Dorothy Burnett was the first independent artisan bookbinder to set up shop in Vancouver. Her friendship with Anne Yandle, previously head of Special Collections at UBC, compelled Burnett to choose our library to house a rich collection of 224 of her most treasured artifacts used in her bookbinding career. As an example of the Dorothy Burnett Bookbinding Tools collection, here you can see a French iron press used to apply uniform pressure for bookbinding.
After graduating from the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, and getting a teaching certificate in art education, Dorothy Burnett set out for the Ontario College of Art and later on for the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in the 1930s. Back in Vancouver, she opened the Craft Center Studio at the corner of Dunsmuir and Granville. She was 32 years old at the time.
With no interest whatsoever in mass production, Dorothy Burnett created handcrafted bindings that are regarded today as some of the best examples of the art of her trade. The slogan of the Craft Center Studio accurately describes her life’s work and her approach not only to bookbinding, but to calligraphy as well: “Art in Form and Function”.
Complementing the collection is Norman Amor’s Dorothy Burnett: Bookbinder, published by the Alcuin Society in 2007, which can be found in UBC’s Rare Books & Special Collections division (http://webcat1.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=3707625). After you take a look at Dorothy Burnett’s bookbinding tools, in Amor’s book you can find fascinating information on the bookbinder herself and on her work. This beautiful edition is stunningly illustrated with digitized covers and interior pages of the books bound by Burnett, for example of a 1935 edition of Barrie’s Peter Pan, a 1937 edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and an illustrated edition of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.