I saw this binding on eBay some time ago and suggested to a friend that he should bid on it as it is indeed a very rare and precious specimen. So far our research has uncovered, only a handful examples worldwide from this particular workshop. It is hard to believe that this binding is 500 years old, it appears to be in excellent/ wonderful/ miraculous condition for it's age. We could probably speculate for hours on how it could have been kept all this time without any accidents befalling it. It was this binding that sparked off my research once more on bindings from this period. Thanks to Denise Gid who appears to have been inspired by the 1952 work of J Basil Oldham, English Blind-stamped Bindings, we have an exellent research tool to help us. Oldham catalogued the imprints from dozens (hundreds?) of late 15th century and early 16th century blind-stamped bookbindings. He systemized his coding for each roll/roulette, for example the pineapple roll that we are looking at here, these he called Twisted Pineapples and classified as TP. (1), TP. (2), TP. (3), for rolls that were more numerous and varied he added further designating letters such as HM. c (1) these can be thought of as TYPE and SPECIES denominations. In her 1984 Catalogues Gid adopted the same system but without the periods and bracket, the Twisted Pineapple roll of Oldham becomes Ananas entrelaces (interlacing pineapples) AE with letters for the species as EA "a" and numbers for number of examples = AE a 1. In her catalogues Gid provides us with over 700 rubbings that are referenced to a multiple number of examples from other libraries, covering literally thousands of late 15c to early 16c bindings from the major libraries of France. I cannot imagine how long it took to do all this, we can only bow down in admiration and thankfulness to have such an invaluable reference and research tool. However our good fortune does not end with Denise Gid, the online digital collection from the BIBLIOTHEQUE SAINTE-GENEVIEVE BLIND-TOOLED BOOKBINDINGS FROM THE BIBLIOTHEQUE SAINTE-GENEVIEVE (12th -18th CENTURIES) takes the work of Gid one step further by including photographs as well as rubbings. These are referenced back to Gid's catalogue examples.
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