The main types of binding in old books

25 October 2026 Hugues Guides 0

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Barthélemy d’Arcole, Inspector of Bibliophilic Aesthetics and Modern Heresies to the Guild of Bibliopolices.

A book is also judged by its dress. The binding protects, but it also speaks: it tells the period, the taste, the care and sometimes the vanity of an owner. To learn to read it is to add a sense to reading, and an argument to any valuation.

The first distinction separates the paper-wrapped state (French broché: a simple paper cover, sewn, which is the original state of publication) from the bound book, covered in boards and a nobler material. Between the two, the half-binding, whose spine and corners are leather and whose sides are paper or cloth, is an elegant and widespread compromise. Note that for some modern books the original wrappers are more sought after than a later binding.

Then come the materials. Morocco, a close-grained goatskin, is the noblest and the most sought after; calf, supple and smooth, dominates the classical centuries; sheepskin, tanned sheep hide (French basane), more modest, dresses ordinary books, and one should not confuse it with chagrin, which is grained. Vellum and parchment, white and rigid, come from ancient times, while in the nineteenth century percaline and publisher’s cloth industrialise binding.

The decoration signs a period. The so-called “à la Du Seuil” binding, a double frame of gilt fillets enhanced with corner fleurons, is a seventeenth-century design, older in fact than the binder Augustin Du Seuil who gave it his name. The fanfare binding spreads the interlacing of the Renaissance; the dentelle (lace) binding, openwork borders typical of the eighteenth century; the mosaic binding inlays pieces of coloured leather; and the Jansenist binding, unlike all the others, gives up every decoration on the sides to put beauty in the material alone. The Romantic nineteenth century, for its part, multiplies tools and ornaments.

One must also know how to name what one is looking at: the boards, which are the two sides; the spine, with raised bands or flat; the headcaps, at the top and bottom of the spine; the corners; the edges, sometimes gilt or painted; and finally the endpapers, those inner leaves sometimes decorated with dominoté paper. To name is to be able to describe, and so to sell or buy knowingly. Some bindings also bear the signature of a great binder (Trautz, Lortic, Cuzin, Marius-Michel), a signature that adds value provided it is authentic, which is not always so; mistrust, here as elsewhere, is a form of respect.

To go further, see our pages on formats, first editions and bibliophily.

The dress does not make the book, but it always admits something about it. GUILDE · esthétiques — B. d’Arcole.

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When They Guillotined the Booksellers: Paris, Spring 1794

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Barthélémy d’Arcole, Inspector of Bibliophilic Aesthetics and Modern Heresies to the Guild of Bibliopolicés.

There is, in the history of French bookselling, a spring that nobody celebrates. It is the spring of Year II of the Revolutionary calendar. Between January and May 1794, in the weeks leading up to the fall of Robespierre, five Parisian book dealers went to the scaffold for doing what their trade had taught them to do: print, sell, ship, display in the shop window. None of them had taken up arms. None had conspired. All kept shop at the Palais-Royal, on the quai des Grands-Augustins, or in the Saint-Honoré quarter. The offence held against them was not plotting but having let printed sheets circulate. The indictment was not about their deeds but about their catalogues. They were condemned as booksellers.

The names are little known, and even well-informed bibliophiles meet them only in a footnote in Mellot, or in the work of Annie Duprat, on which I draw here. They are: Jacques-François Froullé, printer-bookseller on the quai des Grands-Augustins; Thomas Levigneur, his occasional partner, who set up shop within the very galleries of the Convention; François-Charles Gattey, bookseller at 14 Palais-Royal; Michel Wébert, bookseller and dealer in caricatures, also at the Palais-Royal; and finally a woman of whom the archives have kept only the name of a widow, la veuve Lesclapart, bookseller in Paris. Five people, five fates, one era and, give or take a few weeks, the same end.

Three of these five booksellers fell for the same book. It is a pamphlet that every eighteenth-century enthusiast should know, if not as a bibliographical object then at least as a historical document: the Liste comparative des cinq appels nominaux faits dans les séances des 15, 16, 17, 18 et 19 janvier 1793 sur le procès de Louis XVI [Comparative list of the five roll-call votes taken in the sessions of 15–19 January 1793 on the trial of Louis XVI]. The title looks dry. The contents are less so. It is a compilation of the votes of the deputies of the Convention on the death of the king, accompanied by a Relation des vingt-quatre heures d’angoisses qui ont précédé la mort de Louis XVI [Account of the twenty-four hours of anguish that preceded the death of Louis XVI] and by a footnote, modest in appearance, that would feed a French legend for two centuries: that of the “majority of a single vote”.

That footnote, more than anything, is what condemns. Royalists found in it the proof that the king had been murdered by a procedural stroke and not by the will of the people. The revolutionary authorities saw in it a manoeuvre, and the most dangerous of all, since it struck at the very legitimacy of the regicide. The pamphlet was printed by Froullé and Levigneur as early as April 1793. It spread. It travelled. Levigneur admitted having sold it openly at the door of the Convention, under the eyes of the people’s representatives, adding that after a few reproaches he had withdrawn it. Froullé, more deeply involved, confessed to having disposed of two thousand copies. Asked why he had not read the Relation des vingt-quatre heures before inserting it, he answered simply that he had not thought it dangerous, “by virtue of the freedom of the press”.

