About the book:
Ernest William Gimson was an English furniture designer and architect. He is known as one of the most influential designers of the English Arts and Crafts movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He began his career as an architect but, influenced by the ideas of William Morris, quickly developed a passion for furniture design. This book contains an authoritative and insightful study, surveying the life and work of “the greatest of the English artist-craftsmen”.
He learnt two crafts in 1890. Having seen the rush-seated ladderback chairs by Philip Clissett in the meeting room of the Art Workers’ Guild, he went to Herefordshire to learn how to turn chairs on a pole lathe. He also learnt how to make decorative plaster panels.
Towards the end of 1890 he was involved in the formation of Kenton & Company, set up by a group of architects to produce individually designed and well made furniture. In 1893, after the company was dissolved, he moved with the Barnsley Brothers to the Cotswolds, in the English countryside, setting up one of the many rural artists’ colonies in the Arts and Crafts Movement. This self-sufficient craft community was guided by the utopian thinking sparked by Morris.
In 1900, Gimson and Ernest Barnsley went into partnership setting up a second workshop and employing cabinet makers including Peter Waals to make up their furniture designs. Gimson took sole control of the business from about 1903; after the move to Sapperton he opened showrooms at Daneway House and a workshop in the outbuildings. He also set up a blacksmith’s shop in Sapperton and a chair making business at Daneway with Edward Gardiner.
Gimson’s prolific production was far from limited to furniture: he designed pieces of gold work, patterns for embroidery and lace, book bindings and decorative plasterwork.
The design of this book is based on a striking cabinet that Ernest Gimson designed for Kenton and Co, which was exhibited in the Art Workers’ Guild in London, 1891. This piece is now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The cabinet is made from ebony, with an extensive interlocking marquetry pattern derived from Gimson’s drawings of 13th-century mural paintings in a church in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. It has handmade silver handles and unusual circular trays between the leg rails:
“Composed of simplified but powerfully geometrical forms, the cabinet stands on a light base made of two round trays. Gimson focused his attention on the delicate inlaid decoration of the cabinet doors, using different species of wood (palm tree, orange tree and ebony) in a stylised pattern similar to some of the textile designs later produced by the Wiener Werkstätte. True to the principle of honesty so dear to Ruskin, the inlaid pieces are not glued but fitted together. The inside of the cabinet is made of sycamore and cypress, and the locks made of silver, balsam of Peru and white metal show the same subtlety.”
About the binding:
- A full leather binding bound in orange pigskin on the boards and dark brown goatskin on the spine.
- The boards have a grid embroidered to them in brown thread (running stitch which was then whipped in the same colour of thread), with brown and grey leather onlays stuck in them to create an ongoing pattern.
- Multiple stitches are applied to the onlays in a variety of colours: both French knots and couched stitches.
- Gold metallic thread is applied in the corners of each of the grid squares.
- The top edge of the book is sanded and decorated with acrylic paints using a cotton wool bud.
- The foredge and bottom edge of the book have deckled edges to the pages.
- The endband at the top is sewn using a variety of brown, green and metallic thread.
- The endband at the bottom of the pages was covered in leather and threads were then applied, to allow for the uneven length of the deckled pages.
- The title of the book is embroidered to the spine using white thread that was whipped.
- The signature of the subject of the book, Ernest Gimson, is gold-tooled onto the spine in 22carat gold leaf using a series of small pallet tools.
- The centre of the spine has a depiction of an illustration from the book made from leather onlays with embroidered thread over the top.
- The edge-to-edge doublures are covered in semi-transparent vellum, embroidered with a grid in white thread (running stitch which was then whipped in the same colour of thread).
- The vellum has white and off-white leather onlays stuck into some of the squares.
- The doublure onlays are patterned with stitches in the same way that the cover design was decorated.
- The covers and doublures have some 22 carat gold leaf (mounted onto Japanese paper) stuck down onto the cover in random places.
- The endpapers are staggered, and cut into profiles so that they can each be seen.
- Embroidery threads adorn the endpapers, with the ends of the the threads being concealed with smaller circles of the same gold leaf stuck to the covers of the book.
- The book is housed in a wooden box made of Wenge with a lift-off lid.
- The box is lined with the leather, paper and vellum used throughout the binding.
- The book lies on flecked brown wool felt, stuck into the lid and base of the box.
