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Patch by Sara
A few years ago I volunteered at Monk's House, Virginia Woolf's home in Sussex from 1919 until her death in 1941. My favourite item was a set of Shakespeare's works which Woolf re-bound in 1936 in colourful marbled paper. As I practice bookbinding, I was intrigued to learn more about Woolf's binding hobby. I discovered that Woolf began lessons in bookbinding in 1901 aged 19 and went on to bind books throughout her adult life, for herself and for friends and family. Woolf's approach to bookbinding included pasting colourful papers over dull leather bindings, using patterned, abstract or marbled papers to re-cover books, cutting leather and paper roughy leaving jagged edges, and using discarded headed notepaper and endpapers, re-using paper and leather labels or hand-writing labels for re-bound spines. Woolf's bindings have been called 'slapdash' and 'rotten' as they appear technically poor; Woolf herself described her bookbinding as 'amateurish.' However, I find a playfulness and subversiveness to her binding - a deliberate rejection of a masculine tradition of skilled 'professional' bookbinding methods in favour of a feminising 'amateur' domestic patchwork aesthetic. This patch is inspired by Woolf's creative bookbinding. I cut the front board of a book of Tacitus in Latin with a private school book -plate on the reverse - to represent the masculine domination of knowledge, education and professions which Woolf criticised in A Room of One's Own. I then re-purposed the spine of the book with its title, pasting over Woolf's name and the word 'binder,' I cut up a bookmark handmade by Cate Olsen (owner of Much Ado Books where I work) that had a picture of Woolf laughing layered over colourful paper, and embroidered the word 'amateurish' and an antique shell button onto the cut up papers, finishing it with a roughly cut strip of leather. I hope Woolf would approve! Sara Clarke Beloved Bindery, Lewes.