LUNCHTIME TALKS
Chaired by Geoffrey Catchpole unless stated

John Lewis & Evelyn Lewis, Members,
on 11 September 2003

This report is included as a tribute to John Lewis who died in June 2004 and will be much missed by all his friends at the Institution.

Historically and geographically one would expect Bath to have a chained library and illuminated manuscripts, but the Abbey's collection of books founded by Arthur Lake, Bishop from 1616 - 1626, consisting of some 300 books are, today, in the Wells Cathedral library.

I have not had time to research how and when Bath City Corporation came to house them, but the story goes that the Abbey ran out of space and handed them over to the city library whose then librarian, Reginald Blight, had them rebound in Victorian bindings. According to Roger Vaughan, ex-keeper of Collections in BRLSI, the City library closed in 1880 and the books were left with us, only to be moved in 1895 when the Guildhall opened it's library. Space must again have been short as the books were placed in a cellar whence they were rescued by Mr Colchester, the Honorary Archivist and assistant Librarian at Wells Cathedral. In 1988, when I met him, he said the Dean, who would have been the titular Librarian, knew more about cricket teams than books. Mr Colchester found the books in the crypt by a door which had to kept open for the convenience of the dustmen and he managed to have this valuable collection transferred to Wells Cathedral Library where I last saw then in the passageway.

All this happened in a city which, according to an article in the Society of Bookbinders Journal by Brian Edwards (my tutor in bookbinding) on ‘Bookbinding in Georgian & Victorian Bath' listed 42 binders working in Bath during the Georgian period from 1714 -1830 ! Some of them were printers who may have been publishers bringing out local guides and historical accounts, which they would have bound as publishers bindings.

The list also includes lending libraries, of which Bath had quite a number, being one of the last towns in the UK to have a Public Lending Library, opened in 1895. Of the binders listed, only one, Robert Riviere, was well-known and he moved his business to London in 1840. By 1800 the Bath City Rate Book shows only six bookbinders remaining and operating in Bath. They were Joseph Barratt (library),William Cole, E.D.Hazard, William Maybury, Joseph Price and Richard Tonge.

During the nineteenth century growth in printing and book publishing forced great changes in the way books were produced and bound as more books were being produced than hand bookbinders could cope with. Firms like Cedric Chivers, who established a business in 1878 in the premises formerly occupied by Robert Riviere in Union Street, took up the challenge. They subsequently moved to a double fronted shop at 39 Gay Street and then, as the business expanded, to a large house at Portway in Combe Park where they operated until 1990. George Bayntun opened his business in Northumberland Place in 1894 and George Gregory was operating from 5 Argyle Street until taken over by Bayntuns in 1920.

Today the binderies operating in and near Bath can be counted on the fingers of one hand, but this is still more than most parts of the country can boast of, and Bayntuns have played a special part in keeping the craft alive as most of the local binders did their apprenticeship and training there.

World War 2 saw the Admiralty take over the BRLSI building and all the contents had to be cleared out in the space of two days, the books going into storage. By 1959 the building, after the Admiralty left, could only be described as 'awful', so the only solution, at the time, seemed to be to hand it over to the City Corporation who moved the Reference Library into the building and set about clearing out all the old museum exhibits and selling off some 9,650 of the Institution's books, according to Roger Vaughan, which were dubiously labeled as 'duplicates'!

The library today contains some 8000 books, magazines and journals of which 3000 form the Jenyn's library, which is what the team of volunteers is working on. While we have been refurbishing the books I thought it would be interesting to see whether any of the binders known to have been working in Bath had bound some of the books we are working on. What we do is to give each book a sheet on which we record the condition of the binding and pages and report what we have done to it and recommend what else should be done. In the case of any interesting looking bindings we take photographs as well.

As I just said we have been working mainly on the books in the Jenyns Library and for those of you who do not know about the Rev Leonard Jenyns, to give him his full title, (later to be known as Bloomefield), he was the curate who said he was too busy looking after his parishioners to accompany Fitzroy as naturalist on the H.M.S Beagle but recommended Darwin instead.

The 3000 odd volumes that make up the Jenyns library remain as an historic/special collection to be kept in a separate room as laid down in his bequest to the Institution in 1869. Some of the earlier volumes came to Jenyns from his uncle Chappelow, otherwise they are books he purchased or exchanged with contemporaries – Hooker and other great naturalists of the time. Many of the books left to him by his uncle are hand-bound fine bindings in calf leather with gold tooling, but as Jenyns began to add to the library binding structures had altered to keep pace with more books being printed, and cloth-bound cased books with gold blockings of the covers and lettering on the spine took their place

Jenyns does not appear to have been interested in the bindings as such, whereas if it had been a traditional country gentleman's library the books would have been bound to his taste and instructions. A great collector like William Beckford went to endless trouble to get the binders to carry his instructions minutely. Unfortunately I have no slides to show of any of the bindings from the few books still in the Lansdown tower where originally Beckford kept a small collection of his finest books; the few books still there are superb examples of the work done by his binders. Beckford used to get very angry with some of the binders his bookseller sent his books to calling one of them a 'clumsy handed neglectful brute' to whom he is going to delay payment of some £30 due him. Another volume he sent back to his favourite binder "for the purpose of being bound in the old style in smelling Russia", a reference to the smell of birch trees said to be still in the leather imported from Russia.

