(A Manual of the Art of Bookbinding is an unchanged, high-...)
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James Bartram Nicholson was an American bookbinder and fraternal official.
Background
James Bartram Nicholson was born on January 28, 1820 in St. Louis City, Missouri, United States. He was the son of John and Eliza (Lowry) Nicholson, both natives of Philadelphia, and a grandson of John Nicholson, a gunsmith who came from Scotland in 1755 and settled in that city, where, during the Revolutionary War, he manufactured firearms for the Continental Army. He is said to have designed the firelock, or musket, which was adopted by the Committee of Safety. In 1822 John and Eliza Nicholson returned to Philadelphia, which was henceforth James's home.
Education
James was educated in Philadelphia.
Career
At the age of twelve he was placed in a lawyer's office as errand boy; later he was similarly employed for a drygoods house and for a grocery. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a house carpenter, but because of poor health and ill treatment he left his master. The latter attempted to force his return, but it was decided that the terms of his indenture did not demand it, and he went into the shop of Weaver & Warnick, where he learned the trade of bookbinding.
After completing his apprenticeship, in 1848 he joined in a partnership with James Pawson, an English binder, and under the style of Pawson & Nicholson began a business which was continued by descendants of the original partners until about 1911.
Nicholson retired from active business in 1890, his house having become one of the leading binderies in this country. He was a thorough student of his craft, which he followed as a fine art.
Although it was founded upon John Hannett's Bibliopegia (1835), it went farther than that popular work and came to be regarded as the most nearly complete treatise yet published in America. Nicholson was as prominently identified with the life of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows in the United States as he was with the bookbinding trade. He joined the Order in 1845, was elected Grand Sire of the Sovereign Grand Lodge in 1862, Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania in 1866, and Grand Scribe of the Grand Encampment of Pennsylvania in 1869. He held this last office at the time of his death. His efforts as Grand Sire of the national lodge were largely responsible for the fact that "the Order issued intact from the chaos of the Civil War, the only Order of the kind in the whole country, it is said, which was not disrupted by that four year struggle between North and South". His own account of the experience was privately printed in 1896 as I. O. O. F. : The Story of '65.
He gained a national reputation for oratory, and as Grand Scribe introduced reforms into the business of the Order regarding questions of dues and benefits by which he is said to have "conferred untold blessings" upon its members. While addressing a meeting at Berwyn in December 1892, he was stricken with paralysis, which rendered useless the right side of his body and caused his death in Philadelphia nine years later.
Achievements
Nicholson published A Manual of the Art of Bookbinding, the first practical manual of the subject by an American.
The IOOF erected a large bronze statue of him in Mount Peace Cemetery in 1917.
