The Guild was begun by a bookbinder, a classicist and an astronomer. Each brought a habit of mind from an ordinary trade, and the Guild is still recognizably made of the three.
Ambrose Tolland
1919-1994 - The Binder - First Guildmaster
Ambrose Tolland was born in Baltimore, the son of a ship chandler, and was apprenticed to a trade bindery at fourteen. After some years at sea as a merchant radio operator he came home in 1946, and in 1951 he opened his own shop on Lantern Court, where he bound, repaired and occasionally rescued books for libraries and private collectors.
Books on the Art came to him to be mended, and he read what he mended. For twenty years he practiced alone and told no one. What he brought to the Guild was the outlook of a craftsman: that a rite is a made thing with a structure that either holds or does not, that skill is passed from hand to hand, and that an apprentice learns more from one job finished than from ten admired.
Tolland gave the Guild its name, its three craft titles and its vocabulary of bench and workroom. He drew and cut the Seal. He served as Guildmaster from the adoption of the Articles in 1974 until his death. His working diary was published after his death as The Binder's Notebook.
No one is made a Master by a ceremony. The ceremony only says aloud what the bench has already said.
Imogen Castellane
1931-2009 - The Scholar - Second Guildmaster
Imogen Castellane was born in Richmond, Virginia, and taught Greek and Latin at a small Maryland college for thirty-one years. Her own study was the ritual literature of late antiquity: hymns, invocations and instructions that had passed through so many copyists that much of what survived, she liked to say, was the record of a thousand years of mishearing.
She brought to the Thursday Workroom the discipline of an editor. She compared sources, struck out what was plainly corrupt, and insisted that every invocation used in the Guild be put into English that the speaker could mean. Most of the first Common Book is her work, and she edited The Guild Record from its first number in 1976 until 1994.
Castellane succeeded Tolland as Guildmaster and served two terms. Her letters of advice to Apprentices, written over many years from a desk in the corner of the bindery, were collected as Thirty Letters from Lantern Court.
If you cannot say it in plain words, you do not yet know what you are asking for.
Margit Anselm
1938-2017 - The Astronomer - Warden of the Lamp
Margit Anselm was born in Trondheim, Norway, came to the United States as a child, and taught physics and astronomy at a Baltimore high school for thirty-four years. She came to the first meeting as a skeptic, to correct an error in arithmetic, and she remained a skeptic of a particular and useful kind for the rest of her life.
Anselm brought measurement. It was she who proposed that three people keep three separate records and compare them, she who required that the time, the sky and the weather be noted with every working, and she who computed the first Tables of the Hours so that members in different cities could keep the same planetary hour. The tables were issued each year from 1983 until her death.
She founded the Hearth Course for members who worked alone, served as Warden of the Lamp for twenty-six years, and twice declined to stand for Guildmaster on the ground that she preferred to be useful.
I do not know why the hours matter. I know that when we stopped keeping them, the records got worse.
On remembering them
The founders asked that no portrait of them hang in any Hall, and that they be quoted only where they were right. The Guild has tried to honor both requests. Founders' Night is kept each year on September 23, not with speeches, but by reading aloud from the archive one entry from each of their three Records, chosen by lot.
A fuller account of the early years is given in the History of the Guild.