Robert Muma

The Society printed more about Robert Muma than about any other member and never printed a life of him. This account is assembled from its own newsletters. Its spine is the tribute the Ontario Crafts Council's Craft News published in November 1977 and the Society reprinted in full — the only continuous account of his life the archive holds.

The letter that started the Society

The Society exists because an exhibition ignored leathercraft. “About 1949, the (then) Toronto Art Gallery sponsored an exhibition of handcrafts. Badly shaken because leathercraft was almost totally ignored, he wrote to Deane Russell of Ottawa, who had founded the Ottawa Valley Leathercraft Guild, and discussed with him the possibility of wider organization for the purpose of channelling leather creatively into a higher art form. The result was the Canadian Society for Creative Leathercraft.”

• Born in 1907 at Coldstream, near London, Ontario
• Founded Mumart Studios of Creative Leathercraft in 1947, at 62 McGill Street, Toronto
• Wrote to Deane H. Russell of Ottawa about “wider organization” for leathercraft — the letter that led to the Society
• Presided at the organizational meeting of 8 June 1950 at which the Society was formed
• The Society's first Treasurer, and a Charter Member
• Author of Color Decoration and Finishing of Leather (1952) and Color in Leathercraft (1954), and publisher of the Mumart Leathercraft Designs
• Fellow, 1953; Honorary Life Fellow Membership, 1962
• Won the first craftsman's scholarship of the Women's Committee of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, $500, October 1959, and turned to bookbinding full time
• Master bookbinder at 118 Hazelton Avenue, Toronto; commissions for the Queen, the Governor General and Col. Sam McLaughlin
• Honorary membership of the Canadian Crafts Council for Ontario, 1977
• Wrote the Society's first history, The Society's First Ten Years, in 1960

The minutes bear it out from the other end. The organizational meeting of 8 June 1950, reprinted forty years later in Spring 1990, opens: “Mr. Robert Muma, Toronto, presided at the meeting.” Seventeen people were present and his name heads the list of them. He is a Charter Member, and the officer panel of Fall 1952 gives him as Treasurer — an office the same page says he had held “since its formation nearly three years ago”.

He also wrote the Society's first history. The Society's First Ten Years, printed in Spring 1960 and reprinted word for word in Spring 1975, is his account of the founding, and remains the archive's best first-hand source for it.

Nature, art, and making things with his hands

“Robert Muma was born in 1907 at Coldstream, near London, Ont. His whole life has been motivated by three major fields of interest — nature, art, and making things with his hands. Because of ill health for most of his life, Robert Muma had to find some combination of these interests and aptitudes for a livelihood at home. The result was the formation in 1947 of Mumart Leather Studio.”

The Society's own profile of him, printed in Fall 1952 under the heading About the Craftsman, fills in what came before: “interested in nature, taxidermy, drawing and crafts since childhood; illustrated university texts and nature stories; trained as a bookbinder in several of Toronto's larger binderies; has specialized in leather as a decorative art-craft for the past 7 years.” It lists his competitive record as it stood in 1952 — first and second prizes at the 1947 C.N.E., first prize and a bronze medal at the 1948 P.N.E., and the Lewiscraft Award at the 1949 C.N.E. — and adds that for three years he had been consultant on tooling to Clarke and Clarke Leathers and had shown at their annual C.N.E. exhibitions.

On his training the 1977 tribute is blunt: “Except for six months at one art school and six weeks at another, he was entirely self-taught. He says: ‘I always had confidence I had a different “mouse trap” to offer and my classes in leathercraft proved this.’”

Mumart

Mumart Studios of Creative Leathercraft traded from 62 McGill Street, Toronto, and advertised in this newsletter from its earliest issues; the notice of December 1951 offers a “NEW MUMART DESIGN — Matched Set No 5” of shoulder bag, billfold, keycase and change purse, with complete instructions, fifty cents postpaid. Under the registered trade name he ran the business from 1946 or 1947, “offering custom bookbinding and general leathercraft products”, with private and group lessons at the studio.

The publications did more than the shop. “His published portfolios of Canadian Leathercraft Designs and his book Color in Leathercraft, published and sold extensively in both Canada and the U.S., brought advanced students for summer classes from Halifax to Wisconsin and Long Island to Regina”; at their peak, “proceeds from Robert Muma's publication of books and technical articles accounted for about one-third of his income”. Color Decoration and Finishing of Leather was “just off the press” in Fall 1952 at $1.50; Colour in Leathercraft followed in 1954, forty-four pages, subtitled A Complete Course In Color Decoration and Finishing Of Leather For The Handcraftsman. The newsletter was still recommending it as “a must for those who seek information on colour” in 1972, eighteen years after publication.

He taught for the Society and well beyond it. Hazel Quinn's profile records that he taught at Red Deer, Alberta, for three summers, 1960, 1961 and 1962, four weeks each year; Edith Melchior trained under him at Mumart in 1955–56 and was awarded a Certificate of Merit from the studio; Irva Ford's training list names Mumart among four; and Sherle Bottrill was taught by him with Don MacKinnon in her first years as a member. In Spring 1978 the Ontario Crafts Council's Craft Resource Centre announced that it had received from him “a complete set of his Mumart series of books and demonstration charts for Mumart Leathercraft Techniques 1948–60” — the whole teaching apparatus, given away.

