- About Bookbinding -
Famous Book Binders
DE Thou and LE Gascon part 2
It was towards the end of the reign of Charles IX., after the death of Grolier (1565), that we find the first specimens of a new style. The side of a book was now covered by a framework of small compartments formed by double filleted bands. At first these compartments were empty, and Henry III added to the barren severity of the design by filling the central space with a stamp representing the crucifixion. As Henry II put the bow and arrows and triple crescents of the unchaste Diana on the royal bindings, so the sombre Henry III, taking life sadly because of his lost love, Mary of Cleves, was fond also of a powder of tears and of death's heads scattered through the lilies of France.
So solemn a style of decoration did not tempt his sister, Margaret of Valois, afterward known as Queen Margot, and she preferred a powder of marguerites each flower being framed in an oblong wreath.
For her, also, the cold austerity of the geometrically distributed compartments was done away with, and while the same regular framework was retained, all the hollow spaces within and without the figures, formed by the double fillets, were filled with little branches, with spiral vines, and with a multitude of tiny tools, light, airy, and graceful. These are the bindings which we find on the best of the books of De Thou. These are the bindings which are credited to the Eves, Nicolas and Clovis, two brothers who were the royal binders from 1578 to 1627.
Whether or not they are entitled to the credit for the many beautiful bindings rather rashly attributed to them is one of the many moot points in the history of the art. These are the bindings now known as "fanfares" (because that was the chief word in the title of an old book which Thouvenin bound in this style for Charles Nodier during the Restoration). These are the bindings which served as models to that greatest of binders, who is known to us as "Le Gascon," and who, so M. Marius-Michel surmises, may have been a pupil or an apprentice of the binders who worked for De Thou.
