Romilly Saumarez Smith: Bookbindings for Eileen Hogan
n at i o n a l a r t l i b r a ry l a n d i n g v i c to r i a a n d a l b e r t m u s e u m 2 May – 2 August 2009
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INTRODUCTION For some years, due to the problems of storing large and sometimes unusually shaped books, my collection of bindings by Romilly Saumarez Smith was hidden in boxes. In 2008, in an attempt to include on my new website all the books I had made or been involved in publishing, I pulled them out of their boxes and discovered a treasure trove of colour, tone, texture, muted pattern, and craftsmanship. These books form the core of Romilly Saumarez Smith: Bookbindings for Eileen Hogan The first time I encountered a binding by Romilly was in 1984. The book was The Seven Deadly Sins of London by Thomas Dekker published originally in 1607 and reprinted by Cambridge University Press. Romilly’s response to the text seemed to focus on its mood and rhythm, and the binding’s effect was achieved by giving its structure a visible rather than a purely protective or decorative role. Four years later, when I wanted to commission a one-off binding for Selected Poems by C P Cavafy, the first book that I produced with my own images for The Camberwell Press (I had established the press at Camberwell College of Art and Crafts in 1984 and was its Director until 1997), I asked Romilly to do it. My experience of binding had been shaped by classes with the book conservator Chris Clarkson when I was a student at Camberwell, in the days when students had to take a subsidiary subject and I, unusually in the Painting School, chose lettering and started making books. Chris was one of the team who rescued the holdings of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale following the Florence Flood in 1966, and in examining the structures of the water-damaged books developed “new’’ limp vellum bindings. The simplicity of these non-adhesive structures, which emphasise the sewing and the end-bands, 3
influenced my taste and understanding. In Romilly’s approach the physical nature of the binding is usually evident, as was to be the case in her solution for Selected Poems by C P Cavafy, a characteristic which, for me, is part of her strength. Someone– I can’t remember who -–said that Romilly’s contribution made them think of Cavafy’s shoes; I am not sure that his shoes would have been as colourful, but without doubt the binding reflected Cavafy’s unique tone of voice. Subsequently, I asked Romilly to bind the books that I had already made during my years as a student at the Royal College of Art for the Lion and Unicorn Press and for The Burnt Wood Press (my press between the RCA and Camberwell). My Lion and Unicorn Press books were either one-offs or very small editions that used letterforms I had designed and cut in lino, sometimes printing the letters singly with images integrated within the texts. Romilly found structures and materials which reflected the nuances of the texts and imagery, often marrying subtlety with unexpected colours and patterns in the endpapers. In 1986 she designed and bound, in an edition of 200, The Camberwell Press’s Anaskaphes: A celebration of the Centenary of the British School at Athens (1986), which encompassed thirteen of my images alongside twenty-two specially commissioned articles from members of the British School. This display includes two bindings linked to the late Charlene Garry, the much-loved founder and proprietor of The Basilisk Press and The Basilisk Bookshop. The first was commissioned by Charlene for Basilisk Press’s last and most ambitious book, The Rhinoceros: A Monograph conceived by Francesco Nardelli, with twenty illustrations by Matthew Hillier, and the second, Charlene Garry: A Celebration, was published by The Camberwell Press to commemorate Charlene’s life and achievement. Eileen Hogan 4
BIOGRAPHIES Romilly Saumarez Smith studied binding and paper conservation at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts and went on to become the first female forwarder and union member at London’s Zaehnsdorf Bindery. By 1984 she had been elected a Fellow of Designer Bookbinders and was teaching at the London College of Printing and at Guildford College of Art and Technology. Her public commissions have included bindings for the Victoria & Albert Museum and for annual exhibitions of the Booker Prizewinners. Her work can be found in the collections of the Contemporary Art Society, the Crafts Council, the British Library, Humanities Research Center, Texas, and the New York Public Library, and she has exhibited in Britain, America, France, and Germany. In the 1990s she began increasingly to use metal in her bindings, and gradually moved to making jewellery. Eileen Hogan is a painter and book artist. She established the Camberwell Press in 1984 and remained its director until 1997. Recent one-person exhibitions include Four Squares (The Fine Art Society London) and Eileen Hogan’s Poetry Box (San Francisco Center for the Book). Commissions include recording the Women’s Royal Naval Services for the Artistic Records Committee of the Imperial War Museum and stamp design for the Royal Mail. Her work can be found in the British Library; the Imperial War Museum London; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; National Library of Australia; Rijksmuseum-Meermanno Westreenianum; Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Yale Center for British Art. She is currently a Professor in Research at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London.
