They subsequently moved into the workshop created in the main reading rooms of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (BNCF), where he worked on devising treatment protocols as well as supervising and teaching volunteers and students carrying out basic treatment procedures. On arrival, Chris was put in charge of the many volunteers at the Florence Railway Power Station, where books were being washed and dried. ![]() Late in 1966 he was invited by Tony Cains to join the English Government team in Florence after the devastating flood of 4 November, to work with him, Peter Waters, Don Etherington and Roger and Rita Powell as they began to work with the international teams assembling to rescue the millions of books that had been damaged by water, mud, sewage and oil. At some point in and amongst these other activities, he developed a keen interest in origami. Cockerell) in Grantchester, outside Cambridge to learn more about the repair of early printed books and manuscripts, and later with Roger Powell in Froxfield, Hampshire. After that, in 1964/5, he went on to work under Tony Cains at Douglas Cockerell & Son (run by Sydney (Sandy) M. He graduated from the RCA with an ARCA Diploma in Graphic Art in 1963 and was invited by Jeff Clements to teach graphic design, wood engraving, writing and illuminating, letter cutting and ‘fine’ bookbinding to diploma level at the Plymouth School of Art and Design. His encounter with Peter Waters was soon to take him to Florence and then to Washington, but before that, with the help of a Minor Travelling Scholarship from the RCA, he travelled in Europe, getting as far as Crete (he found it too hot in Greece), where his intention of walking around the island was discouraged by a local inhabitant, who provided him with a donkey by way of transport. ![]() He was not allowed to give up his other studies and had to complete twelve bindings for his final diploma show in addition to his other work, as well as studying bookbinding history, helping Howard Nixon at the British Museum with his bookbinding rubbings project and going to evening classes with George Frewin at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. As result of this encounter, Chris added ‘Fine Binding’ to his studies for his last two years. While there, he one day found an apparently empty room in which to do some work which happened to have some bookbindings in it, and was soon discovered there by Peter Waters, then working with Roger Powell and teaching bookbinding one day a week at the RCA. He took on various commissions for lettering, on seeing some of which the typographic designer, Berthold Wolpe suggested he apply for a place at the Royal College of Art, as a result of which he studied there from 1960 to 1963. At seventeen he gained his National Diploma in Design – and took a part-time position at Camberwell assisting Frank Martin in teaching wood-engraving and lettering and writing and illuminating under Vernon Shearer. When he was only fifteen, he moved on to the Senior Art School and developed an abiding interest in medieval architecture, heraldry and brass rubbing, touring around southern England on his bicycle, making drawings and taking photographs. There the curriculum was dominated by painting and painting techniques, drawing and all the graphic reproductive methods, with one day a week only given to other subjects. It was at school that one of his teachers suggested that he should go to art classes at the Whitechapel Art Gallery on his Saturday mornings, which led, at the age of thirteen, to his being sent to the Junior Art School at the Camberwell College of Arts and Crafts. He was not a strong child, having been born with a hole in his heart, and only went to school when he was seven. He was born in on 19 November, 1938 in Blackheath, the son of Victor and Kathleen Ruth (née Hopgood). From an early training in design and the graphic arts and without a university education, he made himself, by virtue of his manual skills and a single-minded dedication to his craft, the pre-eminent conservator of early books, equipped with a deep knowledge of the materials used to make them and the techniques used in their construction. ![]() Christopher Clarkson, who died just before midnight on Thursday 30 March 2017 at the age of 79, was the pre-eminent conservator of medieval manuscripts and early printed books and a much-respected historian of book-binding and in particular of the structural history of bookbinding, specializing in the period from the birth of the codex to the early Renaissance.
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