The organizers of this exhibit wish to thank the Iowa Arts Council for its generous support for the exhibition catalog as well as other materials.

William Anthony, artist and craftsman, inspired and instructed the binders in this exhibit.   He was trained in hand bookbinding in a system of apprenticeship and journeyman work that has its roots in the late Middle Ages.   This method of learning profoundly affected his relationship to books and to the craft of binding.   However, his career was also influenced by other forces—by his study at academic schools of art, by his association with other handbinders, and by the increasing interest in conservation of old books that began in the 1960s.   In different ways, these diverse methods of learning and applying the craft of binding can be seen in the work and careers of Bill's students, and the students of his students, whose books are exhibited here.   

In 1942, when sixteen-year-old Bill Anthony began his apprenticeship at Croker & Co. in Waterford, Ireland, his tasks may not have been so different from those of a teen-aged apprentice in the sixteenth century.   One of his first tasks was bringing blank paper to the senior binders for the books they were making, and he soon became expert in judging by eye the number of sheets that were needed.   Eventually, over the seven years of his apprenticeship, he became expert in all the operations of that bindery, where blank account books were made for businesses.   He would have learned to fold gatherings of the book and sew them together, make the endsheets, color the edges of the text paper, cut out the index tabs, line the spine and create a hollow that allowed the book to spring open, prepare the boards, and cover them.   He would have learned how to work the various covering materials—leather, vellum, and cloth.   

His apprenticeship finished, Bill moved on as a journeyman to five other production binderies—first in Ireland, then in England—specializing in different styles of handbinding.   In these workshops, the emphasis would have been on efficiency as well as workmanship.   There he repeated the same procedures many, many times, acquiring a deep familiarity with each stage of forwarding and finishing the book, an intimate knowledge of his materials, and an instinctual knowledge that resided in the hand and eye.   As a journeyman, he helped train the apprentices and younger journeymen coming after him.   Here, in a sense, began Bill's career as teacher and mentor.

Relatively few of those who trained alongside Bill in the production binderies of Waterford, Dublin, and London would have had careers that developed the way Bill's did.   Most would continue to work throughout their lives in large commercial shops.   As a journeyman in London, after work hours, Bill was already taking a different tack, studying design and fine binding at the prestigious Camberwell College of Arts and the Sutton School of Arts.   He also taught at Camberwell for a time.   

The last bindery in which Bill worked in London, F. G. Marshall's, specialized in large vellum books of remembrance.   On his own time, he bound Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard in vellum.   The book was in an exhibition in London in 1963 and was seen by John Cuneo, who offered Bill a position at the Cuneo Press in Chicago.   There Bill worked first as director of the Art Department and later as director of the Fine Binding Studio.   The Studio's major project each year was to bind a deluxe edition of the Cuneo Press's Christmas Book—50 copies bound in full, red goatskin, stamped on the cover and spine with a special brass die.   (A single copy bound in white leather would be presented each year to the Pope.)

Bill's career (and that of many binders) was profoundly affected by the devastating flood of the Arno River in 1966, which soaked the libraries of Florence, Italy.   Bookbinders from around the world traveled to Italy to help salvage the ancient texts from the muddy water.   New methods were developed to care for damaged books, and new ideas about ideal book structures and materials emerged, as did research into historic book structures.  

These developments stimulated binders everywhere.   At the same time, libraries and museums were becoming more aware of the need to conserve valuable old books in their collections. In 1970, while working at the Cuneo Press, Bill took on the important commission of restoring Northwestern University's rare, intact copy of John James Audubon's four-volume Birds of America.   Beginning in 1973, when he left Cuneo to go into partnership with Elizabeth Kner, Bill worked primarily as a conservator for institutions and for individual collections.   While he still occasionally worked on editions and other new work and continued to produce fine bindings for exhibitions, most of his paid work was in restoring old books to usability while maintaining as much of the original materials and structure as possible.   I

In 1984, Bill came to Iowa to establish the Conservation Department in the UI Libraries.   While conserving books for the UI Libraries' Special Collections, he had greater opportunity to reflect on and experiment with the ideas and techniques that had shaped book conservation since the floods of Florence.   He and his apprentice Mark Esser began to make models of historical book structures, seeing these models as educational tools for the general public and as aides in teaching students and apprentice conservators.    The models became well-known as a result of being exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1986 and through the visits of binders from the U.S. and Europe to the Conservation Department.   In this way, Bill stimulated an interest in models that has grown over the years.   Every year classes are offered throughout the country in making models of the Stonyhurst Gospel (an eighth-century book, the earliest extant), medieval account bindings, and other structures that Bill and Mark first copied in the early 1980s.   Today Bill and Mark's models are the nucleus of a collection that the current University of Iowa Conservator, Gary Frost, has much enlarged.   Some models crafted by Bill's apprentices or their students are also included in this exhibit.  

