Preface to Katharine Nash
Katharine Nash was born in 1907. She was twelve years old when women
won the right to vote. Her mother was an amateur artist who painted
plates. Her flowers, Kay says, “were beautiful, perfectly beautiful.”
Her mother was also a suffragette, and Kay has a vivid memory of going
with her sister to see her mother speak at a demonstration on Fifth
Avenue in New York City. She and her sister watched from the window of
their family eye doctor’s office. Kay recalls, “Mummy stood on a soap
box and spoke about women’s rights at a big demonstration. Sister and I
watched. Daddy was in the crowd because he was worried there might be
trouble and he didn’t want anything to happen to her. She had a ribbon
that she wore across her chest-Vote for Women. We still have it.”
Kay and her mother both used automatic
writing to help them resolve dilemmas. They had learned this technique
in Europe. Her parents were also interested in parapsychology, and Kay
participated in occasional seances which she said were “successful.”
The family was clearly interested in exploring the most innovative
ideas of their time. Katharine and her sister were also allowed to
travel abroad by themselves while still in their early teens, something
very unusual at that time.
When Katharine spoke about her
experiences, I would catch glimpses of difficult or tricky situations
that promised valuable insights into the life of a professional
craftswoman in the early decades of the twentieth century; for example,
how she established credit as a businesswoman when few women had bank
accounts in their own name; the troubles she might have had with
landlords because of her bindery; how attitudes about women had
affected her professional and personal life; how her personal life was
affected by her commitment to an exacting profession. When I tried to
explore these issues, she brushed most of my questions aside.
In the 1920s, bookbinding was one of the
few professions affluent women could enter and retain respectability
while earning money and practicing a demanding craft. Like many women
who pursued self-fulfillment through accomplishment, she remained
single, lived with family, and assumed responsibility for the care of
her aging parents. While her temperament is not that of a
revolutionary, she tried to redefine herself by pushing the envelope of
what was permitted and acceptable.
KATHARINE NASH
The Poetry of Bookbinding
You
know what time I woke up last night? Two o'clock. I'm almost ninety
years old but I often awaken late in the night, the way I did when I
had my bindery. I was always at my brightest at those hours, and that's
when I often worked on my designs. Sometimes the neighbors complained.
They would ask what was that tapping, tapping noise in the night. Of
course it was me, doing my bookbinding.
I started because I wanted to do
something, and because I wanted to have my own money. I had just
graduated from boarding school. Mother heard about two women, Miss
Emily Preston and Miss Helen Haskell Noyes, who were bookbinders and
took pupils. We went for an interview, and Miss Preston said that she
would take me as a student. That's the way I began. I said, "I'll do
it, Mother, for a year. If I don't like it, I'll find something else to
do."
Well, I found the work very interesting. I loved it! I studied with Miss Preston for eight years.
Don't think it's easy work. Oh no! There
are forty-eight steps in hand bookbinding, and you have to stand to do
most of them. The process dates back to the middle ages and was
developed by monks. Hand bookbinding is difficult, demanding, very
physical work. All the tools I used, like the irons and the hammer,
were heavy. You need strength to handle the big backing press. You have
to concentrate because every measurement must be exact. The finished
book has to be absolutely square, not one-sixteenth of an inch off.
I progressed faster than Miss Preston's
other students, and she started giving me books to sew, and slowly, as
I began to build a reputation, people brought books to me. Early in my
career, around 1937 or 1938, I bound a copy of Green Pastures for the
author, Marc Connelly. At the time I didn’t know if the author was a
man or a woman, because you can’t tell from the spelling of the name. I
bound that book here in New York, then I took it to England, where I
put on the design at Sangorsky and Sutcliffe. I used Moroccan leather
in a very fine grain for the cover, and for a design I used a little
elephant motif in gold leaf.
My family lived in a brownstone on West
Ninety-Third Street, and for many years I sewed books at home. Then
Father sold the brownstone and bought a duplex apartment with maids'
rooms, and I used one of them for my sewing ventures until I really got
going. When my sister got married, Father told me to take her bedroom
and use mine for my bindery. And he took me to get business cards
printed. Oh! They were beautiful. I was thrilled because I didn't think
he cared heck about my binding, but he did, and he helped me
financially to set up a complete bindery, with presses and roulettes
and everything I needed for a real business. Miss Preston was retiring
about that time, and she gave me some pictures that she’d had framed in
Paris. This gift made my mind feel that I must really be good. You
know! I felt that what I was doing was worth something.
In New York I had practically no social
life because all I did was my bookbinding. But every summer I closed my
bindery and went abroad to visit and travel with friends in England and
Europe. I still remember the first trip that I paid for myself; I had
earned enough so that father only had to pay for himself and mother.
Traveling was a very different
experience. Ships took almost a week to cross the ocean. People rested
from their work on the trip over, and rested from their travels on the
way back. You didn't start your travels in a country tired and return
home exhausted from your vacation. Now, everybody flies, nobody gets
any rest, and you have that awful jet lag afterwards.
During my vacations I almost always took
a refresher course, and I paid for these myself. Usually I studied with
Sangorsky and Sutcliff; they were famous English binders. In the
thirties, just before the war, I studied in Paris with a bookbinder
named Malandet. He came from a family of binders, and I worked with him
right in his home and studio on the left bank.
Malandet couldn't speak much English, and
I didn't know French. I traveled with a French-English dictionary. When
Malandet spoke in French, he'd tell me how the words were spelled, and
I looked them up in the dictionary; I did the same when I wanted to say
something to him. That's how we conversed that summer.
