• Original Art: Leather inlay binding by Sybil Pye
• Era: Art Deco (early 1900s)
• Region: England

This striking Art Deco design comes from British bookbinder Sybil Pye (1879–1959), heralded as one of the top female artisans of her time.

Pye came from an artistic family, her father being a collector of oriental and contemporary art, and she was exposed to the craft of bookbinding at a young age. Using Douglas Cockerell’s classic text Bookbinding and the Care of Books as her guide, she taught herself the craft of bookbinding, producing her first binding in 1906. Pye began with simple white or natural pigskin leather before graduating to coloured goatskin leather inlay panels, like the one reproduced here. By 1934 she was creating complex covers of many different coloured inlays, and her work was regularly exhibited throughout England and around the world.

This particular design, reminiscent of a tawny lion’s face and using masculine colours of red, black, green and brown evoking a rich leather study (or den), was designed to hold a collection of William Wordsworth’s poems. Currently housed at the Fitzwilliam Museum, the poetry collection was illustrated by Pye’s lifelong friend Thomas Sturge Moore and printed by Ballantyne Press.

Though we cannot be sure that Pye intended to evoke the image of a lion’s majestic head with this cover, we felt it offered a tantalizing connection between a design and its contents, as one of Wordsworth’s poems is titled “Picture of Daniel in the Lions’ Den, at Hamilton Place.”

One of the youngest pre-War women binders, Pye was the only binder in England (male or female), and among just a few worldwide, who specialized in inlaid leather bindings. With this, our first design reproducing work by Sybil Pye, we pay tribute to a pioneering woman in book design.

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