In 1934 the Melbourne Public Library (now the State Library of Victoria) acquired, with funds from the Felton Bequest, a Book of Hours published and printed in 1531 by the well-known Parisian humanist, Geofroy Tory.1 The small prayer book, purchased for what was then the considerable sum of £850, came from the library of London book dealer and collector E.P. Goldschmidt,2 who described it as ‘a famous copy of the finest of Tory's Hours’ (Goldschmidt 1934: 45).

Tory published five principal editions of Books of Hours in the 1520s and 1530s. In design and illustration they were a radical departure from the medieval conventions of contemporary Parisian printed Books of Hours, and with the Champ fleury, his famous treatise on typography, have made Tory a celebrated figure in the history of the French book.

The State Library copy of the 1531 Hours is one of about 17 extant from the 1531 edition.3 In addition to representing an important edition, it is of great significance because of its rare original sixteenth-century binding. The black calf is blind-tooled front and back with the distinctive classically-influenced pot cassé or broken jar design associated with Tory, and is one of only six examples of this size extant. This binding is an early example of binding in the Renaissance style and one of the first French bindings that can be identified with an individual publisher or binder.

The high price paid by the library in 1934 for the Tory Hours acknowledged the importance of both the edition and binding. In 1937 the Senior Assistant Librarian, A.B. Foxcroft, was prompted to publish a small booklet on the recent acquisition.4 However, despite its former celebrity, this precious copy of the Tory Hours is not well known to scholars today. Last recorded in a 1973 publication on bindings, the book was not included in at least two recent catalogue listings of Tory's 1531 edition.5

Geofroy Tory was an editor, writer, bookseller, publisher, printer and, as some have claimed, calligrapher, designer and bookbinder.6 Most of what we know about his life derives from the Champ fleury, and the prefaces and dedications in his other books. Tory was born around 1480 in Bourges and died around 1533. As a young man he spent about two years in Italy, studied in Bologna, and returned to Paris about 1505. His literary career began in January 1508 with the publication of his edition of Pomponius Mela for the bookseller Jean Petit. This was followed by a succession of classical editions. He married in 1511 and his daughter Agnes was born 26 August 1512. He again went to Italy, probably for some time, as he records having seen the Coliseum ‘mille fois’. He returned around 1521. The following year his beloved daughter died just short of her tenth birthday, and Tory recorded the sad event in a memorial verse and prose text in Latin, printed by Simon de Colines and published by Tory in 1523. In this publication we see his first use of the pot cassé or broken jar pierced by a lance or toret (a pun on Tory's name) that appears on the title page of the 1531 Book of Hours [Fig. 1]. This and the motto non plus, which is recorded in his publications, were perhaps symbols of his daughter's tragically shortened life. In 1523 he rented a shop as a libraire or publisher in the rue St Jacques in Paris and by 1524 the pot cassé also became his shop sign. In 1529 his patriotic exposition on the development of the French letter, the Champ fleury, was printed by Simon de Colines. From 1529 Tory also operated as a printer and in 1531 was awarded by François I the title imprimeur du roi. In 1533 he was also admitted libraire-juré, or publisher sworn in by the authority of the University of Paris. He probably died the same year, and after his death his wife Perette Hulin married the publisher Olivier Mallard, who carried on Tory's business.

Tory's principal editions of Books of Hours, printed on paper and all illustrated with full pictorial cycles in four different woodcut sets, date from 1524/5 to 1531.7 The first edition appeared in three versions in 1524 and 1525. Informed by Tory's visits to Italy and by Italian humanism, this first edition was dramatically different in design from traditional Parisian printed Hours. The set of woodcut illustrations and borders is in a crisp linear style with a minimum of shading and an emphasis on white background. The style is quite at odds with the characteristically dense, gothic style of early sixteenth-century printed Parisian Hours.

Often printed on vellum, hand decorated and frequently heavily illuminated, contemporary Hours were closely modelled on illuminated manuscripts of the late Middle Ages.8 The new technology of print, which was first used in Paris in 1470, allowed for the production of hundreds of editions of Books of Hours during the first few decades of the sixteenth century. However, there were few innovations in the appearance of these books, and printing seemed to be used mainly as a means of expediting the production process.

Tory's Hours, on the other hand, fully exploited the artistic potential of the printing medium. For the first time in printed French Hours, the design, layout and illustration and even the binding were conceived as a harmonious whole. Medieval conventions of page layout and illustration were eschewed in favour of an integrated, spare design that acknowledged the classical influence and innovations of the Italian Renaissance. The printed book was established as an art form in itself.

The 1531 edition, of which the State Library copy is an example, was the last Book of Hours published by Tory, and was also printed by him. Of the 17 woodcuts used to illustrate this edition, 13 were borrowed from Tory's revolutionary 1524/5 first edition.

