Gold tooling on leather: the binding tools of Sarah Prideaux
Gold tooling is one of those leather techniques I find hard to look away from: you heat the metal face of a small brass tool, lay gold leaf over the leather, and press a pattern into the surface. A recent post from the V&A's National Art Library blog looks at exactly that craft, through the tools rather than the finished books.
The cataloguer writes that she has recorded 171 binding tools so far, mostly belonging to three binders: Sarah Prideaux, Charles Ricketts and Sybil Pye. Thirty-five of them were Prideaux's own, signed and donated by her to the library between 1911 and 1917. All of them were used for gold tooling, so they are a rare chance to see the stamps that made the impressions we usually only see on the covers.
Prideaux's story is the part that stayed with me. Born in London in 1853, she taught English until 1888 and then turned professional as a bookbinder. Her first bindings were reviewed unkindly in 1891 as "quaint but not pretty", yet she went on to make well over 300 of them. She was careful about materials, choosing only the finest leathers and marbled endpapers, and in the late 1800s she designed large tools inspired by Turkish and Syrian tiles in the V&A collection. One of them appears on her 1902 binding of the Vale Press Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
The post also mentions that she employed a skilled finisher, Lucien Broca, from the mid-1890s to 1900, and did not credit him, which was common at the time. She called herself the first woman to make a career in bookbinding and to teach it.
For anyone who works with leather, it is a nice reminder that a stamp, a bit of heat and a steady hand can carry a whole design. I would love to see more of these tools photographed next to the impressions they left.
Source: V&A Blog
The cataloguer writes that she has recorded 171 binding tools so far, mostly belonging to three binders: Sarah Prideaux, Charles Ricketts and Sybil Pye. Thirty-five of them were Prideaux's own, signed and donated by her to the library between 1911 and 1917. All of them were used for gold tooling, so they are a rare chance to see the stamps that made the impressions we usually only see on the covers.
Prideaux's story is the part that stayed with me. Born in London in 1853, she taught English until 1888 and then turned professional as a bookbinder. Her first bindings were reviewed unkindly in 1891 as "quaint but not pretty", yet she went on to make well over 300 of them. She was careful about materials, choosing only the finest leathers and marbled endpapers, and in the late 1800s she designed large tools inspired by Turkish and Syrian tiles in the V&A collection. One of them appears on her 1902 binding of the Vale Press Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
The post also mentions that she employed a skilled finisher, Lucien Broca, from the mid-1890s to 1900, and did not credit him, which was common at the time. She called herself the first woman to make a career in bookbinding and to teach it.
For anyone who works with leather, it is a nice reminder that a stamp, a bit of heat and a steady hand can carry a whole design. I would love to see more of these tools photographed next to the impressions they left.
Source: V&A Blog
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