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HARMONY AND COUNTERPOINT Bookbinding is an art of collaboration and individualism. There is always the pre-existing content of the book itself, where hearts and minds have already dwelt on visual and verbal articulation, yet it is the binder whose imagination holds it all together. The book’s structure and covers form an introduction, integrating form and content into an eloquent whole. There is also the commissioner. A bespoke binding most often comes into being at the instigation of a patron. In this exhibition, it is the artist and educator Eileen Hogan who lit the spark in the 1980s when she wanted to have bound the publications she had brought into being as artist and publisher, described in her introduction. Romilly Saumarez Smith’s training in the 1970s, in bookbinding and paper conservation at Camberwell and subsequent experience as the first woman forwarder at trade binders Zaehndorf’s, gave her the grounding for the rigorous craftsmanship and sophisticated elegance and simplicity which are characteristic of her work. There is a rejection of the self-consciously artistic flamboyance inherent in the ‘fine binding’ tradition of, for example, twentieth-century France, in favour of an understated attention to structure, stitching and the surface textures of papers and painterly effects. Many of the bindings contain Eileen Hogan’s art, which is structural and layered, with an animated colour palette shaping the lines and volumes of nature, or of people, suffused by light. The intelligent thoughtfulness of her paintings and prints is grounded in close observation and an atmosphere of passionate restraint; heart bound by logic. These qualities are shared by Saumarez Smith, ever alert to the ways in which the structure and meaning of a book can be economically and evocatively expressed through its materials and colours. 6
The binder’s two versions of Cavafy’s poems might act as a summary of 1980s style, the decade in which most of the bindings in this exhibition were produced. There is the postmodern flourish of playful colour, pattern and wit, and alongside it a plangent monochrome binding, a limp tender form suggesting the metaphor of object as human experience. One is exuberant, referring to the Mediterranean of ancient myth, the other resonates with its source of inspiration: a medical textbook in the Wellcome Collection with its pragmatic staples, transmuted here into a pillow ticking cover handwashed with brown paint and simple steel wire stitches inside, holding the whole together with a fragile but determined grip on life. One thinks here of the minimalists’ concern for essence and for exposing truth. The weight, balance, colour, tones and discreet play of light (in the above instance a patina caught by the wax- rubbed cover and ‘worn’ surfaces) as the books are moved into motion by the reader’s hands, find their counterpart in clothes on a body. Saumarez Smith avers a delight in fashion and its preoccupation in the 1980s with rethinking every aspect of the construction and articulation of form and function. The rise of deconstruction as a design method, developed by architects altering perception of space, line and volume through visual conceits, such as Bernard Tschumi and Arata Isozaki, carried over into clothing, whereby a garment’s neckline, sleeves, hems, edges, fastenings, were subject to asymmetrical shifts of form, scale and emphasis on unexpected details. Saumarez Smith notes that the red false bands of Seven Deadly Sins, for example, are like postmodern architecture since they ‘comment on the structure without actually being the structure’. Several of the bindings have complex spines which appear detached or unhinged, or their sewing inside has exposed knotting, or there are several more endpapers than is necessary, creating again the 7
harmony and counterpoint fundamental to this binder’s creative approach. A binding clothes the book in the same way as a body is clothed – wrapping, protecting, enhancing and presenting. The endpapers of folded paper dipped in ink, an outstanding hallmark of Saumarez Smith’s work, move like the finest silk, organza or taffeta. The structuring and sensitive colour washes suggest affinities with clothing by Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, Martin Margiela or Dries van Noten, while the rich counterpoints of pattern in Antony and Cleopatra, the resist-patterned surface, striped inside edges and spotted spine in varied colours, alluding to the cacophony of text and image created by Ron King inside, are inspired by the sumptuous kaleidoscope clothes of Christian Lacroix. Colours and patterns, so carefully and brilliantly used in fashion, are central to the experience of Romilly’s bindings. The cover is often counterbalanced by different colours inside, nature’s contrasts, by sequences of delicate Japanese papers, by her own surprising ‘selfmade’ patterns, which sometimes play on the surface as insistent fanfares for the content inside: here velvety or petal-like wax resist dripped spots of colour spreading over the whole, there a black leather surface embossed with handmade tools, like a tattooed skin or heavy Tudor doublet. Contrasting colours can appear at first unnoticed at the edges , a lime green or orange, or a red thread dances dramatically across the handmade paper cover of Haiku to suggest the flow of the hand-drawn lettering inside. While a painterly approach suffuses her bindings, Romilly recalls simply that, ‘it never occurred to me to think of painting and canvas; I was simply a craftswoman”. Looking at and handling these books bound entirely by hand, the art of craft is self-evident. Like music the rhythms elucidate the themes. In the flow of binding with text and 8
image, there is the same articulation – by intervals, spaces, repeats and digressions – with echoes of traditions incorporated and re-interpreted. The intense visuality of the art of binding does not therefore preclude the significance of sound, smell and touch. On the contrary, the movement of the books and their pages in the hands, inactivity and mobility like a Zen Buddha, offer a continuous aural and sensory engagement, the experience heightened by questions of weight and scale, exteriority and interiority and an insight into narrative and the operation of time. They offer a phenomenological experience, of a handmade thing as a form of knowing about life, not portentously, but as a subtle invitation to find out something new. Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away Antoine de Saint Exupery Martina Margetts, March 2009
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T H E C A M B E RW E L L P R E S S
A Selection of Poems by C P Cavafy Nine poems in Greek, their English translations by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, eight images by Eileen Hogan with short accounts of the poet by E M Forster and W H Auden. Published in 1985 in an edition of 70 with two unique bindings by Saumarez Smith commissioned in 1988. 296 x 178 mm. 40 pages.
