LA RILEGATURA PIEMONTESE NEL '700

Milan: Walter Toscanini & C., 1929. No. 19 OF 500 COPIES. 300 x 220 mm. (12 x 8 1/2"). 74 pp.
ELEGANTLY BOUND IN BLACK CRUSHED MOROCCO FOR J. R. ABBEY BY SYDNEY COCKERELL (stamp-signed on rear turn-in with Cockerell's device and the date 1949; signed in ink on recto of rear endpaper and dated 27/8/72), covers with wide frame of blind-tooled squares, these enclosed by gilt S-shapes and inlaid red morocco dots, central panels semé with small gilt stars, that on upper cover with Abbey's gilt armorial supralibros, smooth spine with vertical gilt titling, turn-ins with gilt S and red morocco dot borders, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. In the original felt-lined black cloth clamshell box, two tan morocco labels on spine. With 60 plates, 56 showing sepia-toned photo reproductions of 110 different bindings, and four with examples of binding tools. Front flyleaf with engraved armorial bookplate of J. R. Abbey and green cloth book label of Jean-Paul Getty. With a handwritten letter from Getty, dated 11 January 1974 and written on stationery with his London address, presenting this book to renowned rare book dealer and bibliophile Bernard Breslauer. Christie's, "Bibliotheca Bibliographica Breslaueriana The Third Portion," lot 1413 (27 June 2005). Boards very slightly bowed, leaves with a touch of browning to edges, but a fine copy, very clean and fresh, in an unworn binding.

Rarely has a reference work on bindings been as attractively bound or had as illustrious a provenance as this illustrated volume on the 18th century Piedmontese style originated by the royal binder to Victor Amadeus II. It was bound in 1949 by the son and successor of the renowned Douglas Cockerell for arguably the period's greatest British collector of bindings, John Roland Abbey. The design is a wonderful mix of the contemporary and the traditional, with its densely detailed gilt coat of arms (worthy of an 18th century tome) being placed within a gilt, inlaid, and blind-tooled frame that is all openness and understated modernity. Sydney Morris "Sandy" Cockerell (1906-87) trained and worked with his father, and took over the Cockerell bindery on Douglas' death in 1945. According to DNB, "adept with his hands, [the younger] Cockerell was also of a highly practical turn of mind. Many of his tools he made himself, and the hydraulic ram (adapted from an aeroplane's wing flaps), with which he impressed gold leaf into his bindings, gave any visitor immediate notice of his ingenuity. Like his father, Cockerell insisted on the best materials appropriate to their purpose, paying special attention to leathers (especially goatskins) and to papers with a neutral pH value, and of the right weight and fibre structure. In the 1920s his experiments on marbling paper for bindings soon led to its regular production by his workshop." His skill in that craft is on display in the three-dimensional, feathery quality of the endpapers here. John Roland Abbey (1894-1969) was the most ambitious English book collector of his time, amassing world-class collections of private press books, illuminated manuscripts, and color plate books. But bindings were his most ardent interest, and the various fine and important catalogues they spawned comprise perhaps the most enduring legacy of his collecting. Bindings commissioned by Abbey are considerably less common than bindings owned by him, and offer a distinct insight into his personal aesthetic. Son of Jean Paul Getty, the American oil tycoon, Sir Paul Getty (1932-2003) took up book collecting in 1971, as a solace after the tragic death of his wife Talitha. According to DNB, "it was especially the book as object that sparked him, with the arts of the binder an enduring passion." In the words of Nicolas Barker, Getty's "collection is to be measured by comparison with the great collections of the past—as great as any made in the last century." In the enclosed letter, written in January 1974 on stationery with his Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, address, Getty presents this book to Bernard Breslauer with these words: "For Bernard --Who has the loveliest taste in books and music (it must be the loveliest -- he loves the sames things I do!) Paul." Breslauer (1918-2004) was born into one of the great bookselling families of Europe, but had scarcely begun his career when his Jewish family had to leave Germany to escape the Nazis. With the help of a former client, they re-established the business in London, where his father was killed in the Blitz. According to his obituary in the New York Times, Bernard Breslauer "became a leading bookbinding expert, specializing in examples from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and in literary and musical autograph manuscripts. He also began his voluminous collection of illuminated manuscript leaves, some kept at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. As a dealer in New York, he offered more than 100 catalogs, among them a series on historic artistic bookbindings." The sales of his library at Christie's in 2005 constituted a major bibliophilic event of the new millennium..