|
Fascinated by the discovery of this rare binding I decided to study in depth Dr. Jan Storm's book "De achttiende-eeuwse
Haagse boekband in de Koninklijke Bibliotheek
en het Rijksmuseum Meermanno-Westreenianum
(The Hague, 1976)" (The Hague bookbindings of the eighteenth century in the Royal Library and the Rijksmuseum Meermanno-Westreenianum). This is a Dutch language publication however there is a brief summary in English at the back. A detailed Catalogue of Decorated bindings and the tool kits that made them, hundreds of minute illustrations or rather rubbings representing the vast panapoly of tools used by the Dutch binders, as well as photographs of the more important bindings themselves. |
|
"There were twenty or more different workshops producing de lux and semi-de lux bindings in the Hague in the eighteenth century. The most important in the first half of the century was without doubt the First Stadholder's Bindery ( Eerste Stadhouderlijke Binderij)" As I now had one volume to work with I started by comparing Dr. Storms rubbings with the tooling on my binding... |
| ...probably when he started working on this project many years ago, making rubbings was the quickest, most accurate and inexpensive way to catalogue the tools, however today with the luxury of cheap high powered scanners hooked up to lightning fast computers, rubbings are going to be replaced with highly accurate digital imagery. One main reason being that rubbings will not show all the fine details, compare this rubbing with the adjacent photo. |
| A simple flatbed scanner would give even better resolution as well as 100% accurate scale and demonstrate that the inner lines of this tool are formed of dots similer in nature to pointillé used by numerous French bookbinders in the first half of the 17th century. Another tool used to form the center of the panel, shows this return to the style of pointillé |
|
Pointillé 1634, Jeremias Drexel [Drexelius] Recta Intentio omnium humanarum actionum anussis Coloniae: Agrippinae: Cornel: ab Egmond [i.e. Amsterdam : Blaeu] 1634, this is a 32 mo book, it is shown at its actual true size, click on this image to see an enlargement! |