I stayed in a pensione hotel off Rue des
Saints Pères. Every day I walked from the hotel to the bindery where I
worked happily with Malandet. I had brought three books with me from
New York, and I finished tooling them before the time came to leave.
The weather was so beautiful that summer.
I had my map of the city, and when I wasn't working in the bindery, I
walked all over Paris, I walked through all the gardens. I walked to my
dressmaker - I was having three dresses made to take home with me.
The day of my last lesson, on my way to
the bindery I bought a perfectly beautiful pot of flowers. The gift
pleased Malandet, but really, that man was scared to death because his
oldest son had been called into military service. Malandet knew that
meant war was coming and he might lose his son.
When I said goodbye to Malandet and his
family, I didn't know this would be my last trip abroad. In the years
to follow, my father died, and there was the war, and then I was busy
pursuing my career in this country, I had so many orders, and I had
pupils, and I had the responsibility of caring for my mother.
I bound
books for twenty-five years. I have lots of stories. A woman who lived
in our apartment building put together a book of photographs about her
two cocker spaniels, Swinky and Swanky, that she asked me to bind. She
later donated that book to the museum in New Haven. Doctor John Holmes
of the Messiah Church, a famous Unitarian, commissioned me to bind the
original Parker Bible. There were a few bad years when orders were
scarce, but not too many. I usually had too many orders, and I often
took books along with me on my vacation to finish.
After Daddy died, Mother and I moved to
60 East 96th Street. I had no qualms about going there once I found out
that a doctor had an office on the ground floor. I didn't care what
kind of a doctor he was, so long as his office was in the building,
because that meant I could legally operate a bindery. Mother and I
lived on the fifteenth floor and I had beautiful light to work by.
I never married. I had a chance to after
the Second World War, to an English man, but I saw what a mess my
sister's divorce turned into, and I said, "I don't want that."
I taught privately, as my teacher, Miss
Preston, had. I lectured on hand bookbinding at the Barrington School
and at Connecticut College. My work was exhibited many times. To
prepare for an exhibit I would buy a fine book from Doubleday where I
had a charge account. That was unusual then, for a woman to have her
own charge account. Once, for an exhibit, I wanted to bind a book about
Madame Curie, and Doubleday sold me one that had been written by her
daughter, Eve. The store asked to see the book when I finished, and
they had Eve Curie autograph it. George Jenson exhibited the Curie book
in his famous store on Fifth Avenue. He thought it was beautiful.
Another book I bound that was widely
exhibited was written by a group of doctors to document the work of
another famous physician, Doctor Walter Crump.
After Mother died I moved to Jackson
Heights to live with my sister and niece. I had a few books to bind,
but in this building I wasn't legally allowed to operate a bindery, and
I didn't really have enough space.
In hand bookbinding everything has to be
accurate, accurate, accurate. Your hand has to be very precise.
Everything you do has to be precise, perfect. The day came when I
started having trouble with my eyes. I couldn't see well enough to do
the kind of work that I had a reputation for doing and that I wanted to
do.
About this time I got a new pupil. Most
of the students I had taught would stay with me for about two years,
then they wanted to go on to something else. They were too rich, you
see; they were just doing it to kill time. But this new pupil was
serious. She was head of the Fine Books Department at the New York
Public Library, and she travelled all the way out to Jackson Heights
because she wanted to study with me.
So when it was time for me to give up,
Pauline came with her friends and a station wagon for my presses. She
set up a bindery in her room, just as I had done in the beginning of my
career. When she was settled, she invited me over to see. Her room was
slightly crowded, but the press was all set up, she had everything
ready to work. That made me happy, because I could see that she really
loved and enjoyed the work the way I did.
Giving up my profession was the hardest
thing I ever had to do because I loved my work. Just loved it! But the
pain was lessened by the knowledge that someone else was continuing,
and I found something else to do. I helped my sister to raise my niece,
and because my hands still needed to be busy, I turned to needlepoint.
I made bed pillows, and gave them as gifts to my family and friends,
and I came out of it all right.
My fingers still remember the feel of the
silk thread I used to sew with, and my hands know the heft and shape of
the tools, the weight of my plough that I used to cut boards for the
new cover, the razor-sharp edge of the knife that I used to trim the
leather. Because I am left-handed, I preferred the oval, half-circle
paring knife. I remember the scratchy feel and the sound of the
grinding stone that I used to sharpen my tools. I remember the
beautiful colors of the dyed leather, the fragrance of glue (it was
made from boiled horses' hooves) cooking on the gas stove.
My designs for book covers were all
original. First I would work out my design on paper, then strike the
design in the leather. The lines had to be deep. The elephant motif
that I used for Green Pastures - each line was struck separately using
a different tool. Each of the tusks was made with a separate tool, and
to make the eyes, I used yet another tool. Glare is a preparation used
in the application of gold leaf. I made my own from white vinegar and
egg whites. I always had a great deal of oil in my hair, and I would
wipe my little square pad of gold leaf over my hair, then lay the pad
down flat on the cover where I wanted the gold on the design. Sometimes
I made my own paper for the end pages, or I used sheets from famous
papermakers, like Douglas Cockerell.
To put the title and the author's name on
the cover, and the name of the publisher, I had three sets of
alphabets. One was fine, so fine I can hardly read it now. They were
all made abroad in England. Most of my materials, and the papers that I
used, my tools, the gold leaf, it was all made in Europe.
Of course, I was called
amateur-professional because my bindery was in my home. Miss Preston,
my teacher, was called that-amateur-professional. We were both
professional woman before most women were allowed to be that. It was
difficult for a woman to become a professional, very difficult. And
that's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be just that in my work. And I
was.
