- About Bookbinding -
Famous Book Binders
Padeloup and Derome part 4
The main defect of Padeloup was an insufficient sense of form. Some of these floral designs in mosiac are as unrelated to the shape of the book they decorate as though they had been cut out an embroidered silk or a printed calico. Some of them have a monotonous repetition of the same framework, as though they were torn from a roll of wallpaper. Form and symmetry, composition and balance - these are essentials of decorative art. Most of Padeloup's designs arc fragmentary; they lack unity of motive; they have no centre to which the rest of the decoration is duly subordinate. Some of them, less pretentious than others, have a quality of their own. Beyond all question they are characteristic of their period. In the main they are heavy, and they lack skill, style, grace. Style they lack most plentifully, for Padeloup was as eclectic as a quack-doctor. He would mingle in the cover of anyone unfortunate book tools and methods borrowed from the whole history of the art.
I confess to having fallen into a popular error here, in speaking of Padeloup as though he were a single entity, despite the fact that there were, first and last, twelve of the Padeloups. And of the Derome dynasty, which for a while was contemporaneous, there were no less than fourteen who were more or less known as binders. Perhaps the greatest of these was Nicolas Denis Derome, who was received master in 176 I, and who is generally known as the Younger Derome. The Younger Derome was a rapid binder, a merit most rare in those who practice this craft; and he was an honest workman, loyally following the mandates of his customers. His bindings have solidity and substance. But he was too fond of the knife, and, like a cruel surgeon, too careless in its use. He cut to the quick, and many a beautiful book has died under his treatment. Margins and edges were shorn away with merciless persistence; no tall copies ever left his shop. Dibdin cries out against Derome again and again, and we cannot but feel that the cutting-iron of the binder had pierced the soul of that travelling book-lover. The Englishman declares that a folio of "Priscianus," printed by John of Spires in 1470, had lost a head and shoulders, and that a good half of the miniatures are cut into at the top. This is a crime for which the guillotine itself is the only fit punishment.