bindings covered with Juberts tooling attest. Even in these times of 'expertise' we find Jubert's work unaccounted for in bindings that contain Derome's ticket. A recent example can be seen in the Sotheby's December 2019 Paris auction La Collection Ribes II (click here to see it) Lets look at lot 169 which has a Derome ticket and is said by the Sotheby's experts to be "a fine binding by Derome" |
| If we ignore for a moment the spine of this binding we see that the boards have been decorated by Jubert, the imprints derive from Jubert's tools. The famous fer d'oiseau found in the dentelle is not that of Derome, it is Jubert's tool of the same type. Now this item sold for well over 10 thousand euros, part of this high price is due to the fact that the binding contains Derome's ticket, however the artistic merit of the dentelle and the perfection of the tooling belongs to Jubert, and so too with our 60 euro eBay item. Both bindings were executed by Jubert. Fantastic you say, but where is the proof. Below I show an undistorted representaion of Sotheby's item 169, thanks to the modern wizardry of photoshop such a thing is possible. We need to do this so that we can compare very precisely the tooling of this binding to our eBay example that we have scanned at 1200 dpi. |
| In Comparative Diagram 2, we show that the same imprint is found on both bindings. It is interesting to note that there are almost no other imprints shared by these bindings, why? I think that further research will show that the Sotheby's example was executed by Jubert for Derome le Jeune somewhere near the beginning of Jubert's career, possibly as early as 1771, where as the eBay example has been decorated with tools of a style that became very popular in the last quarter of the 18th century, 1780 and later. It may be that this binding was not executed in 1773 (the printing date) but rather a decade or more later. On the next page we will look at some of these Jubert imprints that could almost be called post Derome, some of which I have not catalogued previously. |
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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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