Portrait of a Binder: Charles Meunier (1866-1948) and His “Binding a Day”

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Barthélémy d’Arcole,
Inspector of bibliophilic aesthetics and modern heresies to the Guild of Bibliopolices.

To place Charles Meunier (1866-1948), and to understand the singular position he holds in French binding, one must first accept an idea that the “good taste” of his time condemned: that a design can be conceived quickly, can aim at novelty, and can still claim the rank of a work of art. Apprenticed to Bénard at the age of eleven, Meunier worked until the 1920s, and he still leaves an impression today through the boldness of his work. There, already, is the signature of a temperament: not a conservator of fine craftsmanship, but a man in a hurry to impose a manner.

After that apprenticeship with Bénard, where he stayed until he was sixteen, he became a journeyman with Domont, then with Maillard, and finally with Marius Michel, whom he left at twenty to set up on his own. Everything about him, one senses, had to go fast, very fast. Established, yet still in his twenties, he naturally struggled to stand apart from the style of his last employer, Henri Marius Michel, who then ruled over Parisian creation: ornamental flora, plant motifs, incised leather. But the man, as we shall see, was boiling with ideas and meant to impose a style of his own. He soon became one of the standard-bearers of the emblematic binding (reliure emblématique), alongside Pétrus Ruban, and threw himself headlong into numerous experiments, some of them hazardous, because, as Devauchelle stresses, his rapid apprenticeship left him no “time to perfect himself or to acquire all the mastery of which he was capable.” Here, from the outset, is the tension of an entire body of work: the fever of the creator set against the patience the trade demands.

Never mind the reservation: Charles Meunier teemed with ideas, and as Devauchelle again reports, he kept saying, “I haven’t the time for that, for I mean to produce, if I so please, one design a day.” The line could have been mere bravado; it was a programme. His output was indeed colossal: in 1897 Beraldi already put it at five or six hundred pieces. He also published, over twelve years, seven albums of one hundred plates each reproducing his best work (1893-1905); the albums were printed in one hundred copies and put on the market. That a craftsman should think to archive and circulate his own output says enough: he saw himself as a practitioner and, beyond that, as a school unto himself.

Charles Meunier was a great binder, and he also had a head for business. A colossal output, albums put on sale: he moved from 3 rue de la Bienfaisance to 75 boulevard Malesherbes (an address occupied, as this was written, by the engraver Benneton), where he had a magnificent shop that would house his publishing house and his review L’Œuvre et l’image. One recognizes a trait I have already described elsewhere in Octave Uzanne: that of the bibliophile who refuses to separate the object of commerce from the object of worship, and makes the shop a manifesto. Nobody should be surprised, then, that where many binders of the day sought recognition at the world’s fairs, Charles Meunier refused to compete at the one of 1900: partly because he did not think he could win the grand prize, but also, he added, for a reason worth a whole treatise on offended aesthetics: “Why would you have me pay 750 francs per square meter to show my bindings in display cases lost in the middle of the paperbound-books section, killed by that icy setting of white and black that drives the visitor away! The day there are 400,000 people at the Exposition, you find two of them in front of the bindings… and those two are binders!” There is, in this calculated disdain, more than a sulk: an art’s refusal to let itself be relegated, the conviction that binding has no need to beg for its place in a setting that “kills” it.

While continuing to practice and create, he explored other directions: he went further than Lortic by publishing his own books, whose deluxe copies he clothed in his characteristic designs. The first volume published and bound in this way was Les Fleurs du Mal, illustrated by Carlos Schwabe in 1900. Rather in the manner of Octave Uzanne, he founded in November 1900, with Léon Berubé, L’Œuvre et l’image, a monthly review of contemporary art and the illustrated book, which ran until September 1902; in 1904 it became the quarterly Les Arts bibliographiques, devoted to contemporary literature, technique and the arts of the book, and it stopped in December 1907. It carried articles on binding, of course, but also on engraving, on papermaking, and bibliographical news, all lavishly illustrated. He even pushed the logic as far as holding a public sale of part of his library: fifty volumes… bound by his own hand, on 21 November 1908.

He was a jack-of-all-trades, as we see, and he had firm opinions. Annoyed by the theses Beraldi developed in La Reliure du XIXᵉ siècle, he published in reply Les Réflexions d’un praticien en marge de « La Reliure du XIXᵉ siècle » de M. Henri Beraldi. As in Beraldi’s work, it runs to four volumes, a symmetry that in itself sounds like a challenge. According to Devauchelle, Meunier there “dissects the bibliophile’s work, picks out every error, page by page, and takes a malicious pleasure in inflating the most insignificant ones in order to discredit the author, who had the finesse to feign indifference.” In another work, Paroles d’un praticien pour l’art et la technique du relieur-doreur, he attacks the methods of the Estienne school in Paris. The man takes sides, as we see; and he gave lectures to defend his ideas, at the Grolier Club in New York in 1906, but also in Paris and Amiens. Then he retired in 1920, after organizing a second sale that was a kind of liquidation of all his activities: he put up for sale his binding workshop, taken over by Conil and Septier, who came from Marius Michel’s, and all his books, even those still in progress, stripped of their paper wrappers, sewn, or ready for gilding. He died in November 1948.

