A Custom-Bound Library: The Ultimate Biliophilic Luxury

A genuine Apollo and Pegasus Binding by Marcantonio Guillery

Can you imagine having every book in your library in matching bindings that were especially designed for you? No half-hearted half calf, either: full leather bindings with a signature design that instantly marks it as your property, even almost 500 years later. Such was the luxury enjoyed by the two Renaissance men described in today's post.

Giovanni Battista Grimaldi (ca. 1524- ca. 1612), heir to a large Genoese fortune. While visiting Rome as a teenager in 1543, Grimaldi met the humanist scholar Claudio Tolomei, founder of the Accademia della Virtù. At Grimaldi's request, Tolomei undertook to help the young man assemble a "complete" library to advance his education. According to bindings scholar Anthony Hobson, who definitively identified the owner of the Apollo and Pegasus bindings, Tolomei agreed and "invented a device or 'impresa' for him" that depicted "Apollo driving the chariot of the sun, 'straight and not crooked,'" as the Greek motto informs us, towards Mount Parnassus, on whose summit Pegasus is standing. Apollo represented Grimaldi, who should aspire, like the god, to be a patron of arts and literature, while the straightforward course of the chariot symbolized the course of study Tolomei would devise for the young man, designed to lead him to the virtue and fame embodied in the winged Pegasus.

Apollo & Pegasus Impresa designed by Tolomei

Tolomei was an ardent advocate for treating modern languages as the equal of Greek and Latin in works of scholarship, and he included works in the vernacular in the Grimaldi library. These, like our volume, were bound in red morocco, while those in classical languages were bound in green or brown. Three Roman binders were engaged to do the work: Maestro Luigi, Marcantonio Guillery, and Niccolo Franzese. These men were also booksellers, and each likely bound the volumes that had been purchased from him.

Four very well-executed Apollo and Pegasus forgeries

Apollo and Pegasus bindings are uncommonly seen: only about 150 volumes of Grimaldi's 200-volume library survive. Consequently, they command extravagant prices when they do appear in the marketplace: a "restored" octavo Seneca, also by Guillery, sold for more than $106,000 at Christie's in 2004. A scarce and highly desirable that can be sold for large sums of money will always attract the unscrupulous who try to pass off copies as the real thing. Just ask art collectors, museum curators, or fashion designers. Apollo and Pegasus bindings are no exception.

As fake as the Rolex you can buy in Times Square

At least two binders are known to have faked Apollo and Pegasus bindings during the final part of the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th centuries. The first of these binders was Vittorio Villa (d. 1892) of Bologna and Milan, who typically started with plain or sparsely decorated 16th century bindings, which he then tooled more elaborately and to which he added the Apollo and Pegasus medallion. His work, which is strongly reminiscent of Guillery's, is almost certainly seen in the Homer volume described in the next entry. After Villa's death, his tools came into the possession of Domenico Conti-Borbone, a Milanese binder. These extremely convincing forgeries are sought by some collectors, not as replacements for the real thing, but because they are desirable curiosities and, as binding specimens, are fine pieces of work done for early books with inherent value.

A rare early book on medicine, in a binding done for Pietro Duodo

Venetian diplomat Pietro Duodo (1554-1611) served as ambassador to the court of French king Henry IV from 1594 to 1597, and took advantage of his residency in Paris to accumulate a portable gentleman's library of 90 works in 133 small but dazzling volumes. He commissioned a Parisian atelier to produce richly decorated, color-coded bindings for the works: olive brown morocco for literature (72 volumes); red for theology, philosophy, and history (46 volumes); and--rarest by far--citron for medicine and botany (15 volumes). Duodo never had the chance to enjoy his library: he was recalled to Venice and later served as its ambassador to Prague, London, and the Vatican. His portable humanist library remained in Paris, probably packed away, for 200 years. Volumes began to appear on the market around the time of the French Revolution, and have been sought after by collectors ever since. The binding's provenance can be established by the very distinctive stamps used on the Duodo bindings, as well as unusual features like the raised "à la grecque" head and tail of the spine, seen here and on other Duodo bindings in the British Library's Database of Bookbindings.

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All images courtesy of Phillip J. Pirages Fine Books & Manuscripts

African American Archivist's Dream Must Not Be Deferred

Avery Clayton (1947-2009)

Avery Clayton lived long enough to find a home for the largest collection of African American artifacts on the West Coast. But not long enough to see the treasure trove of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, feature films and ephemera, his mother's life's work, made available to the public. Mr. Clayton died suddenly on Thursday, while hosting a Thanksgiving dinner. He was 62 years old.

Mayme A. Clayton (1923-2006)

Clayton's mother, Mayme, spent 40 years amassing materials on African American history from every source imaginable: garage sales, flea markets, attics, used-book stores, and even dumps. She rescued thousands of rare books, movies, sound recordings, photographs and letters documenting the Black experience in America, which otherwise might have been lost to scholars forever. Until Mayme Clayton's death in 2006 this priceless archive was stored haphazardly in her garage in the West Adams section of Los Angeles.

Avery Clayton, the eldest of Mayme's three sons, began to see the value of his mother's "hobby" when he became a teenager. "Her part was to assemble the collection," he said. "I really believe my part is to bring it to the world." Just days before his mother's death, Mr. Clayton signed a $1-a- year lease on a former courthouse in Culver City, CA., to house what is now the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. Since 2006 he had tirelessly raised funds to catalog, preserve, conserve, and display the collection and make it accessible to the public. He also personally helped to archive many of the items. He had hoped to see the Library open in 2010 or 2011.

Avery Clayton seated before a portrait of his mother, which he painted for her 80th birthday.
(Photo by Phillip Scott Andrews, AP)

As of Avery Clayton's untimely death this week, only about one-fifth of the collection has been archived, according to Leah M. Kerr, director of the Clayton Library. "It's everybody's hope that we will be able to continue the work," she said. Mr. Clayton eloquently explained the reasons behind his family's efforts to preserve the long neglected history of African Americans to The New York Times in 2006: “One of the things that culture does is that it works like a family. If you know you come from a good family, it enables you to go out into the world, no matter what happens to you, and do O.K. It is the same thing with culture: If you know you come from a great people, it gives you that same feeling.”



The first exhibit of materials from the Library was organized just this year, in conjunction with the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. Central Avenue and Beyond: The Harlem Renaissance in Los Angeles opened in October and will continue at the Huntington through February 8, 2010. Director of Literary Manuscripts at the Huntington Library, Sue Hodson, co-curated the exhibit with Avery Clayton. She noted that selecting materials for the show was "a great time of discovery" for Clayton because most had been collected while he was a child. "He had such a dream and a vision and a passion for what he was doing," she recalled.

The Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum

Avery Clayton's original dream was that his mother would see a library named for her, holding her amazing collection, "in her lifetime." That did not come to pass. Now Mr. Clayton's death means that though he accomplished the minor miracle of finding a home for the Mayme A. Clayton Library, he will never see public benefit from his unfailing devotion to her legacy.


The Clayton Library includes an outstanding collection of signed first editions by authors of the Harlem Renaissance movement. One of those writers, poet Langston Hughes, wrote of the dire consequences of unfulfilled dreams in his most famous work:

A Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Information about becoming a member of Western States Black Research and Educational Center, the non-profit organization that supports the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, is available at the Library's website.

Posted by Nancy Mattoon