I could not find any reference of Beckford having had any of his books bound in Bath so he obviously did not trust any of them and I have mentioned him at some length because we are just about to have an Open Day in connection with the Fonthill Casali paintings, and one of the books on display in the showcase is a copy of ‘Vathak' which has been rebound but was originally covered in silk – unusual for a case binding and no doubt in this limited edition specified by Beckford himself.

Returning to Jenyns and his library, however, many of his weather and rainfall records kept at the meteorological station he had set up in the Institutions' Gardens (now Parade Gardens) have been bound in a typical library style with leather spine and marbled boards all matching each other on the library shelf and, while there is no binder's signature, they must have come from the same bindery over a period of years. Incidentally binders either put a small paper label at the bottom left hand comer of the back of the book, or in the case of leather bound books their name might be tooled on the leather turn-in. Fine bindings might have a binder's monogram.

Bound volumes of the Linnean society from 1 to 17, and again a similar run from 1859 to 1880, have the same paper on the boards and the same end-papers inside. As the HQ of their Society was at Burlington House from where they were published it may have been Chivers who did the binding as they specialise in similar publications up to the present day. We have found books bound by Chivers about 100 years ago (whichh they have rebound recently), which puts an age on how long the calf skin used for binding has lasted. One must now ask how long the calf skin used in their re-bindings will last with all the attention to acid free materials and other modern methods of leather treatment and conservation techniques ?

While the library was being looked after by Bath City Council and Avon County Council, the books that were left in the BRLSI library did receive some attention and money was obviously available for some re-binding, which would have been done by the County Bindery which was situated in Bristol, now no longer, but it was a well equipped bindery. It looks as though the more dilapidated books were selected for re-binding particularly some of the larger volumes such as Bibles and Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. We have no record of what state of repair they were actually in, but they were rebound in a conventional library style with new end-papers and flyleaves. Generally speaking the workmanship was plain, competent and robust as you can see from the samples I have brought along. With a few exceptions repairs and paper treatment left must to be desired..

Unfortunately the same criticism could be made about the work we are doing today. It is relatively easy to put covers on a book, but it takes many hours of careful attention to wash and resize the pages, let alone attempt any repair work. Having done all this the book still has to be re-sewn ,but if all this done the books will certainly last have a longer life. Funnily enough the books that respond to the treatment best are very often the old ones when the paper used was hand made and of good quality. (Vellum is another matter and requires more specialist attention.)

Until recently spines, boards and end-papers removed from books being rebound were discarded, but now we try and keep these and we take 'before and after' photographs. Today in any rebinding we try to preserve as much as possible of the old leather from the sides and spines, azs well as marbled boards and endpapers, as the sample books I have brought along show.

The slides show some of the books we have found that were bound by Bath binders. I have purposely left Bayntuns out of this account. There is not time to give justice to their work and special place in Bath book-binding, but I have brought along an example of their, and Riviere's, binding with a double fore-edge painting. A visit was made, however, to the Bath Central Library to look at their Special Collection which includes a set of 100 bindings by a Bath solicitor, Alvah James Cook, who took up bookbinding – a remarkable collection as you can see from the few slides, which include some Bayntun bindings and a volume bound in human skin.

During the 60s, two new binderies were established in and near Bath, which are operating today. Period Binders now at Batheaston and Cottage Bindery at Corston are used by us to bind books under the 'Adopt a Book 'scheme. Brian Frost, who carried on business at 13 Trim Street as a bookseller, also opened up a bindery where Chris Lewis (another ex Bayntun man) worked. Chris was a brilliant finisher and his early death is a great loss to the craft. More recently Richard and Margaret Norman (ex Bristol Brunei College students) took over the bindery at Downside Abbey where, in addition to looking after the fine library, they conduct course in binding and marbling paper.

In a talk about binding in Bath, mention must be made of the Pitman Press (now Bath Press) which operated in Bath under the direction of Sir Isaac Pitman whose archives are with the University of Bath.

Finally I am finishing with a slide showing Geoff Packer and Paul Jackman, both craftsmen employed by Frederick Chivers: Geoff for 30 and Paul for 20 years with their magnificent copy of the Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter.

John Lewis