Illustrations such as the ‘Triumph of Death’ [Fig. 2], illustrating the Hours of the Dead, and the ‘Adoration of the Magi’ [Fig. 3], illustrating sext in the Hours of the Virgin, both first used in the previous edition, show the spare, elegant manner based on classical architectural motifs and figure proportions. The ‘Triumph of Death’ also includes Tory's mottos non plus and sic ut, used liberally in the illustrations and borders of his books. Of the four other woodcut illustrations not drawn from the 1524/5 edition, two plates, both representing the Annunciation, were new to this edition (f.H8 and f.L6) and two others, the small ‘Trinity’ (f.R7) and ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ (f.V3) derive from Tory's fourth Hours published in 1529. While the borders of the text pages in the 1531 Hours are also from the first edition, the classical borders of the illustration pages are new.

Unlike the heavily painted metalcuts and woodcuts of many contemporary Hours, the woodcuts of the State Library book are uncoloured. While this might appeal to a modern aesthetic sensibility, in the sixteenth century the taste was often for colour. There are numerous examples of coloured illustrations in editions of Tory's Hours, but they are rather delicate washes that enhance rather than obscure the graceful lines of the woodcuts.9

It seems that Tory was well aware of the revolutionary design of his Books of Hours, as he was granted from King François I two exceptional privileges, the first dated 23 September 1524 at Avignon and the second 5 September 1526 at Chenonceaux.10 These privileges gave Tory exclusive publishing rights to his editions, in particular the publication of ‘certain pictures and vignettes’, ‘friezes, borders, crowns and scrolls’. The first was for six years, and first appears in the 1524/5 Hours. The second, which appears in the 1527 Hours printed by Colines, extended these rights by 10 years, and included the previous edition of Hours as well as the Champ fleury of 1529. This protection of original designs was unprecedented in Books of Hours. Extracts from these two privileges are also printed on the recto of the last leaf in Tory's 1531 Hours.

It was claimed by Tory's nineteenth-century biographer Bernard that Tory was personally responsible for the design and even the cutting of the woodcuts in his Hours. This belief was based in part on the wording of the first privilege which tells us that Tory ‘had made and caused to be made’ certain illustrations and vignettes ‘à l'antique’ (or classical style), and likewise some ‘à la moderne’ (referring to the more traditional floral borders), in order to have the same printed and to serve ‘diverse books of hours’. However, the four woodcut sets used in the Hours are in quite disparate styles and Tory's authorship has sensibly been disputed by Myra Orth (1976 and 1980) and most recently by Tenschert and Nettekoven (2003:1085ff.) who, like Orth, attribute the design to the manuscript illuminators of the 1520s Hours Workshop.

Stylistically, the woodcuts have a debt to the graceful native French tradition of manuscript artists such as Bourdichon, but also clearly to Italian woodcuts such as those illustrating the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499 and known in France soon after. It is highly improbable that as publisher and printer Tory also extended himself to woodcut design and manufacture, and, as Orth suggests, he was more likely the entrepreneur who managed the production of the entire book.

The State Library copy of the 1531 Hours, which follows the use of Rome, is a complete, well-preserved small quarto gathered in 8s, with Tory's device of the pot cassé on the title page and on the verso of the last leaf. This copy needs to be added to the other 16 exemplars from the edition.11

However, while the copy is complete in that it has the full 20 gatherings, one added plate is missing. Two other copies, Bibermühle 133 and that at the Bibliothèque municipale de Versailles, Rés in-4 93B, include a folded oblong plate representing the Triumph of the Virgin, bound before gathering E, just before the Hours of the Virgin. In the woodcut the Virgin is shown in a chariot drawn by Faith, Hope and Charity with the nine Muses and seven Liberal Arts, all in classical dress. Printed below the scene are explanatory verses in French. The style of the illustration is different from the other woodcut images in the book. The Versailles plate is complete [Fig. 4]; that in Bibermühle 133 is damaged and only a section remains. The plate was designed to be folded out, which has probably contributed to its disappearance in other copies. It also appears in some copies of the 1542 Hours printed after Tory's death by his successor Olivier Mallard.12

There are indications that the ‘Triumph of the Virgin’ page may once have been bound into the State Library copy as well. Leaf E1 has been repaired and is mounted on a slightly frayed leaf with vertical chainlines. The later arabic manuscript foliation in the upper right corners is irregular: D8 is foliated as 32, E1 is foliated 33 (under the mount) and E2 is foliated as 33bis. E1 recto may have been printed blank to back the fold-out plate which may have been originally intended for all copies of the 1531 edition.