The argument carried little weight. The law of 29 March 1793, whose reach Froullé had perhaps not measured, imposed the death penalty on the authors and distributors of writings tending to restore the monarchy. Both booksellers were arrested on 8 Ventôse, Year II. Fifteen copies of the Liste were found at Froullé’s, along with twenty-seven suspect pamphlets and, a detail that did not help, a packet of cartridges. They were guillotined on 13 Ventôse, Year II (3 March 1794).

François-Charles Gattey did not fall for the Liste. He fell for the Actes des Apôtres, the great royalist journal launched in 1789 by Peltier, Suleau and their friends, of which he was the appointed publisher. Gattey was no latecomer to trouble with the Revolution. He had been at odds with the book-trade authorities since before 1789, and had even known Charenton for breaking the rules of the trade, which made him, in the profession, one of those disreputable booksellers whom the whole Palais-Royal knew. In May 1790 the commissioner Toublanc seized six packets of the Actes des Apôtres in his shop. An anonymous pamphlet appeared shortly afterwards under the eloquent title L’aristocratie du libraire Gattey punie par le peuple ou supplice des Actes des Apôtres [The aristocracy of the bookseller Gattey punished by the people, or the torment of the Acts of the Apostles].

Gattey carried on. He published, he sold, he distributed. The Revolution hardened around him and he changed nothing in his trade. Arrested in Year II and tried for active royalist propaganda and for supposed links with the counter-revolutionary networks of the colonies (he had correspondents in Saint-Domingue and in the Île-de-France), he went to the scaffold on 25 Germinal, Year II (14 April 1794). His case illustrates a second category of hunted bookseller: no longer the distributor of one particular text, but the merchant identified with an entire catalogue.

That leaves the last two. Michel Wébert, bookseller at the Palais-Royal, a native of Saverne, sold royalist caricatures, some of them engraved in such a way that weeping willows and funerary urns encoded tributes to the beheaded king. The veuve Lesclapart, of whom almost nothing is known, kept a shop in Paris. Both were guillotined on the same day, 20 May 1794. The charge against Lesclapart is laconic: having sold the Liste comparative. Having sold. Not printed. Not distributed through a network. Sold, as a bookseller sells whatever is on the shelves of her shop.

For the bibliophile, the name Lesclapart is not neutral. Under the Ancien Régime, Pierre-Antoine Lesclapart had been “marchand relieur-papetier-colleur et en meubles privilégié suivant la Cour” [merchant binder, stationer, paper-hanger and furnisher with a privilege to follow the Court]. At his death, around 1781, the privilege passed to Honoré-François Jollivet. Now this same Jollivet wrote to the Convention twelve years later, offering to strip the gold of the royal arms from the volumes of the Bibliothèque nationale at the rate of two sols a volume. Whether or not the widow Lesclapart guillotined in 1794 was the direct widow of the former binder to the Court (the Paris archives, largely destroyed in 1871, do not allow a formal answer, and the hypothesis would need checking in the central records of the notaries), the name alone is enough to draw, across the revolutionary decade, a strange symmetry. On one side of the privilege, a man prospers by offering to undo the bindings he was commissioned to serve. On the other side of the same name, a woman dies for having sold, as she had always done, what her shop sold. The coincidence of names here looks like a judgment.

It remains to understand why these five booksellers, and not the many others whose shops were searched between January and May 1794, went to the guillotine. The booksellers Garnéry and Desenne, suspected of the same complacencies, were released shortly after Thermidor. The distinction lies not in the gravity of the trade but in the moment of the arrest. Froullé, Levigneur, Gattey, Wébert and Lesclapart fell within the narrow window between the law of 29 March 1793, which made royalist propaganda a capital offence, and the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor. A few weeks more, and they would have come through as Desenne and Garnéry did. A few weeks less, and the law would not yet have been passed.

The lesson, for the bibliophile, is archival rather than political. Books outlive their sellers. The Liste comparative can still be found today at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (shelfmark Lb41 354) and turns up regularly at public sales, with no catalogue mentioning that it cost five heads to those who circulated it. The copies of the Actes des Apôtres still met with in the trade rarely bear any trace of their executed publisher. For Wébert and Lesclapart it is worse: their stock was dispersed without any bibliographical note preserving their names beyond a mention in Mellot. The book survives. The bookseller passes.

Five guillotined in four months, for a few printed items. It is little, set against the 17,000 victims of the Great Terror. It is a great deal, set against a trade whose Parisian shops numbered a few dozen among practising printers, and a few hundred at most among all the merchant booksellers. And it is enough to be remembered, in a milieu that by tradition prefers its glorious binders to its martyred booksellers.

Principal sources: Annie Duprat, “Un réseau de libraires royalistes à Paris sous la Terreur”, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 321, 2000, pp. 3-26. Jean-Dominique Mellot and Élisabeth Quéval, Répertoire d’imprimeurs-libraires XVIᵉ-XVIIIᵉ siècle, Paris, BnF, 1997. Archives nationales, W 332 (Froullé/Levigneur file) and W 345 (Gattey file).

GUILDE · BdA/MARTYRS-LIBRAIRES

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