Historical essay on the art of bookbinding/Grolieru et Amicorum
GROLIERII ET AMICORUM.
ean Grolier was born at Lyons in 1479, and died at Paris in 1565. His title to fame rests entirely on his passion for beautiful books, the patient investigations of M. Le Roux de Liney disclosing only three or four occasions of his emerging from comparative obscurity: In 1544, in a quarrel with the boasting Benvenuto de Cellini, who does not fail to record in his Memoirs his closing of a discussion with a threat to throw the bibliophile out of the window; in 1558, as director for the Marshal of Montmorency of the Chantilly Art Collections; in 1559, as president of a commission instituted by Henri II. for the recoinage of moneys; in 1561, in a suit for peculation, which resulted in his acquittal. Portio mea, Domine, sit in terra viventium, is the invocation traced on his books, and it was probably accorded.The friendly intimacy that existed between Aldus Manucius and Grolier, while the latter was treasurer for the Duchy of Milan (about 1510), animated, if it did not originally promote, Grolier’s appreciation of “the art preservative.”
He was a member of the little academy which held its meetings at the learned printer’s house, apparently of a size to contain none but true friends, as a realization of the ideal of Socrates. There he met as colleagues Navagero, Marino Sanudo, the Greek Musurus, Giovanni Gioconde, Erasmus, poets, artists and savants.
In 1518 Grolier was a celebrated collector of books, and Erasmus prophesied that they would make him great. There were, says La Caille, three thousand volumes in his library, which remained intact for one hundred and ten years in the hotel de Vic. They were sold at auction in 1676, after the death of Dominique de Vic. The original buyers are not known, and three hundred and fifty volumes only have been found extant by M. Le Roux de Lincy.
There were many of the finest editions of the Aldine press, many in duplicate and in triplicate copies, a circumstance which, in the opinion of his biographer, explains and justifies the singular device of his volumes: Io Grolierii et Amicorum—and all were bound in Levant morocco, embellished with varied designs and ornaments of the most exquisite patterns. A distinguishing feature of these was the interlacing with geometrical accuracy of boldly traced gold lines. Grolier undoubtedly led the art of bookbinding, justifying the opinionated expression of the Comte de Laborde: “Bookbinding is an art all French.” It is a moot point with bibliographers as to the binding of Grolier’s volumes, whether they were executed at Paris or at Lyons. The relentless Mr. Fournier, inferring from an allusion in Bonaventure des Périer’s “Cymbalum Mundi,” that the best bindings were made in Paris, while the no less learned “bibliophile Jacob” (P. Lacroix) gives the palm to Lyons, the birth-place of Grolier, and the favorite city of Bonaventure des Périers. Be that as it may, Grolier had unconsciously founded a school of the art of bookbinding, and it would be impossible to enumerate the excellent works with which it enriched the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of these are the elegant bindings of Francis I., stamped with the emblematical salamander; and of Henry II. and his mistress, Diana of Poitiers, to whom is due the edict providing that a copy on vellum, handsomely bound, of every book printed in France should be deposited in the library of the King. Her books were stamped with mythological emblems and crescents, sometimes untied in a monogram with the King’s initial and the royal coat-of-arms.