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The cover is pillow ticking, coloured with sweeping washes of leather dye applied with a cloth to build layers of colour. This was backed onto Japanese paper, and then rubbed with beeswax to increase durability, add extra texture and catch light. Lucky accidents introduced surface irregularities. Influenced by early bindings in the Wellcome Collection, Saumarez Smith folded the inside cover in the manner of a limp vellum binding, fixing it with steel wire. The backstrip is vellum on board attached by leather tabs. The endpapers are Japanese Mingei paper.
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2. This binding has a conventional structure echoing the book form through a pattern on the spine and sides derived from the tapes onto which the book is sewn. The materials are a combination of onlays of goatskin and glacé leather (normally used in the fashion industry). The stripes reflect the shadows and light (shutters and louvres) of the book’s images. An unusual number of Japanese endpapers creates a slow lead into the text and reflects Hogan’s colours.
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Charlene Garry: A Celebration A collection embracing Anthony Rota’s 1989 obituary of Charlene, an extract from her lecture Illustrated Books as Original Works of Art: Form as Complement to Content, and Peter Guy’s essay Working with Charlene. The keepsake is illustrated using surplus sheets from Tulips (illustrations by Rory McEwen) (The Basilisk Press, 1977), pages from The Basilisk Press Bookshop catalogues, and line drawings devised by John Lawrence as Basilisk’s press mark. It was published in 1996 in an edition of 200 with 15 exemplars bound by Saumarez Smith. 270 x 170 mm. 16 pages. The book was bound in calfskin, treated with resist to create the spotted pattern that reflects textures in Lawrence’s line drawings of basilisks. Copydex was used for the resist rather than wax for ease of control and improved clarity. The tulip illustrations are reflected in the backstrip, a stick coloured like a stem with three leather bands, painted like the petals, looped around it. All cut edges are gilded.
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Anaskaphes A celebration of the centenary of the British School at Athens 1886–1986. Thirteen images by Eileen Hogan and twenty-two specially commissioned articles from members of the School: Robin Barber, John Campbell, Paul Cartledge, Nicolas Coldstream, Roderick Conway Morris, Elizabeth French, Nicholas Hammond, Kerin Hope, Richard Jones, John Lazenby, Christa Mee, Christopher Mee and Anthony Spawforth, Peter Megaw, Ruth Padel, Jane Rabnett, Peregrine Rhodes, Steven Runciman, Karin Skawran, Helen Waterhouse, Susan Young, and Richard Ashton. Introduction by Hector Catling, then Director of the British School. Edition 200, twenty of which were boxed with extra prints. 300 x 210mm. 80 pages. Anaskaphes was published in 1986 and the whole edition designed and bound by Saumarez Smith. Twenty ‘specials’ had boards covered in mould-made grey paper with the cut edges of the paper coloured with green paint. The spine and fore-edge are grey goatskin with three red leather overbands.
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THE LION AND UNICORN PRESS (ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART)
Laius, Iocaste and Oedipus The text is taken from Greek Myths by Robert Graves. Hogan designed an original alphabet and cut the individual letters in lino. Once each page was composed, a line block was made to print from and the colours of each sheet were inked by hand with a brush. The book was published in 1972 in an edition of 25, with a one-off binding commissioned from Saumarez Smith in 1988. 290 x 360mm. 16 pages. The cover is pillow ticking, coloured with sweeping washes of dye applied with a cloth to build layers of colour. This was pasted to Japanese paper, and then rubbed with beeswax to increase durability, add extra texture, and catch the light. Lucky accidents introduced surface irregularities. The colours reflect the text, with stronger tints in the lining and endpapers, which are of patterned Japanese paper made by folding the paper into a small packet and dipping the edges into ink. The book is made from single sheets which are sewn through copper plates and the folded covers in the Japanese style.
