When Nixon was making his 1965 catalogue of Fleur-de-lis Binder imprints he must not have been aware of the binding shown at the top of this page (lot 103), as we do not see the imprints that I have shown in Comparative Diagram 3 amongst his rubbings. These are the same type of imprints that he has catalogued on Plate C, numbers 1, 2, 3. We know now that these tools belong to Jean Picard and not Claude de Picques. However my point is that if Nixon had of seen these tools he might have changed his strategy in numbering them. His numbering of the Fleur-de-lis binder imprints may in fact try to follow a sort of chronological order. However now that we can see that a number of binders had most of these tool types and used them in a very similar fashion it may be more logical to name them all according to type similarities. Thus a Roffet type one tool would be similar to Picard type one. The totally mind boggling thing in all this is the fact that many of these binders had virtually the same tools, many of which could barely be distinguished one from another making the job of identifying bindings by the tool imprints no easy matter.
Observe closely the changes in the shapes of these tools shown in Comparative Diagram 4. We see that the Fleur-de-lis binder tool in position 3 is very similar to the Roffet model, that might actually be the original, that was copied by the Fleur-de-lis binder. We can imagine then Picard making a similar tool copying the Fleur-de-lis Binder model, later Picard's model was then copied by the others. While it may not have happened exactly this way, I present the idea here as a possible explanation of the changes in the design of these tools.
Below, in Comparative Diagram 5, I show another of the tools mentioned in the description of Lot 103, it is EF. 9 compared to a very similar tool used by Jean Picard, perhaps somewhat later.
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