Forum Auctions
Lot 303
Lloyd (Trevor, binder).- Chambers (Sir William) A Treatise on Civil Architecture, first edition, list of subscribers (bound after preface), 50 engraved plates, very light soiling to title, some light foxing and browning, occasional faint damp-staining to lower margin (including to title), exquisitely bound in full red goatskin, by Trevor Lloyd, covers with central lozenge and corner-pieces of inlaid white paper, elaborately tooled in gilt and edged in black goatskin strapwork, the background lavishly tooled in gilt all over with a variety of tools all specially made by Stewart Field and incorporating four large circles of detailed featherwork, spine tooled in gilt in compartments with seven raised bands, second compartment with black goatskin label lettered in gilt, spine with "Bound by Trevor Lloyd MBE for David Nathan Maister" lettered in gilt to foot, turn-ins with gilt floral tools, comb-marbled endpapers, g.e., housed in a goatskin-backed drop-back box, [Fowler p.70; Harris 122; Millard, British 13], folio (535 x 375mm.), Printed for the Author, by J. Haberkorn, 1759. *** Bound in the style of one of the legendary Irish Parliamentary bindings tragically destroyed in the explosion at the Dublin Public Record Office in 1922. Described by the late G.D. Hobson as "probably the most majestic series of bound volumes in the world", the 149 large folio volumes containing the manuscript Journals of the Irish Lords and Commons had been stored, unnoticed, in the Dublin Public Records Office since the Acts of Union in 1800.The magnificent collection, nominally the work of the King's Stationers in Ireland, was shown to book collector and amateur binder Sir Edward Sullivan in the last decade of the 19th century. Sullivan made rubbings of all 149 unique volumes (now in the National Library of Ireland) and photographed 20, publishing his findings in Country Life magazine in September 1908 and Decorative Book-Binding in Ireland in 1914. The Dublin Public Record Office, with nearly all its contents including the bindings, perished during the siege of the Four Courts just a few years later.In 1990, Philip Maddock, a Boston-based book collector, started to build up a visual database of Irish hand tools with a view to making a digital reproduction of one of the lost volumes, inspired by images displayed in Maurice Craig’s Irish Book Bindings 1600-1800. This digital reproduction of Commons Journal 1757 was finally produced in 2006. Edward Bayntun-Coward, who carried out a review of this digital reproduction, introduced Maddock to Trevor Lloyd, the renowned bookbinder and restorer. The team of Maddock, Lloyd and toolmaker Stewart Field then collaborated over the next decade to make exact facsimile reproductions of 14 of the original (and now lost) bindings, a project that culminated in the exhibition 'Burning Books' at Dublin Castle in April 2017.
