Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. First trade edition (a limited subscriber’s edition had appeared in 1926). 54 plates, 4 folding maps. 4to., rull russet deep-grained morocco by Denise Lubett, signed on the lower turn in with monogram and dated 1954, with cream morocco onlays across both covers forming the Arabic word ‘Aurans’, olive green morocco doublures tooled in gilt with other Arabic versions of T.E. Lawrence’s name, all edges gilt, housed in the original russet morocco backed with light brown cloth chemise and slipcase. Very good. A couple of small marks on the upper side consistent with variations in the leather.||Lubett’s sumptuous binding of TE Lawrence’s epic masterpiece was exhibited at ‘The art of the book William Morris and after 1892-1977’ in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 1978, no. 163. The Arabic across the covers spells out Aurans - an Arabic name for TE Lawrence.
Denise Lubett (1922-2015) was an American born in Paris. She discovered bookbinding walking past a binder’s workshop in Paris where she settled after working with the Free French during the War. Her marriage brought her to London where she trained briefly at Camberwell School of Art and London College of Printing but she was in the main self-taught. She set up her own bindery in 1966 and she was elected a Fellow of the Designer Bookbinders in 1971.
Lubett’s designs tend to be animated, inventive and striking in the choices and boldness of her colour onlays. In the chapter she wrote for the book “A Bookbinder’s Florilegium’ she described her personal binding credo, apparent here, when she said that “great purity of style and design usually bring forth great beauty”.




Sold at the Wardington Library English Literature Sale, 13th July 2006 at Sotheby’s.|Chalmers, A Bookbinders’ Florilegium’, 1988, printed at the Press at the Humanities Research Center, Austin Texas, p. 76 A sumptuous binding of Lawrence’s epic masterpiece with his name in Arabic in rich onlays across the covers