A Binding "à la Fanfare"

Clement Marot (1496–1544) and Theodore De Beze (1519–1605).
Les Pseaumes de David mis en rime françoise.
Paris: Pierre Des-Hayes, 1642. (10708)

Intended for private use, this pocket-sized edition of musical settings of the Huguenot Psalter was bound à la fanfare, an elaborate gold-tooled binding style that was popular in France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although the word “fanfare” evokes showy ornamentation, it is not a descriptive term: it became attached to the binding style only after the nineteenth-century French author Charles Nodier instructed his binder, Joseph Thouvenin, to bind the title Fanfare et corvées abbadesques in imitation of this seventeenth-century style. The original style grew out of the Grolieresque strapwork style and, less directly, Eastern ornament. This tiny calfskin binding exhibits all seven of the essential characteristics that define “fanfare” bindings:

(1) Ornamentation that is the product of small stamps.
(2) Decoration that fully covers both top and bottom boards.
(3) A design composed of compartments of various shapes and sizes.
(4) A central larger or distinctive compartment.
(5) All the work is gilt.
(6) The ornament includes foliage.
(7) Each compartment is delineated by one single and one double gilt fillet.