Clara Buffum
Posted on January 20, 2025 by Jenny ONeill
WOMEN OF WESTPORT POINT
Clara Buffum (1873-1938)
Bookbinder
21 Cape Bial Lane, Westport Point
Noted craftsman in the art of fine bookbinding, Clara Buffum bound many famous and valuable books including a first edition of Chaucer. Like a true craftsman, she scorned modern shortcuts in bookbindery and revived the ancient method of using the raised cord binding. She resorted to goat skin procured from England.
Clara Buffum (1873-1938) lived with Jessie Luther, both of whom never married, at 21 Cape Bial Lane in a house which they built in 1928 and used as a summer residence. Clara had owned a separate house on Cape Bial Lane. Clara was born in New York City, but was in Providence by 1906. She may have studied or worked in bookbinding in New York.
Clara’s grandmother was from Massachusetts – Sarah A. S. Buffum – and was later neighbors with Lyle Ring’s parents in Cheshire, Keane Ward, New Hampshire. That most likely was a reason Clara came to Westport Point which was near to Providence. Lyle Ruland and Pauline Teel Ring lived at 21Cape Bial following Clara. ( A note: Cape Bial Lane was referred to as Wild Goose Lane. Bial is taken from Abial Macomber who owned the land there.)
In 1920 she is living with her mother and brother in Providence. She is an artist in the bookbinding business which she owns.
She was a proprietor at the Providence Athenaeum in 1897. She catalogued the Crosby Brown Collection of Musician’s Portraits and Biographical Sketches in 1904 which was published by the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in NY. In the introduction to that work it states: “It only remains to say that the preparation of the catalogue has been the work of Miss Clara Buffum of Providence, R.I. to whom the collector wishes to express her hearty thanks for her patient and painstaking labor.”
Mary Elizabeth Brown who wrote “An Anthology of the Forms Used from the Earliest Days of Book-making to the Present Time”, cites Clara Buffum’s work: Hand-Bound Books a Guide for Amateur Bookbinders, Providence, Ackerman-Standard, 1935.
In 1936 she published Hand-Bound Books which is about binding techniques and the history of making books by hand. She exhibited her work at the annual BGS exhibitions until a year or so before her death.
Clara died in North Adams, Ma. In July 1938. She was buried at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence.