You Can Tell These Books by Their Covers : Bindings: Collector snapped up the best of the binders’ art for 12 years. Now he plans to sell 150 of the jeweled and leather works at an auction.

Paul Chevalier loved to collect jeweled leather book bindings as long as he could buy the very best. For 12 years he did exactly that until he assembled America’s finest private collection of British, American and European bindings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He snapped up rare examples of impeccable craftsmanship from London’s top binderies: Sangorski and Sutcliffe, Riviere and Zaehnsdorf. Unique bindings of John Keats’ “Some Poems,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and two volumes of William Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet”--all produced around 1915 as illuminated manuscripts--found their way to the library of Chevalier’s English Tudor-style house in the Los Feliz area. So did one of 25 copies of a Bible printed in 1953 for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

But Chevalier, a senior vice president at Carter Hawley Hale, was so successful at collecting that he eventually ran out of things to buy. “The fun was the chase and learning about the field, but about a year ago the market ran out. Now it’s time for other people to have an opportunity to collect this material,” he said.

Potential collectors’ first big opportunity will be Nov. 9, when Christie’s New York plans to auction about 150 rare and precious bindings from Chevalier’s collection. The sale is expected to bring a total of $755,000 to $1 million.

The Keats binding--with floral patterns and the author’s monogram executed in tiny stones and inlays of colored leather--is expected to bring the sale’s top price of $125,000 to $175,000. The astonishingly complex work, which is considered the masterpiece of Sangorski and Sutcliffe, contains about 4,400 pieces of leather and more than 1,000 jewels.

The Coleridge volume--depicting a red-sailed galleon on the high seas with an albatross soaring in the sky--is estimated at $60,000 to $90,000. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Selections,” an illuminated manuscript with a jeweled leather binding, also is expected to sell for $60,000 to $90,000.

The two jeweled Shakespeare bindings, to be sold together, are valued at a total of $45,000 to $75,000. Two other top-priced items, each estimated at $30,000 to $40,000, are set with miniature portraits on ivory. W.H. Worthington’s “Portraits of the Sovereigns of England” has 39 portrait miniatures, while a two-volume binding of Julia Frankau’s “William Ward A.R.A., James Ward A.R.A.” is set with 25 ivories.

The art market, which has sent auction prices to astronomical heights during the last few years, appears to have calmed, but Chevalier is not concerned about selling at a disadvantageous time. His collection contains items that come on the market so rarely that he believes collectors will jump at the opportunity to buy.

The market for fine bindings has risen steadily in recent years, with top pieces bringing six figures, “but it has to be a very unusual binding to do that,” said Stephen Massey, head of Christie’s books and manuscripts department.

The record for an English binding is $418,000, paid for a Bible that was produced in 1680 at the Queens’ Binder B in Oxford. The Bible was sold in 1988 at Christie’s $37.8-million series of auctions from the Edward Laurence Doheny Memorial Library of St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, Calif. Most of the prime pieces in the Chevalier collection were once in the Phoebe A.D. Boyle library, which was sold in 1923 at a legendary auction in New York.

Chevalier said he became interested in collecting while frequenting an antiquarian bookshop on business trips to New York. He subsequently visited the great binderies in Britain and became a scholar in the field. Jewels were set in metal bindings for bibles in the Middle Ages, but Sangorski and Sutcliffe (a company formed in 1901 by Frances Sangorski and George Sutcliffe) was the first firm to make jeweled leather bindings, he said. The stones--including garnets, pearls, turquoise and amethysts--are set in gold within designs of inlaid colored leather that are often detailed with gilt.

Sothgran’s, a prestigious London bookseller, took an interest in Sangorski and Sutcliffe’s innovative work around 1907 and began to commission bindings. Business boomed during the Arts and Crafts period; by 1910 there were more than 10,000 binderies in England, Chevalier said. Jeweled bindings are rare, however, because of the time and expense required to produce them. Sangorski and Sutcliffe did its best work between 1912 and 1914, but World War I nearly put an end to the craft, he said. Since then, many examples have been destroyed or damaged.