Scholar, lecturer and writer Sarah T. Prideaux was one of the first English women to make bookbinding a career. She taught binding and lectured on its history, amassing a significant collection of books, catalogues, and ephemera documenting the subject. In 1900, with Katharine Adams, she printed her Catalogue of Bookbindings (also in the collection) on her own hand press. This 1894 Prideaux binding is done entirely by her own hand in brown goatskin, blind and gold tooled. The design is of heart-shaped flowers on delicate stems. The spine titling is in her typical disposition of type, flush left.
English bookbinder Rosamond Philpott trained at Sangorski and Sutcliffe in 1904. Like many successful women binders, she exhibited on the Continent and in England and sold her work regularly. Her workshop, the Marygold Bindery, was in Cambridge. This wonderfully executed binding of maroon goatskin over boards is exuberantly arranged, utilizing leather onlay, and includes gold-tooled Tudor roses, foliage, flower buds, and stars. It is stamped on the turn-in of the lower cover: “Marygold Bindery, 1925.”
