I remember reading early on in my book collecting journey, with a sad heart, about the different calamities through history that have befallen collections of books. The loss of the Library of Alexandria, the burning of Baghdad, or of the great library of Cordoba, the stories of molten lead and burning stone falling into the book-filled crypts of St Paul's during London's Great Fire, or the twice-lost university library at Leuven.

Among this list of terrible events was the destruction of books, manuscripts, and other documents during the French revolution, where an untold amount of history was burned or otherwise destroyed.

As I'm sure collectors do, I'd reflect on these events whenever I came across evidence of them - I'd see a fire damaged incunabula at auction, or spot a world war two 'souvenir' book at an antiques fair with a bullet hole in it (no evidence that it wasn't done last week by a bloke in a field).

However, I also spotted a trend (though somewhat uncommon) with defaced French bindings, specifically bindings that bore the royal coat of arms. This does occur on a range of different coats of arms on bookbindings, for example this binding probably had the coat of arms on the binding defaced after a change of owners. Or this British binding with the royal coat of arms was defaced to update the coat of arms after a new monarch took to the throne.

But these are very rare occurrences, however with French royal bindings I've seen the coat of arms defaced at least half a dozen times. Could there be something deeper behind the reason this happened?

Very occasionally, you will see the royal coats of arms on French bindings struck out with pen, cut with a knife, or even scraped off with a sharp tool. On one binding from a particular 18th century French college (Le College Royal de Vire), where the college coat of arms were paired with the royal coat of arms, the royal coat of arms alone has been defaced.

This college held the title of "royal college" until it was destroyed during the second world war, so why at some point in the book's history did the royal side of the coat of arms have to be removed? Surely the only reason could be during the French revolution, when perhaps a student at the college with revolutionary preferences took the book and carefully scratched off the offending heraldry.

The most telling book I have seen is fortuitously a book in my own collection, which I bought in eBay quite a few years ago. It was because of its damaged state and because it was an uninteresting book of legal ordinances passed under the reign of one of the many Louis that meant it sold very cheaply - surprising considering the exciting fingerprints of history that were traced in ink across the pages. It's in a regular speckled calf binding with a gilt spine, but inside of it every single reference to the king had been erased.

The title of the book had been edited to read:

A number of other references to the king had been erased on the title page, as well as the printed royal coat of arms. And this carries onto the first page of the prologue. This is a particularly striking example of censoring royalty, and most undoubtably be the work of the French revolution.

With these few examples I hope I've been able to illustrate somewhat, these signs of revolutionary fever that can even be traced in bookbindings and old books themselves. Of course - many, many royal French bindings survive without and damage, showing that these are rare and extreme examples of what was done to books during the French revolution. But you can imagine, for example, if you were a proponent of revolutionary ideas or someone under suspicion of supporting the counter-revolution, how you would not want to have any symbolism of royalty in your house - and why you might go to such extreme lengths to remove any royal imagery from your books.