The iconography of the ‘Triumph of the Virgin’ is not usually found in French Hours of the period, and Tory was probably influenced by similar Triumph scenes in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. With the exception of this inserted plate, the iconography of the woodcuts in the 1531 Hours is consistent with other early sixteenth-century printed Books of Hours. While the design, style and often composition of illustration in the book is startlingly original for a Book of Hours, the contents are not. As in any Book of Hours the core text is the Hours of the Virgin, comprising eight divisions or Hours. These texts are illustrated with traditional subjects, such as the ‘Annunciation’ for the Hour of Matins [Fig. 5], the ‘Visitation’ for Laudes, the ‘Flight into Egypt’ for Vespers. Terce is somewhat unusual, being illustrated with the ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ rather than the more common ‘Annunciation to the Shepherds’. A Book of Hours was essentially a prayer book used for recitation and contemplation, and the conventional contents and iconography of the images in this book suggest that the owners used it in a traditional way for mainly devotional purposes.

The inclusion of handwritten annotations, prayers, notes and poetry in French are all evidence that the book was used. A sixteenth-century owner, Guillaume Dannes, has recorded his name on the first and last page, describing himself as ‘bourgeois, marchand de Paris’. Bourgeois ownership of a Book of Hours is consistent with studies on book ownership in the sixteenth century.13 However, in some respects, this book was not a standard Book of Hours. The sparseness and clarity of the design may not have appealed to an audience accustomed to the appearance of other French Hours with their crowded, dense illustration and — as Roger Wieck aptly put it — horror vacui, or fear of empty spaces (1997:75). Tory was well connected and positioned, in touch with French humanist circles at Blois under François I and Louise de Savoie, and his clientele probably included like minds sympathetic to his intellectual concerns. Another copy of the 1531 Hours, Bibermühle 134, was owned by Tory's contemporary Gilles Corrozet, scholar, author, poet and bookseller. The early owner of the State Library Hours, Guillaume Dannes, may have shared these humanist sympathies, if we can judge from the inclusion of a poem, possibly by Corrozet, on the inside back cover. Below the poem another hand has written: “vers moraulx, Gilles Corrozet fo 45, Galiot Corrozet”.

As already mentioned, the State Library 1531 Hours is especially precious because it is still in its original black calf binding.14 [Fig. 6] This particular binding style, blind-tooled with Tory's distinctive elegant pot cassé design, is recognised as one of the most significant French bindings of the sixteenth century, ‘a supreme masterpiece of Renaissance book decoration’ (Goldschmidt 1927:60).

The pot cassé binding design was made for two sizes: one to bind a book in quarto, like the 1531 Hours, the other for a smaller octavo. The two designs are similar but the octavo design does not include the toret or lance piercing the broken vase. Bindings of both sizes are exceptionally rare: only six of the large and seven of the small can be identified.15 This list modifies the most recent study of Tory's bindings in 1971 by Nixon, who listed six of the large and five of the small.16 To his list of smaller plaques must be added the Doheny 1527 Hours17 and the BNF's octavo Hardouyn Hours of c.1527 (rés-vélins 1531), which Nixon mistakenly believed to be an example of the larger plaque.

To Nixon's list of large plaques can be added an empty cover at BNF (rés. V. 1948) which may or may not have been produced in Tory's lifetime. Tory's successor, Olivier Mallard, continued to use Tory's binding design as well as his materials. For example, the quarto 1535 Diodorus, now at the Musée Condé (cote VIII G22), published by Mallard, is bound in a pot cassé binding.

Like the State Library book's woodcut illustrations, the binding shows the influence of the Italian Renaissance. Medieval French bindings were generally blind tooled with figurative designs such as saints appearing on the leather in plastic relief. Tory's pot cassé design is different in that it uses an ornamental, classical language, with flowing vine arabesques seemingly impressed into the leather. This particular example is blind tooled, but most other pot cassé bindings are gold tooled, again influenced by developments in Italy. The presence of the pot cassé links the design to Tory and this is also highly unusual. The names of 21 binders are known from the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century, but none can be linked to actual bindings.18 While Bernard claimed that Tory designed the binding and was even a binder, there is no evidence to support this, and it is more likely that he managed the binding of his books, like the illustration, to order for his select clients. Several pot cassé bindings, like the State Library Hours, are on Tory imprints, and it is possible that Tory arranged for his books to be bound through his own bindery. However, it was generally the purchaser rather than the publisher or printer who had a book bound, and Tory's role in these bindings needs further investigation, particularly in relation to patronage.

Described as ‘both a revolution and a triumph of the French Renaissance book’ (Wieck, 1997: 59), the importance of Tory's Books of Hours should not be underestimated. The precious little book in the State Library of Victoria is a rare example and certainly warrants further scholarly attention.