viii, 433, [1] double pages. To comfortably read this book you have to rotate it 90 degrees. All edges gilt. Decorated floral endpapers. Label pasted inside the rear cover: “Royal School of Art Needlework. Exhibition Road, South Kensington.” 48 x 55 mm. Particularly detailed for the UK and for North America; every town of at least 2,000 inhabitants recorded. The UK Census of 1891 recorded a total population of England, Wales and Scotland as 33,015,701. Bondy, 104. Garbett, 13. Houghton, 18. Welsh, 6717. WorldCat locates only two copies in the UK (British Library and the National Library of Scotland) and four in the USA (Newberry Library, & Illinois, Indiana, and Virginia Universities).
The Royal School of Art Needlework was founded in 1872 to create employment for women and to restore ornamental needlework to the significant place it once held among the decorative arts. The school made some embroidered bindings, but more frequently created painted vellum bindings. Blank vellum bindings were made by either Zaehnsdorf or Morrell’s trade binderies and were embroidered or painted by the women workers at the Royal School of Art Needlework to be sold. Often the designs were of themes, characters, or scenes not at all related to the book’s text. The woman who embroidered this vellum binding is not identified, as was often the case for RSAN bindings. This embroidered vellum binding is reminiscent of eighteenth-century crewelwork: Tudor roses and stylized carnations. The Arts and Crafts and Aesthetics Movements and the early designs of the Royal School of Art Needlework were very inspired by historic needlework. Crewelwork was a very popular method of decorating domestic textiles in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. This binding is post-1903, when the school moved to Exhibition Road near the Victoria and Albert Museum, and pre-1922, when it was renamed 'Royal School of Needlework'. Tidcombe refers to the exhibiting of similar and more elaborate bindings at Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society events in 1889 and 1890, bookbinding exhibitions in London in 1897 and 1898, and even in America, at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.