Le Rayonnement des Moretus (review)

It is well known that the printing house founded by Plantin in Antwerp was inherited after his death in 1589 by his son-in-law Jan Moerentorf (Joannes Moretus), and that the Officina Plantiniana was continued by the Moretus family until its last imprint appeared in 1866. Although the quality and importance of its output declined in later centuries, concentrating by the eighteenth century almost exclusively on liturgical works, it has always been a name to be conjured with in the annals of European printing. It might be expected that a catalogue entitled Le Rayonnement des Moretus would primarily be a work for printing historians, but this is actually an exhibition of bookbindings, held at the Bibliotheca Wittockiana between September 2006 and January 2007. It focuses on a collection of 129 bindings covering editions printed by the Moretus / Plantin press between 1591 and 1837, assembled by the Belgian bookseller Eric Speeckaert over a fifteen-year period of 'chasse internationale'. The main criterion for selection was that books should be in bindings more or less contemporary with their imprints, but apart from that the collection is wide ranging, including books in quite plain bindings and books in very fancy ones, books with armorial stamps and distinguished provenances, and books without any external ownership markings.

From the binding historian's point of view, the intellectual rationale behind this is perhaps a little artificial. There is no particular connection between the printing house and the bindings; these are books bound all over Europe, wherever individual sets of sheets ended up for binding. Many emanate from France, Germany, or the Low Countries, as well as Spain and Italy, but there are some more exotic examples, such as the Mexican or South American binding on a mid-eighteenth-century Breviary (no. 109). The handsome fanfare binding on a 1609 Officium BMV, the blind-stamped roll binding on a 1602 Estius, the Colbert and de Thou bindings are all entirely typical of their genres, and matching bindings were produced on many other contemporary books. That said (and it is, arguably, an irrelevant quibble), every binding is generously reproduced in excellent-quality colour, with good descriptive details. Among the various kinds of bindings shown, there is a good sprinkling of prize bindings and some striking eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bindings with silver furniture. This is a handsome catalogue that anyone interested in European bindings will be glad to have on their shelves. The challenge for us will lie in remembering that this is the place to look to find a prize binding from Ypres, or a binding from Deflinne of Tournai — but binding specialists are used to that kind of thing.