Bookbinder Roger Powell Celebrated in New Exhibition
Roger Powell at work in the 1980s
The life and work of internationally famous 20th century bookbinder Roger Powell (1896 – 1990) is the focus of a new exhibition which examines how his work transformed the craft using rarely seen fine bindings from private collectors.
Bound Together: Modern British Bookbinding which runs through May 3 at Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery in Hampshire, England, features examples of his work on books produced at his Froxfield bindery in the county with business partner Peter Waters.
Powell’s career began in the 1930s when he worked initially with leading bookbinder Douglas Cockerell (1870-1945) before establishing his own bindery in Froxfield in 1947. During that time Powell worked on the conservation and re-binding of the Book of Kells for Trinity College Dublin and in 1966 when the River Arno in Florence flooded and damaged thousands of books inthe Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Powell was closely involved in the conservation of many valuable items.
The exhibition features a range of his work, including his early bookbinding efforts while still at school at Bedales with a copy of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig, 1885), and his family's 1934 copy of The Concise Oxford Dictionary which he bound with gilded edges.
Other highlights include a miniature chained library, one of 25 he worked on during the late 1950s and early 1960s, containing seven tiny manuscript volumes created and hand-decorated by Pamela Fowler, each volume chained to a horizontal rod on a miniature wooden lectern. Also on show is Poems in English by John Milton with illustrations by William Blake (The Nonesuch Press, 1926), bound in 1974 by Powell with a front cover featuring gold tooling of a weeping willow set against a starry background, and adorned with blind-stamped Tudor roses
