page_title: Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt
section_title: Career as a bookbinder
hierarchical_section_title: Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt / Career as a bookbinder
caption_attribution_description: Style: Frame|Lettered cover, eg intitals, titles; Caption: Upper cover; Colour: Red; Edge: Unspecified
context_page_description: Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt was an American bookbinder and book collector, specializing in botanical literature.
context_section_description: While on a trip with her family to the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, Miller visited the Roycroft community of craftsmen. This trip inspired her to experiment with making her own hand-bound books. In 1903, she was introduced to suffragette and bookbinder Euphemia Bakewell, and studied with her in Pittsburgh for two years. On a trip to Europe with her parents in 1905, Miller Hunt visited T. J. Cobden-Sanderson's Doves Bindery, and was also able to purchase supplies for her own bookbinding work, such as hand-marbled endpapers, stamping tools, and a stock of gold leaf.
  Back in the United States, Miller established her own bindery, which she named the Lehcar Bindery ("Rachel" spelled backwards), in Shadyside. There, she produced over 126 complete bindings, performing all aspects of the work except for edge gilding. She worked on numerous commissions and exhibited in several national book exhibitions, and in 1907, she joined the recently-founded Guild of Book Workers of New York. Her work was praised by binder Alfred de Sauty for its "finely balanced sense of craftsmanship." In 1908, she met T. J. Cobden-Sanderson while he was visiting Euphemia Bakewell; Cobden-Sanderson invited her to visit him in Hammersmith, which she did, staying at the Doves Bindery for almost a year.
  She continued creating and exhibiting bindings until about 1920. Her last public showing of her work was at the Guild of Bookworkers' annual exhibition in 1921, held at the Grolier Club. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Hunt became a distinguished speaker on books and bookbinding, though she was no longer an active practitioner. She continued to maintain her binding equipment in a workshop at "Elmhurst," the Pittsburgh home she and her husband moved to in 1926, and continued to refer to it as the "Lehcar Bindery."
caption: An example of Hunt's work - a binding created in 1916 for an edition of Samuel Rogers's Poems
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