Let us now judge on the evidence, as befits the Inspection. Charles Meunier was an exceptionally gifted binder: his bindings resemble no others, and few French binders can be said to be the same, certainly not Capé or Trautz, for all their immense talent. His bindings can be identified at first glance, as can his collaboration with Carlos Schwabe, which also left a definitive mark on the history of Les Fleurs du Mal. It was the Geneva bibliophile Frédéric who introduced them, and their collaboration lasted a dozen years. Charles Meunier had already bound editions of Les Fleurs du Mal, but with his own edition he naturally surpassed himself: its execution took nearly four years. Bibliophiles will also note the extraordinary and unique set of the Œuvres complètes of Victor Hugo (Paris, J. Lemmonyer, G. Richard et Cie, Émile Testard, 1885-1895), in forty-five quarto volumes bound by Charles Meunier in claret morocco, with ninety incised and tinted leather panels in all set into the covers, where one can read two portraits of Victor Hugo and several emblematic characters of his work, down to those pearly reflections of which Meunier had the secret. This is the kind of undertaking before which praise bows: not a binding but a cathedral of leather.

For the Guild’s expert, this series moreover poses a textbook case. Charles Meunier bound three copies of this edition, three of the fifty copies on Japan paper, but he signed only number 3, which is also the only one on which he took care to sign and date each piece of leather. Number 1, belonging to the Lyon booksellers Bernoux, Cumin and Masson, was shown at the 1900 Exposition Universelle and sold for 100,000 gold francs. Number 2 was in the library of the Lille bibliophile Hector Franchomme. As for number 3, it went through the fire of the auction room on 7 April 2011 at Aguttes in Lyon: estimated at €35,000 / €50,000, it was knocked down at €163,485. Emboldened by that success, it reappeared at Artcurial in Paris on 14 June 2017, this time as lot 38 and under a far more ambitious estimate of €180,000 / €200,000… where it went unsold, for want of a bidder. Fashions have their whims, and auctions their sulks: the same object, hammered down without difficulty at a reasonable price, is shunned as soon as it is given airs. The cathedral of leather has returned to the shadows. But a copy signed and dated by Meunier’s own hand, of such an edition, has never had to fear oblivion; it merely waits, like all great things, for the patience to return.

Meunier was, at bottom, neither a devotee of the past nor a gratuitous iconoclast. By wanting a design a day, by publishing his own books, by founding his reviews, by feuding with Beraldi and the Estienne school, he made speed a doctrine and daring a method. Where others sought mastery in slowness and recognition in official display cases, he preferred risk, controlled quantity, and a signature recognizable among all others. That is why, a century later, his bindings are recognized at a glance where so many irreproachable works blur together. The Inspection takes note: well-conducted heresies always end up entering the canon.

Sources: Devauchelle, Fléty, Wikipedia; Henri Béraldi, La Reliure du XIXᵉ siècle (Paris); by Charles Meunier himself, Les Réflexions d’un praticien… and Paroles d’un praticien pour l’art et la technique du relieur-doreur; and, for the auctions, the Aguttes catalog entry (7 April 2011) and the Artcurial entry (Paris, 14 June 2017, lot 38, unsold).

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The Sacrificed Books of The Ninth Gate: Inquiry into Polanski’s Cursed Book

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By an adept, in the manner of Lucas Corso, surveyor of the bibliophilic margins.

Some years ago I was told about a man in Toulon who owned Latin leaves of the seventeenth century whose provenance was murky. Not murky in the way ordinary bibliophiles mean it: no dubious trimming of the margins, no ill-judged restoration. Murky because these leaves, he said, came from a book that had been taken apart on purpose to make another book, one that had never existed. I noted the name, filed the information under things to check, and then forgot it. Until the other evening, when I watched Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate again.

The film, released in 1999, adapts Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s El Club Dumas. It tells of the quest of a rare-book broker, a trade I know well, commissioned to authenticate one of the three known copies of a book called De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis, On the Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, supposedly printed in Venice in 1666 by one Aristide Torchia, and said to have been co-signed by the Devil himself. Torchia, burned by the Inquisition, was supposed to have left three copies identical except for nine engravings which, compared with one another, would yield the keys to invoking Lucifer. The book does not exist, of course. Pérez-Reverte invented it for his novel. Polanski had it manufactured for his film. And this is where the bibliophilic story starts to get interesting.