Bill had taken on his first apprentice, Bill Minter, in 1971 while at the Cuneo Press.   Bill Minter continued as his apprentice in the partnership of Kner & Anthony Bookbinders.   David Brock became the next apprentice there, in 1978, followed by Mark Esser in 1981.   After Bill came to Iowa, the number of apprentices burgeoned to include me, Annie Wilcox, Sally Key, and Ralph Weber.   Indeed, Bill had been attracted to Iowa by the opportunity to establish an apprenticeship program in book conservation that echoed his own apprenticeship in handbinding in Ireland.   This exhibit includes conservation treatments and restorations by Bill's apprentices and their students.

Bill's apprentices trained with him for varying lengths of time.   Bill figured that, for someone who started an apprenticeship as a motivated adult rather than an adolescent, four to six years would be sufficient, rather than the seven years he spent as apprentice.   Our apprenticeship was a much longer sustained period than most young binders now experience.   Aspiring binders often begin on their own, studying from books, and supplement their knowledge with workshops offered for a week, a weekend, or even part of a day.     Some may live in a community where a binder teaches private classes in his or her studio (as Bill did in Chicago) or offers classes through a college, university, or crafts center.   A few are fortunate enough to study at the training programs that have grown up in the U.S., most notably at The University of Iowa, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Alabama, and the North Bennett Street School in Boston—at all of which Bill's apprentices and students teach or have taught.

Even in the late nineteenth century, private study was one model for learning handbinding, and particularly fine binding.   Women at that time were excluded from apprenticeship and journeyman training, though they were often hired to sew the sections before the books were bound.   Some women, however, had the means to travel to England to study for a few weeks or months with fine binders associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, such as Thomas Cobden-Sanderson and Douglas Cockerell.   These women returned to the United States where they bound beautiful books, taught the craft of binding, and helped found the Guild of Book Workers in New York City in 1906, as well as other local organizations designed to encourage bookbinding.

Bill joined the Guild of Book Workers after he moved to the U.S. and became an influential member, particularly as chair of the Guild's Standards Committee for the last four years of his life.   In this role, he organized demonstrations and workshops at the Guild's national meetings through which a new generation of binders could learn skills and techniques.   He saw his service to the Guild as a way in which he "gave back to the craft."   Making a return to the craft and tradition that had nurtured him was a very important principle for Bill.

Toward the end of his life, Bill began to take an interest in yet another form of binding, the artist's book.   Book artists typically use nontraditional structural principles and/or materials to create a three-dimensional work of art that expresses an intellectual or artistic statement.   This is an area that students who had studied privately with Bill in Chicago practiced and excelled in, and an area that Bill himself might have practiced had he lived longer.   In 1986, Bill mounted the Guild of Book Workers 80th Anniversary Exhibition at The University of Iowa and served as one of the judges.   Twelve of the 72 books in the show were artist's books, two of them by Bill's students Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler and Pamela Spitzmueller.   Both of these artists are represented in the current exhibit, which also includes artist's books produced by students of Bill's apprentices.   Bill encouraged his students to find the areas of bookbinding in which they were most comfortable, and for some who have become quite prominent, that meant artist's books.

Most of Bill's apprentices and students continue to devote their efforts to the tasks that Bill himself excelled in, bookbinding and conservation as well as teaching in university-based programs, private classes, and workshops.   Students of Bill's students and students of Bill's apprentices are now also working professionally as bookbinders, artists, conservators, and teachers.   The future of the finely printed and expertly bound book is, literally, in the hands of younger book workers. Bill Anthony innovated and crossed bridges from the book craft industry and its conventions to the wider fields of the sciences of preservation and the prospects for artists' books. Now his students need to convey fine traditional bookwork in an environment of screen based reading and digital libraries. These are exciting challenges that Bill prepared us to enjoy.

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