The First Helen Warren DeGolyer Competition for American Bookbinding 1997

Bridwell Library’s triennial bookbinding competition is named for Helen Warren DeGolyer (1926–1995), a well-known supporter of the arts and education in Dallas, as well as a skilled devotee of design bookbinding. Following her testamentary wishes, her brother, Joseph Warren, and her children, Everett Lee DeGolyer and Edith DeGolyer, established in 1996 an endowment to support a triennial bookbinding competition, exhibition, and conference on the contemporary book arts to be held at Bridwell Library.

The competition challenges bookbinders to submit their proposals for a specific book held by Bridwell Library, as well as a recent example of their work. While the DeGolyer Award winner receives a commission to bind the book according to his or her proposal, the jury also selects award winners for excellence in fine binding and artistic design. The judges for this year’s competition include

Decherd Turner, Chair, Former Director of Bridwell Library and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas Austin

Valerie R. Hotchkiss, J.S. Bridwell Foundation Endowed Librarian and Associate Professor of Medieval Studies, Southern Methodist University

Edith DeGolyer, DeGolyer Estate

Jan B. Sobota, Director of Conservation Laboratory, Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University

Catherine Burkhard, Craft Guild of Dallas

Raoul Bollin, Swiss-American design bookbinder

The Book of Common Prayer

The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacrament and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church According to the Use of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David [Boston]: Printed for the Commission, 1928 [issued 1930]. xli, 611 pp. ; 36 cm. Five hundred paper copies and twelve vellum copies printed by Daniel Berkeley Updike. Vellum. Bridwell Library Special Collections.

In 1927 the Episcopal Church in America sponsored a competition to design this book. Bruce Rogers, Daniel Berkeley Updike, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press competed, and Updike was awarded the commission. He printed the work at his Merrymount Press in Boston. Coordination of the project was the responsibility of the Commission for the Textual Revision of the Standard Book of Prayer, but the details of the work, including the choice of printer and editorial tasks, were carried out by the librarian of the Pierpont Morgan Library, Bella da Costa Green. J.P. Morgan, Jr., whose father had supported the revision of the Prayer Book of 1892, agreed to subvent all publication costs and arrange distribution.