Three false books, two real ones sacrificed. The production designer of The Ninth Gate is Dean Tavoularis, the man behind The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Bonnie & Clyde. Oscar, 1975. A man of that stature has a team of prop makers, and the film’s head prop master is called Gilbert Pieri. Pieri had to make three hero copies of the Ninth Gate: the Balkan, the Fargas and the Kessler. Three distinct bindings, nine engravings per volume and, a decisive detail, a Latin text inside that had to look real under the camera, in close-up, open on Johnny Depp’s knees.

Pieri did not print that text. He did what any bibliophile will recognise as heresy: he bought two authentic old Latin books, one of more than five hundred pages, the other of more than eight hundred, and he took them apart. Some twenty leaves from the two volumes were combined, reinserted into the custom-made bindings, and duplicated to serve the three copies needed for the film. The detail is known to specialist collectors, who tell it to one another on forums devoted to film props. Some claim to own original pages from these two books, torn out during production and given to members of the crew. One of them eventually identified the source book by typing a Latin phrase from the film into Google: it was a Latin theological and Catholic work of 1588, from which the production had merely removed a few words to give the illusion of a coded text.

Some twenty leaves of a book of 1588, dismembered to appear in a Polanski film: this should make any lover of old paper tremble. Two real books were immolated on the pretext of making a third, rarer still, since it does not exist.

Then there are the nine engravings. They are, in Pérez-Reverte’s novel as in the film, the central element: each copy contains nine, but three of them differ from one volume to the next, and comparing the eighteen images reveals the secret. These engravings, too, have a bibliophilic history worth attention.

Here is a rare particularity: the engravings already existed in Pérez-Reverte’s novel, where they bear the initials AT and LCF; those in the film take up their formal language. The formal language of these engravings, as everyone knows, draws ostensibly on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the allegorical romance printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499 and attributed to Francesco Colonna. It is, as everyone knows, one of the most prestigious incunabula ever printed, famous for its one hundred and seventy-two anonymous woodcuts, themselves the object of five centuries of speculation about their author. A copy can be consulted online on Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (bpt6k587910); those who want to see what a perfect copy costs today will remember that a Poliphilo in a fine binding has passed four hundred thousand euros at public sale, and that Jean Grolier alone owned five copies.

To make his cursed book, then, Pérez-Reverte had the formal language of the rarest and most mysterious book of Western printing adapted. It is a choice of great elegance: a seventeenth-century fake imitating a real book of the late fifteenth. The film’s engravings were drawn, engraved and printed like real copperplate prints, nine for each copy, twenty-seven prints in all, not counting the variants that Polanski had redrawn. Those prints exist somewhere, framed at Polanski’s or at Pieri’s, or scattered among the members of the crew.

As for official sales, the record is poorer than for The Name of the Rose. Neither Christie’s, nor Sotheby’s, nor Bonhams, nor Heritage, nor Propstore has seen a hero copy of the Ninth Gate go through. The three bindings made by Pieri are, to my knowledge, still in private collections; one belongs to the collection of a certain “balkan.press”, a discreet figure who runs a specialist website devoted to the object.

But the parallel market is teeming. More than forty official replicas of the book are listed online, sold for between five hundred and twelve hundred dollars depending on quality. A whole tinkerer’s literature circulates, with manufacturing tutorials, reconstructed typefaces, tracings of the nine engravings and of the tenth (the one called the “true ninth gate”, inscribed LCF). The Ninth Gate is probably the most copied prop book in the history of cinema.

And then there are the leaves. Those from the two sacrificed books. They circulate quietly, sometimes on eBay, more often in private transactions between collectors. The bibliophilic status of these objects is staggering: they are at once fragments of real old books (the Latin theological work of 1588), film props deposited by the production, and relics of the shoot co-signed Polanski. Three provenances for a single leaf: for the collector, an object to the third degree.

I do not know whether the man from Toulon really has Latin leaves that passed through the shooting of The Ninth Gate. I did not bother to go and see. But the idea that real old books were destroyed (consumed is the right word) to make a fictional book whose market value reaches several hundred euros today in replica, and incalculably more as a hero copy, should give us pause.

Polanski and his team inverted the bibliophilic equation. Where the usual market pays for the old manuscript and despises the modern copy, their film does the opposite: it buys and destroys a theological book of 1588 to make a modern fake that resells for more than the pages it is woven from. The cursed book has done its work. The real work has dissolved into the matter of the fake. And the leaves now in circulation are, as in the film, fragments that must be compared with one another to guess where they come from.

Burned books vanish, but those that are shut away always end up coming back.

Guild shelfmark: GBO-C/2 — Le Livre Démembré [The Dismembered Book]

Document classified: restricted circulation — Bureau of Litigious Props.