Pierre Galland

The Mahieu Aesop Binder workshop gets its name from the binding on a 1501 edition of Aesop’s Fables made for Thomas Mahieu (act. Ca. 1547–ca. 1580), a collector akin to Grolier in his taste and technique. Mahieu was also a treasurer of France, and he used a similar motto on his bindings. This workshop produced at least fifteen bindings for him, four for Grolier, and nineteen for Claude III de Laubespine. The binding displayed here covers a collection of early Roman treatises on land surveying, edited by the rhetorician Pierre Galland and the printer Adrien Turnèbe. In his introduction, Galland says that he and Turnèbe ransacked monasteries for classical texts just as well-trained dogs track down wild beasts in thickets.

Pierre Galland (1510−1559)
De agrorum conditionibus & constitutionibus limitum (The Writings of the Roman Land Surveyors)
Paris: Adrien Turnèbe, 1554
T. Kimball Brooker
Photography by Pixel Acuity