A book binding for Tulips and Tulipomania by Jean Gunner

One of the many remarkable bindings in the KB collection is that by Jean Gunner for a copy of Tulips and Tulipomania. The tulips, executed in various colors of leather, adorn Wilfrid Blunt's standard work on the seventeenth-century tulip mania.

Travelers visiting Turkey in the mid-sixteenth century were struck by a peculiar kind of plant: the tulip. The bulb was soon exported to Western Europe and also ended up in the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, where people focused on cultivating special varieties. Initially, a trade in bulbs arose between growers and the wealthy, but gradually a true ‘tulipomania’ developed, involving lively speculation on the potential increase in value of certain tulip bulbs: bulbs, that is, from which the flower had yet to grow.

This edition of Tulips and Tulipomania contains, in addition to the historical chapters, an overview of English tulips with specially commissioned paintings of them by the Scottish artist Rory McEwen (1932-1982). He initially worked as a painter and as a singer/guitarist, but from 1962 onwards he devoted himself exclusively to the visual arts. The collaboration with Blunt did not come out of the blue: he was McEwen's teacher at Eton. For the book, McEwen painted sixteen varieties of tulips. He constructed the image by painting an infinite number of small, parallel lines in watercolor side by side on sheets of parchment. The tulips appear three times larger on these depictions than in reality, so that they can subsequently be reproduced (in reduced size) in lithography for the book.

Commissioned by the KB, a copy of this edition was bound in full leather by bookbinder Jean Gunner (*1947). This British bookbinder was trained between 1962 and 1967 but emigrated to the United States in 1969 to take lessons from bookbinder Carolyn Horton. From 1972 to 1986, she was affiliated with the Hunt Botanical Library at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) as a bookbinder and conservator. She also taught evening courses there for bookbinders and conservators.

The binding was described by the then KB curator Jan Storm van Leeuwen. He wrote that at first glance it seems as though Gunner's design directly aligned with McEwen's watercolors, but there are major differences: “The details in her tulips are not created by lines, but by planes of differently colored leather. Unlike the painter, she presents groupings of tulips, which are still closed on the back cover and already past their peak on the front cover, as a direct reference to vanity.” The dark grey-blue goatskin binding is overlaid with many shades of red, brown, yellow, and green leather, with a title label in green and red on the spine. The binding is signed on the inside of the back cover with a blind stamp: ‘J. GUNNER 1982’. The obverse is gilded.

The documentation regarding the binding contains sketches by the bookbinder on tracing paper and a painted sketch showing the colors for the binding. A sheet with samples of the many different leather colors has also been preserved.