D.L. Clement

This short film shows the D.L. Clement eftf. bindery in 1916. Daniel Louis Clement was born in 1820 and started the bindery in 1844 as a university bindery.  He passed away in 1877. The bindery was then taken over by Immanuel Petersen, who owned it until Henry Andersen took it over in 1923 from Petersen’s widow.  It continued to exist, and merged with the Forlagsbogbinderiet in 2005. I’m not sure of its status today.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in this film is how many people were working there, and the quantity of work produced. 

What has been hard to convey at times is that, just because someone signed a book it doesn't mean necessarily that they actually did the work. Axel Knudsen studied and worked with Sandgren, Harry Larsen was at Kyster’s bindery with Park, Ole Olsen was at the Jacob Baden eftf. before going out on his own. Which is to say that, even though the owner of the bindery signed the book, it doesn’t mean that the person who might have bound the book, or the group of people who were involved, wasn’t equally as talented as the name stamped on the binding.

However, it is worth saying that most of the Danish paper bindings were “privatbind”, or private bindings, which were individually bound and what we see in this video is clearly production work on a much larger scale. But I’d imagine that the folks in this film also did parts of that work as well.

By the way, “eftf.” means the person whose name is on the bindery (and the book) had passed on and the bindery continued under their name.

This film is from the Danish Film Institute and Danmark På Film (www.danmarkpaafilm.dk)