- The inside of the box has two location dots so that the lid of the box is placed on the base in the right orientation.
- The box has a teal coloured lifting ribbon attached to the base to help lift the binding out of the box.
Design Description
The book contains numerous black and white photographs and drawings of Ernest Gimson’s designs for a large variety of objects including furniture, metalwork, plaster decoration, embroidery, and more. I purchased a copy of a more recent publication about his work to help me with my research, Ernest Gimson: Arts & Crafts Designer and Architect by Annette Carruthers, Mary Greensted and Barley Roscoe (Yale University Press, USA, 2019).
“This study of the renowned designer-maker Ernest Gimson (1864–1919) combines biography with analysis of his work as an architect and designer of furniture, metalwork, plaster decoration, embroidery, and more. It also examines Gimson’s significance within the Arts and Crafts Movement, tracing the full arc of his creative career, ideas, and legacy. Gimson worked in London in the 1880s, joining the circle around William Morris at the Art Workers’ Guild and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. He later moved to the Cotswolds, where he opened workshops and established a reputation for distinctive style and superb quality. Gimson’s work influences designers today and speaks directly to ongoing debates about the role of craft in the modern world; this book will be the standard reference for years to come.”
This reference book really helped me to come up with a design for the binding, which I based on the striking grid-like marquetry pattern of one of Gimson’s wooden cabinets. The dark brown leather of the spine, and onlays on the boards was chosen to match the colour of the ebony used to make the cabinet. I used embroidery stitches to build up more of a breadth of colour on the binding, and to add a textural quality to the covers too – broken up into shards to appear like light hitting the cabinet front.
On the spine of the book I added a title. I found Ernest Gimson’s signature pictured within the book, and tooled this in 23.5 carat gold leaf using small pallet tools. For the rest of the title, “His Life and Work”, I embroidered this in thin white thread in a style of writing to match the handwritten annotations of Ernest’s drawings within the book.
In between the signature and the embroidery on the spine is a depiction of a cabinet handle designed by Ernest. At the time he set up a blacksmith’s shop in Sapperton village, the immediate impetus was the need for architectural fittings such as hinges and bolts, but the blacksmiths were soon making handles and latches for furniture as well. As well as making their own handles, Gimson commissioned some special ones from a skilled silversmith. One such design I created on the spine, and another you can see on the lid of the box.
The edge-to-edge doublures of the book are covered in semi-transparent vellum, and have the same gridded pattern on them as the cover design. The whole of the doublure is only patterned in shades of white, and my reason behind this was to pay homage to Ernest Gimson’s embroidery designs which he created in the 1880s and 1890s.
Gimson loved textiles. As a young man he carried around a piece of Morris & Co. fabric so that he might have ‘something to look at’ in dull hotel rooms and lodgings. He collected lots of images of 15th- to 17th-century British embroidery, as well as Iranian and Indian examples. He used these designs as inspiration for all kinds of crafts. Embroidery was still considered a female craft, so he didn’t embroider them himself. Instead it was his sisters and cousins who made the pieces, for their own pleasure:
“The Arts and Crafts fashion for embroidery started by Morris & Co. was for brightly coloured, complex naturalistic designs. Gimson created deceptively simple designs often with repeating patterns. He liked to design whitework – white embroidery on a white ground. This fitted with the modest cottage interiors he fashioned for his family and himself. Many are still treasured by Gimson’s family. Some were shown at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, with both his and the maker’s name proudly displayed on them.” (Cheltenham Museum)
The endpapers were inspired by the design for pew ends, the drawings of which feature in the text block. Gimson’s style relied on both good-quality materials and good workmanship. All the woodwork was done with hand tools, with the techniques used to create each piece being crucial. Joints and dowels, for example, became part of the design. The endpapers are profiled and staggered to show six of the different pew designs, with their outlines embroidered through the paper so you can see them on both sides. The colours of the paper were chosen to compliment the cover design, whilst also working together to go from light cream through to dark brown.
The box is made from Wenge, a tropical hardwood that is known for its dark brown colour, distinctive black grain patterns, and durability. The lid of the box mimics the design of the book cover with the same titling, and a depiction of another of Gimson’s cabinet handles.
Below are some images of the binding as a whole, and more can soon be read about the making of this binding in the Blog section of my website.
