Sarah Prideaux (1853 – 1933) was a bookbinder, teacher, historian and author of books on binding and illustration. She, along with Katharine Adams and

Sybil Pye Sybil Pye (18 November 1879 – 1958) was a self-trained British bookbinder famous for her distinctive inlay Art Deco leather bindings. She was, along with Katharine Adams and Sarah Prideaux, one of the most famous women bookbinders of their p ...

, was one of the noted women bookbinders of the period.

Biography

Prideaux was born in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

, England, one of five children born to Elizabeth Williams and Walter Prideaux. In 1888, at the age of 35, she started lessons in bookbinding under

Joseph Zaehnsdorf Joseph Zaehnsdorf (27 February 1816 – 7 November 1886), was a bookbinder. Zaehnsdorf was the son of Gottlieb Zaehnsdorf, of Pesth in Austria-Hungary, where he was born and educated. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to Herr Knipe, a bookb ...

's son, Joseph W., and continued in Paris under Antoine Joly. For several years she experimented, wrote articles, produced bound books inspired by Art Nouveau designs, and showed in various exhibits. But in 1894, the quality of the bindings signed by Prideaux were notably produced at a professional level. It has since been discovered that although she designed the bindings, selected the leather and marbled endpapers to a very detailed specification, the actual bookbinding was carried out by a French tradesman, Lucien Broca, and possibly others under her name. Over 276 books were bound and published under her signature. Throughout the 1890s, Prideaux, an expert on the history of bookbinding, taught, lectured, and wrote reviews and articles for journals and magazines. Her 1893 book ''An Historical Sketch of Bookbinding'' has an introductory chapter by E. Gordon Duff. Katharine Adams was one of Prideaux's students and close friend. Her articles were collected and published as "Bookbinders and their Craft". Her final book on bookbinding was "Modern Bookbindings Their Design and Decoration". She also wrote a book called "Aquatint Engraving A Chapter in the History of Book Illustration". She served as one of the directors of the

Women's Printing Society The Women's Printing Society was a British publishing house founded in either 1874 or 1876 by Emma Paterson and Emily Faithfull with the company being officially incorporated as a cooperative in 1878. Involvement in the suffragist movement The ...

. She was very physically active, went on long bicycle rides through Europe, skied, and bobsledded, even into middle age. She died in Kensington in 1933 in her 80th year.

Legacy

Prideaux's bindings are held by most major institutions and many private collectors. *

Boston Athenaeum Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- most ...

in Boston, Massachusetts *

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the Briti ...

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and ...

* Duke University's Rubenstein Rare Book Library's Lisa Unger Baskin Collection * Southern Methodist University's Bridwell Library

Biography

Legacy

References

Further reading