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Fragments of Sappho Translated by Mary Barnard This prototype was made in 1973 and bound as a one-off by Saumarez Smith in 1988. Hogan’s lettering is hand-drawn and accompanied by eight hand-coloured linocuts. 210 x 310mm. 40 pages. The cover is pillow ticking, coloured with washes of dye, pasted to Japanese paper and rubbed with beeswax to catch the light in response to Hogan’s images. The endpapers are of patterned Japanese paper made by folding the paper into a small packet and dipping the edges into ink. The cover is folded like a limp vellum binding, with the pages sewn directly to the cover through small copper plates.
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THE BURNT WOOD PRESS
Ogham This publication is based on an interpretation by Robert Graves of the bird ciphers used in the Book of Ballymote to represent an alphabet. In Hogan’s alphabet a colour and a bird whose names begin with the relevant letter accompany each unit of the alphabet. Published in 1977 with a one-off binding by Saumarez Smith commissioned in 1989. Edition of 100. 300 x 430mm. 40 pages. The cover is pillow ticking, coloured with washes of dye, backed onto Japanese paper and rubbed with beeswax. The pages are sewn through the cover and the sewing stations concealed with leather tabs which are coloured and patterned with wax resist, applied with a tjanting (a wooden handled tool with a tiny metal cup and a small spout for dripping the wax), normally used for batik.
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Haiku Twenty-Five Poems The poems were translated by Harold Henderson and published in 1978 in an edition of 50 with two bindings commissioned from Saumaurez Smith in 1978. Lithography. 290 x 270mm. 16 pages. The English hand-made paper cover was sewn to the end papers in a zigzag pattern with linen thread to reflect the flow of Hogan’s calligraphy. The title was written by Sally-Mae Joseph.
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A Selection from Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry by Thomas Tusser Hogan’s drawn lettering and images were printed using lithographic plates. The book was published in 1981 and the one-off binding was commissioned from Saumarez Smith in 1989. Edition of 60. 48 pages. 290 x 270mm. Dripped candle wax and leather dye were layered alternately to build colour onto the goatskin cover. The book was sewn on cords, which were laced through the cover.
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Black and White Book This unique book of Saumarez Smith ’s own India ink drawings, on Chatham vellum hand-made paper, was bound in white calf, with raised decorative pieces at head, tail, and fore-edge. The pattern of drawn dots on the doublures reflects the drawings in the book. 1984. 135 x 175mm. 60 pages.
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Seven Deadly Sins of London by Thomas Dekker First published in 1607, this copy was bound by Saumarez Smith in 1984. 180 x 230mm. 104 pages. The book was covered in black goatskin, which was then blind-tooled using two tools made by Saumarez Smith. Saumarez Smith states that the red false bands are “rather like some post-modernist architecture, commenting on the structure without actually being the structure�. The doublures are black calf and the page edges are rough gilt.
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THE WHITTINGTON PRESS
Predators in my Garden by Miriam Macgregor Printed for Lorson’s Books & Prints by The Whittington Press in 1993. Edition of 180. 50 x 45 mm. 32 pages. The book was sewn onto vellum strips attached to the boards with silver wire and small nails. The calf boards were patinated with dye and wax resist, applied with a candle and a tjanting (a wooden handled tool with a tiny metal cup and a small spout for dripping the wax), normally used for batik.
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T H E C I RC L E P R E S S
Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare Thirty silkscreen images by Ronald King accompany the full play text. The book, designed, published, and produced by King, includes notes and an introductory essay, ‘The Elusive Absolute’, by Keith Please. 1979. Edition of 300. 380 x 290mm. Eleven 8 -page unbound sections. The book was bound in calf with colour built up from dye and wax resist. The sewing stations are concealed under leather straps, which are attached with copper wire. Sally -Mae Joseph wrote the calligraphic titles on the covers.
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THE BASILISK PRESS
The Rhinoceros The Rhinoceros. A Monograph conceived by Francesco Nardelli with a foreword by John Aspinall. 20 mounted coloured plates and illustrations by Matthew Hillier. Editiion of 300 plus 15 out of series. 665 x 480mm. Published in 1988. Five exemplary copies with a goatskin binding by Saumarez Smith with wooden box by Justin Savage. The book was covered in two parts The spine is goatskin dyed with a pink hue and sanded. The sides are goatskin dyed with blue and pink and sanded to bring out the grain, to allude to the rhino’s skin. The bands aon the spine are attached with copper wire.
Query: more text to come. No pic
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With thanks to Linda Brownrigg Cathy Courtney Elizabeth James Martina Margetts Michael Mitchell Rowan Watson
Published by Libanus Press Ltd, Marlborough ISBN: © 2009 Bindings Romilly Saumarez Smith © 2009 Text and Images Eileen Hogan © 2009 Text Martina Margetts
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