The scholarship, and the turn to books

Fall 1959 carried a short notice by Anne Hook: “SCHOLARSHIP FOR ROBERT MUMA — Sincere congratulations to Bob Muma on winning the first scholarship, value $500, awarded by the Women's Committee of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild to a craftsman.” It was presented at that committee's annual meeting of 29 October 1959. The Society's twenty-fifth-anniversary history, in the Spring 1975 newsletter, puts the consequence in one sentence: “Since this time, Bob has devoted his full time to book binding and operates his own studio in Toronto.”

By 1972 the newsletter found him settled at it. “Bob Muma, master bookbinder, works out of a ground-floor studio at 118 Hazelton Avenue, Toronto. He not only restores old bindings but creates modern ones to suit any particular book presented for repair.” The same page lists the commissions: “He has done work for the Queen, the Governor General, Col. Sam McLaughlin” and others, and for the St. Lawrence Centre. The 1977 tribute names the same royal commission more carefully — work for “HRH Princess, later, Queen, Elizabeth II” — and adds the institutional restoration: “extensive work for the Buffalo Reference Library Rare Book Room, the Royal Ontario Museum Library, and the New Brunswick Provincial Archives after they were damaged by the flood of the Saint John River a few years ago.”

He named his own best contribution, and it was a method rather than a book. “I believe the most significant contribution I have made to the field of book restoration is the discovery of a method of removing the leather spine of an old book in one piece so it can be replaced on the new leather spine and so retain its original character. It seemed incredible to me that restorers for centuries have been agonizing over the heart-breaking task of trying to remove an elaborately gilded, fragile leather spine in as few pieces as possible and then replacing them meticulously in proper order onto the new spine.” The page's photograph shows him at the bench, captioned Robert Muma tooling the title of a book in gold.

What the Society gave him

He was among the first eight Fellows named in Spring 1953. Nine years later, at the Annual Meeting of 1962, Dr. Ralph K. Larmour presented him with an Honorary Life Fellow Membership, the Society's highest honour and only its fourth: “Mr. Robert Muma has been a great asset to the Society since its founding. His advice is always sought, and it is usually right. His influence as a teacher and practitioner of his craft is widespread. In his own specialty, bookbinding, he has added lustre to the meaning of this Society. In his quiet way he has encouraged many faltering novices to persevere in the craft.”

The wider craft world reached the same verdict fifteen years later. In 1977 he “was declared the winner for Ontario of an honorary membership in the Canadian Crafts Council at its recent conference and annual general meeting”, and Joan Chalmers read the tribute at the awards dinner. It is that tribute this page is chiefly built from.

The newsletter prints the province as Price Edward Island — the Society's own printer's error, kept as printed. The Canadian Crafts Council held its 1977 conference in Prince Edward Island.

Mosses

The tribute ends with a man being let out of a long illness. “Two years ago, Robert Muma's health deteriorated further and a new doctor just ‘stumbled onto’ a very rare chemical imbalance that led to the removal of a large but obscure benign tumour which had apparently been interfering with his functioning for 40 to 50 years. So now, phases of his life, long denied to him, open up for fulfillment.” Macro photography had already taken him “to the fantastic world of mosses”; arthritis in his hands had caught up with the binding. “So at 69, he says, it is time to retire and do something else new and strange — and that is to seriously collect and identify some of the over 400 species of mosses of Ontario.”

The piece closes with four lines he had kept for years, printed as his own comment on his own work:

Growth means constant change
so only those who dare
to do things new and strange
are getting anywhere

What this archive does not tell us

He died on 22 February 1993: the Spring 1993 newsletter and the 43rd Annual Meeting booklet of that year both record his passing. His wife Dorothy Muma, a Charter Member, a Fellow of 1955 and President of the Society at the end of the 1960s, is a separate figure in these newsletters and has her own record; the Fall 2008 newsletter carries tributes to her and notes that their son Walter Muma maintained a website of his father's work. The Robert Muma Memorial Award, for the best coloured piece, is named for him and was competed for until the Society's last competition in 2025.

Six of his pieces were shown together in the Society's exhibition of Fall 1967 — a gold-tooled box, a hand-moulded jug, a napkin ring, a candle holder, a calf-bound copy of The Holy Flame, and a guest book — the largest single showing by any one maker on that list. He also took an honourable mention and a first prize at the Canadian Handicrafts Guild display at the C.N.E. of 1956, in the “most original entry” and “neither tooled nor carved” classes.

Chiefly from the Ontario Crafts Council's Craft News, Volume 2 Number 6, November 1977, reprinted in Canadian Leathercraft, Winter 1977, page 6 — Joan Chalmers's tribute at the Canadian Crafts Council awards dinner. Corroborated from the Society's own pages: the profile of Fall 1952 page 12, the Mumart advertisements of December 1951 and Fall 1952, the scholarship notice of Fall 1959 page 5, the exhibition list of Fall 1967 page 9, the studio visit of Summer 1972 page 8, the Craft Resource Centre notice of Spring 1978 page 8, Dr. Larmour's citation of Spring 1962 page 4, and the founding minutes reprinted in Spring 1990 page 8.