Lot 40
Woman bookbinder
Autograph album, early 20th century
Auction: 16 June 2026 from 10:00 BST
Description
4to (21.8 x 17.4cm), fine Arts and Crafts binding dated 1903 and attributed to Mary E. Robinson (rear turn-in gilt-stamped ‘19 M. R. 03’), green full morocco, spine lettered in gilt ‘A Book of Autographs’, spine and covers lavishly gilt overall with leaf-sprays of various sizes, and curvilinear fillets for branches and dots for buds, heightened with red morocco onlays of berries and flowers, arranged on covers to a pattern of leaf-sprays of increasing size radiating from central composite roundels, the roundel on front cover enclosing monogram ‘J G’, broad turn-ins gilt with the same tools, japon doublures and endpapers. Contents: 26 leaves containing over 250 autograph signatures, largely of Scottish peers and family members (e.g. Roxburghe, Airlie, Buccleuch, Stair, Atholl, Cassilis, Home, Tweeddale, etc.), socialites and soldiers, (mainly Scottish), and other figures including Ernest H. Shackleton (dated 5th January 1912), Reginald Wingate, Robert Baden Powell, Lord Rosebery (the prime minister), St John Brodrick, Margot Asquith, and similar, many dated (1901-15); and some 25 full-page watercolours including views (Archangel, Russia; St Monans, Fife; Dunmore, Waterford; etc.) portraits, garden scenes, and similar. Housed in a contemporary suede-lined red sheep solander box (rubbed and scuffed, front joint cracked at head and foot)
Footnote
‘Mary E. Robinson was a competent binder producing work in the Cockerell and Sangorski & Sutcliffe style. Her workshop was initially at 30 Museum Street … and then at 59-61 New Oxford Street. She first showed her work at the A&CES exhibition in 1906, and continued binding until at least 1938. In 1913 she was teaching at the Westminster School of Art. . Her bindings were illustrated in the Art Journal (1907), the Studio Yearbook (1909), and The Art of the Book (1914)' (Tidcombe, Women Bookbinders, pp. 172-3). That which appears in the Studio Yearbook is especially similar to the present example: a green levant binding with a lavish overall floral and foliate design, the covers as here with leaf sprays radiating from a roundel containing a monogram at the centre.