Background
He was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme on December 26, 1874. He was a son of Elisha and Maryjane Rhodes Holmes.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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He was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme on December 26, 1874. He was a son of Elisha and Maryjane Rhodes Holmes.
Thomas James Holmes attended public school and evening school in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England.
Though he had little formal education. Holmes was a voracious reader and scholar. He was an especially avid reader of the Bible, but otherwise, his tastes were catholic, embracing the theological doctrines of Martin Luther, Calvin, and the nonconformists, the medical journal Lancet, German history, Carlyle’s work on the French Revolution, the French encyclopedists, philosophy, and literature including Dante, Milton, and Tennyson.
At the age of thirteen, Thomas James Holmes began working for David Dilworth, then George Thomas Bagguely at a bookshop in Newcastle-under-Lyme. He worked hard - nine-and-a-half hours a day for two shillings a week - and spent his minuscule salary in purchasing books from the shop. Because Bagguely, who took over the shop after Dilworth, was a visiting librarian in Sutherland, Holmes had the opportunity to spend three summers dressing leather bindings and familiarizing himself with the contents of the library. Later, Holmes would also work for a short time in the library of the bishop of Lichfield, the home of Samuel Johnson.
In 1895, Holmes moved to London and worked for the firm of Riviere and Son for four years. He had become an expert in bookbinding through his work at the library and the bookseller; his particular talent was affixing the gold leaf to the bindings. He won a bronze medal at the Paris International Exhibition in 1900 for his work. By 1902, he was back in London, this time working for Joseph Zaehnsdorf. He became interested in the bookmaking revival led by William Morris and attended lectures on the art given by Lucking Tavener, the Westminster Gazette’s critic. He met Alice Mary Browning at one of these lectures and married her on December 24, 1901.
Together they left for New York in 1902, where Holmes immediately got work at the Club Bindery as a forwarder of rare books. The Club Bindery was a project of several prominent collectors, but it did not do well financially and was forced to close in 1909. The Rowfant Club in Cleveland was then in the process of adding a bindery and recruited Holmes as the business manager. The Bindery lasted from 1909 to 1913, with Holmes resigning shortly before the bindery closed. He was becoming known as a scholar and writer on bookbinding. From 1908 to 1911 he oversaw the bookbinding column in the Progressive Printer, and in 1912, he published a paper called “Fine Bookbinding,” which he delivered at an exhibition of the Rowfant Club’s binding work.
Upon leaving Rowfant, Holmes entered a career as a librarian. He became assistant to Gordon W. Thayer, who headed the folklore and Orientalia collection at the Cleveland Public Library. He helped produce a catalog of English Ballads and Songs in the John G. White Collection of Folk-Lore and Orientalia of the Cleveland Public Library and the Library of the Western Reserve University. In 1919, Holmes’s work in Cleveland was recognized with the Penton Medal for excellence from the Cleveland Museum of Art.
In 1912, while working for the Cleveland Public Library, William Gwinn Mather, a private collector, sought Holmes’s advice on rebinding his collection. Mather was a descendant of the famous Mather clan that included Cotton and Increase and possessed a wealth of manuscripts and materials. He and Holmes became friends, a relationship that would prove significant for Holmes’s career; it is for his bibliographies of the various Mathers, including Cotton and Increase, that he is best known. Holmes went to work part-time for Mather, helping him catalog and acquire materials to improve on his collection, which included more than half of the 621 works written by assorted Mathers. By 1933, the collection consisted of more than 2,100 volumes and items of ancillary material.
Holmes frequently acted as Mather’s agent, traveling to the East Coast to purchase books on his behalf. On the Road with Holmes, published in 1989, is a record from one of Holmes’s diaries of such an excursion, “Memoranda: Trip to New York, Worcester and Boston, February 7 to 14, 1938.” The process of compiling full bibliographies for each of the Mathers was rigorous. Holmes wrote later of the undertaking in papers collected in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America: “the design was to compile a census, with location of every extant copy of these writings; to photograph and to reproduce in zinc etching every known Mather title-page, and other significant pages, such as those which contained colophons, etc.; and to examine, identify, and authenticate every known work; to give to it a full technical description by sheet signatures, by number of leaves, by pages, and by a description of its contents, according to the most improved modern practice.”
Documentation for Increase Mather was the first to be completed. In 1931, two volumes appeared, with a binding designed by Holmes. For reasons unknown, William Mather withdrew support for the project at this time. Dean H. Keller, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, speculates that perhaps the Depression was to blame, or perhaps he simply lost interest. Holmes, in his autobiography, merely suggests that Mather was “tired.” In September of 1935, the collection was sold for $80,000 to Tracy William McGregor. The collection eventually ended up as the McGregor Collection at Alderman Library of the University of Virginia. McGregor died less than a year after the purchase, but in his will, he provided funds for Holmes to continue his bibliographic work.
With McGregor’s money, Mather renewed his support. Holmes moved to Worcester to complete the project, and in 1940 three volumes of Cotton Mather’s works and one containing a bibliography of the lesser Mathers were published. Scholars and librarians recognized Holmes’s achievement as monumental. G. Thomas Tanselle writes in Selected Studies in Bibliography that Holmes’s work on Increase Mather “demonstrated more clearly than any previous American work that descriptive bibliography was a scholarly discipline, and I think it may fairly be said it is the earliest American author-bibliography which does not need to be done over.” In recognition of his achievement, he was granted an honorary doctorate by William Mather’s alma mater Trinity College.
Holmes returned to the Cleveland area that year and was made an honorary consultant to the Army Medical Library. As the most experienced member of the committee in preserving rare books, Holmes was called upon to deliver an address on “The Form of the Book and the Restoration Program of the Army Medical Library.” He delivered the address several times, and it was published in the Report of the Proceedings of the Second General Meeting of the Honorary Consultants of the Army Medical Library. Holmes also remained active in the Rowfant Club, which he had joined in 1924, and delivered an address there about the Bindery’s history in March of 1957. At the urging of a fellow member of the club, Lyon R. Richardson, he wrote an autobiographical letter that was published by the Western Reserve University Press in 1957.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Thomas Holmes is a member of Rowfant Club, American Antiquarian Society, and Bibliographical Society American.
Thomas James Holmes married Alice Mary Browning, on December 24, 1901. They children: John, Alice Rosa Hubbard, and Thomas.