Poems by Lawrence Binyon (Oxford: Daniel Press, 1895)

and

Odes, Sonnets and Lyrics of John Keats (Oxford: Daniel Press, 1895)

The two books chosen as this month’s treasures immediately catch the eye with their delicate bindings, one (the Keats) in ‘cardinal’ red, the other (poems by Laurence Binyon) in a more muted maroon, but both with similar floral designs executed in gold tooling on high-quality morocco (i.e. goat-skin) leather. The style suggests the work of Katharine Adams (1862-1952), one of the ‘most famous women binders of the period [1880-1920]’ (Tidcombe, Women bookbinders, page 6), and this attribution is confirmed by the presence of Adams’ signature mark on the bottom turn-in of the lower cover, the letters KA separated by a Catherine wheel together with the date of the binding, 1899:

Bindings by Katharine Adams are highly acclaimed: in her lifetime she exhibited not just in England, but also in Belgium, France and Germany, and even the USA and South Africa (ODNB), and since her death her work has become highly collectable – she is thought to have produced only 300 or so bindings (Tidcombe, Women bookbinders, page 137). Adams, who as a child played with William Morris’s daughters at her home in Little Faringdon, Oxfordshire, began binding in the 1890s. She had only a short training period of four months in 1897, before winning first prize in bookbinding at the Oxford Arts & Crafts exhibition of 1898. These two bindings at Worcester, dating to 1899, must therefore be among her earliest works. She used tools of her own making (now held at the British Library) to decorate her bindings with simple natural designs of flowers, stylized trees and animals, and is considered ‘one of the few binders of any period who was effective in using gold for pictorial designs on leather’ (Lewis, Fine bookbinding, page 35). In a letter of 7 November 1916, Katharine Adams explained her technique: “The effect of light on the gold can be varied by the angle at which the tool is used.”

Although we have begun by judging these books by their covers, in this instance the covers are admirably suited to their contents. For just as Katharine Adams followed the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement in her production of high quality work using the soundest techniques, so too was the printer of these books, Charles Henry Olive Daniel, ‘sympathetic to the aesthetic and cultural movements of his day’ (Peterson and Peterson, The Daniel Press…, page 13). C.H.O Daniel (1836-1919), Fellow of Worcester College from 1863 and Provost from 1903, used a printing press set up in a cottage at the end of his garden within the curtilage of Worcester College to produce charming books of delicate simplicity. In 1890 eight Daniel Press books were exhibited at the third exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society.

Within the bindings we find two publications of 1895: 26 poems by Laurence Binyon (1869-1943, poet and art historian; the book is listed as no. 35 in Madan’s bibliography of the Daniel Press), and 25 poems of Keats selected by the poet Robert Bridges (no. 36 in Madan). The print runs were limited to 200 and 250 copies respectively, both printed in small type on hand-made French paper.

With their delicate type and small flower ornaments, there is a distinctly similar sensibility between the texts and their Katharine Adams bindings.

The two titles bound by Adams represent well the type of work produced by the Daniel Press in the 1890s, described by Peterson and Peterson in their recent book:

‘best-selling titles were usually by Bridges [i.e. Robert Bridges, who would become Poet Laureate in 1913], but they were interspersed with books of more modest pretensions by other friends and contemporaries such as Margaret Woods, F.W. Bourdillon, T.H. Warren, and Walter Pater – and then of course, there were always the reprints of older writers (e.g. Keats, Milton, Anthony Wood).’ (Peterson and Peterson, page 20)

Such names (Bridges, the future Poet Laureate; Margaret Woods, poet and novelist; F.W. Bourdillon, poet; T.H. Warren, classical scholar and President of Magdalen) reflect late 19^th-century Oxford poetry and scholarship, an ‘Oxford modernism’ (reflected in Yeats’ Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936)) in contrast to the modernism of Eliot and Pound. (Harding among others contrasts Yeats’ Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) with that same year’s Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts: the former ‘devoted more space to Dorothy Wellesley and Laurence Binyon than to Eliot and Pound’ (Harding, ‘Modernist poetry and the canon’, page 235).)

Such society could come together at the Daniels’ home in Worcester College, Worcester House. Now no longer standing, Worcester House occupied a spot in the southeast corner of the Nuffield Lawn, where Worcester Street and Hythe Bridge Street meet. It was in this building that the two Katharine Adams bindings were first exhibited in 1901 – the catalogue survives in Worcester College Library: ‘Bookbindings by Katharine Adams at Worcester House, Oxford, on March 8^th and 9^th 1901’.

Among 53 Daniel Press Publications, one can find listed as numbers 34 and 35 the very bindings of Binyon and Keats with which this piece started. Both were lent by Mrs Daniel, eventually becoming part of the Library’s collections in the early 1960s, when the College’s Record for 1961-4 reports the ‘most important gift of books and manuscripts… from Mrs Kirkman, the granddaughter of Provost Daniel’.

Mark Bainbridge, Librarian

Bibliography

• Griffiths, J., ‘Adams, Katharine (1862-1952)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/38543
• Harding, ‘Modernist poetry and the canon’, in A. Davis and L.M. Jenkins (eds), The Cambridge companion to modernist poetry (Cambridge, 2007), pages 225-243
• Lewis, R., Fine bookbinding in the twentieth century (Newton Abbot, 1984)
• Madan, F., The Daniel Press: memorials of C.H.O. Daniel (Folkestone, 1974)
• Peterson, W.S. and S.H. Peterson, The Daniel Press and the Garland of Rachel (New Castle, DE, 2016)
• Tidcombe, M., Women bookbinders 1880-1920 (New Castle, DE, and London, 1996)