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Adams, Katharine [1862-1952. UK. Bookbinder]

 

Katharine Adams was born, the daughter the Rev. William Fulford Adams, in Bracknell, Berkshire, England, on 25 November 1862. Although she expressed an interest in bookbinding from childhood, she did not pursue it as a career until she was in her thirties. In 1897 she trained briefly with the bookbinders Sarah Prideaux (1953-1933) and Douglas Cockerell (1870-1945). She then moved to Lechlade in Gloucestershire, where she set up a small workshop with second-hand equipment. Her first commission came from Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris. Not long afterwards Adams took on pupils. Her first notable success as a bookbinder came in May 1898 when she won First Prize in Amateur Bookbinding at the Oxford Arts and Crafts Exhibition at the Town Hall in Oxford. Three years later, in March 1901, she exhibited 56 bindings at Oxford House, the offices of the Daniel Press in Oxford. Following the appointment of her father to the position of Rector of Weston-sub-Edge in Gloucestershire, in 1901, she lived with him in the vicarage. She also bought a cottage in nearby Broadway, Worcestershire, where she established her Eadburgha Bindery, which she ran for the next fourteen years. During these years she produced her finest work. Most of her commissions came from private collectors. These included Emery Walker, Sydney Cockerell, C.H. St. John Hornby, Charles Fairfax Murray and Henry Yates-Thompson. In 1913 she married Edmund James Webb, however, she retained her professional name and continued to work in her bindery until 1915, when the couple moved to the Rectory in Noke, near Islip, Oxfordshire. Here she bound books and gave lessons on binding between c.1916 and 1930. Adams was a regular exhibitor with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from 1899 until about 1930. She and Douglas Cockerell were the only binders whose work was shown at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904. In February 1906, she and her brother, the painter, William Dacres Adams (1864-1951) held a joint exhibition, at which she showed 38 bindings, at W.B. Paterson’s, 5 Old Bond Street, London. She exhibited with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1899, 1903, 1906, 1910, 1912 and 1916; and at the New Gallery in London in 1906 and 1908. She also participated in the Dritte Deutsche Kunst-Gewerbe-Ausstellung in Dresden in 1906, the Exposition Universelle et Industriale in Brussels in 1910 (at which she won a Gold Medal), the the Exposition Universelle et Industrielle (Wereldtenoonstelling) in Ghent, Belgium, in 1913, and in other exhibitions abroad. Adams was a member of the Women’s Guild of Art and was its President in 1935. She died at St. Briavels in Gloucestershire, on 15 October 1952. It has been calculated that during her working life, Adams bound some 300 books and manuscripts. Two examples of Adams’ bindings are illustrated in ‘The Studio Yearbook of Decorative Art’ 1909 (pp.123, 124). Other examples are illustrated in a chapter on her in ‘Women Bookbinders 1880-1920’ by Marianne Tidcombe (New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 1996 pp.131-146). This also contains details of principal tools used by Adams and a list of her bindings from 1899 to 1916 (pp.199-204). Adams’ finest binding is considered by Tidcombe to have been for an edition of ‘Tutte le Opere di Dante Alighieri’ printed by St. John Hornby at the Ashendene Press in 1909 and bound in c.1910.
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Bibliography

1. Tidcombe. Marianne. Women bookbinders 1880-1920. London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 1996 [Includes a chapter on Katharine Adams (pp.131-146); a list of her bindings (pp.202-204); and several illustrations of her work]
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