Page:Historical essay on the art of bookbinding (IA 0130ARTO).pdf/32

32 Le Gascon attained perfection, and that he possessed a secret process of gilding which has not yet been discovered.

Le Gascon’s immediate successors were Boyet or Boyer, and Du Seuil or Duseuil, whose name Lesné, the bookbinder poet, has written Desseuil, as he logically but improperly misspelt Pasdeloup for Padeloup, to the confusion of bibliographers.

The work of Le Gascon is greatly superior to that of his successors. Louis XIV. was not an amateur of beautiful books, a defect which was not to be remedied by the edict of 1686, which liberated bookbinders from the dictatorship of printers and publishers, nor by the treaties with the Ottoman Empire, which stipulated an indemnity of morocco skins for the covers of the books of the royal library, possibly in emulation of Charles V. of Spain’s request from Cosmo de Medicis of a superb copy of Titus Livius as a token of conciliation.

From the time of the Roi Soleil the art of bookbinding declined gradually. Derome and Padeloup were great artists assuredly, but at a long distance from their predecessors.

At the end of the eighteenth century Bozerian is the unworthy representative of the art in France,