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Some time ago I decided to create this site while researching French Decorative Bookbinding, particularly gold tooled works from the 16th to the 18th centuries. My interest in this developed out of the acquiring of an elaborately decorated 1647 Breviarium. Up till that point I was a collector of books, from then on I became a collector of bindings. Frankly I knew almost nothing about gold tooling, but I was inspired by the idea of trying to discover, if possible, who actually made and decorated my Breviarium. This lead me on to a vast research project where I not only learned about gold tooling but started collecting the tool imprints for a comparative analysis. The idea being that if one can identify the tools one may also be able to identify the artist. Thus within these pages you will discover how to identify the works of some of the most important and famous French bookbinders. In the early days of this site I just uploaded the pages as they were done but now with so many pages online it will be best to simplify things with a page of links for each binder (see below the list, click on the binders name to see his page). Probably some of you will have discovered this site simply by researching a particular binder, and these new pages will make it a lot simpler to navigate around and hopefully find what you are looking for. I called this site virtual bookbinding due to the fact that while I was collecting and extracting gold tooled imprints, I discovered a way to replicate imprints from rubbings. Thus with these replicated imprints I was able to repair or artificially reconstruct the missing parts of certain bindings, I soon discovered that I was able to create entirely 'virtual' bookbindings. |
