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  • The James A. de Rothschild Bequest at Waddesdon Manor. Printed Books and Bookbindings by Giles Barber
  • Mirjam M. Foot (bio)
The James A. de Rothschild Bequest at Waddesdon Manor. Printed Books and Bookbindings. By Giles Barber . Aylesbury : The Rothschild Foundation . 2013 . 2 vols. ( 1161 + 60 pp.) 96 colour plates + 880 black and white illustrations. £300 . isbn 978 0 9547310 8 3 .

The latest volumes in the impressive series of Waddesdon catalogues, published by the Rothschild Foundation, describe the outstanding collection of [End Page 359] seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books amassed by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. It forms part of the bequest to the National Trust of Waddesdon Manor and its contents by Baron James de Rothschild.

Graham Pollard devoted over ten years of his working life to studying and cataloguing the books at Waddesdon, but on his death in November 1976 the project was far from finished. It was fortunate that Giles Barber, then Librarian at the Taylor Institution in Oxford, accepted the invitation to complete this monumental undertaking. It is virtually impossible to take over someone else’s work, unless it is very far advanced and every step of the research has been carefully documented. As this was not the case, the work had to be started afresh. Perhaps this too was fortunate, as the resulting two volumes are far more than a catalogue of books in sumptuous bindings.

Volume I consists of fifteen essays laced with numerous lists of specific kinds of bindings, either present at Waddesdon or related to these. There are chapters on Baron Ferdinand as a book collector, set against the background of collecting ancien régime books during the second half of the nineteenth century; discussion of the books themselves, their subjects, their illustrations, provenance and associations (the House of Bourbon is well represented), and their bindings. An interesting chapter deals with the Paris booktrade in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its members, organisation, rules, and regulations. In eighteenth-century France binders were separated into forwarders and finishers. Demarcation disputes between these two professions and conflicts with related branches of the booktrade were common and gave rise to several laws and statutes, resulting in a great deal of documentation on the binding trade and how it functioned.

There are chapters on various decorative styles, on the type of tools that were used, and on the ways in which these were employed—including a discussion of the bindings for the Cabinet du Roi, volumes containing specially-commissioned engravings illustrating the achievements of France under the reign of Louis XIV, many with wide wreath borders (the ‘bordure du Louvre’) composed of repeated large tools. Not much is known about the designers and engravers of bookbinders’ decorative tools, but inventories made after the deaths of several prominent binders show what equipment they possessed and hint at their working methods. These are further explained in bookbinders’ manuals and in fairly detailed articles in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. When in the mid-eighteenth century book production and the demand for bindings increased, binders looked for quicker work practices, using prepared pallets for common titles, blocks to decorate whole spine panels, and large blocks for corner pieces, frame segments, and whole covers, which had to be applied with the help of a press.

In a fascinating exposé Giles Barber follows the finisher as he sets about his work, decorating first the spines, then the covers of his products. French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘doreurs’ were highly skilled and their fanfare and all-over styles were widely copied elsewhere in Europe. In eighteenth-century Paris, they reached their decorative heights with mosaics, made with onlays in various colours, either in repetitive patterns, or forming floral or picturesque scenes. A chapter is devoted to the dentelle style and we are shown how these lively flowing designs were built up with masses of small tools, often including the so-called ‘Derome bird’ and bulbous [End Page 360] vase tools in a variety of sizes. Waddesdon’s collection of bindings in both these styles is unsurpassed, and notwithstanding the difficulties relating to their attribution, Giles Barber has...

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