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The paper overviews the history of the privately owned Kaunas Women's Arts and Crafts School (1927-1940), established by the craftswoman Stasė Gudonytė-Biziokienė (1896-1943). Her work is analysed in the context of the interwar arts and crafts education. The school was continuing the tradition of women's crafts education that formed in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Being part of the interwar elite, Gudonytė-Bizokienė, was considered one of the founders of Lithuanian high fashion. During the period of 1935-1936, the school introduced three additional courses: hat making, women's fashion, and children's clothing design and tailoring. The paper uses archival material and memories of family members to present the biography of Gudonytė-Bizokienė. The paper also describes the school with its educational aims, structure, institutional reforms of 1935, and its curriculum. The paper overviews the remaining samples of the students' work that reflect the interwar ideals of a cosy home space, and feature a mix of art deco and modernised folk style. The significance of the school is demonstrated by tracing the careers of its graduates in the general context of arts and crafts education of the time. Apart from Kaunas Art School and Dotnuva Academy of Agriculture (1924-1945), Kaunas Women's Arts and Crafts School was the only higher education establishment with speciality in arts. The school's aims matched the Lithuanian demands. Gudonytė-Bizokienė's tailoring courses were on par with the educational programs of the notable tailors of the interwar Kaunas. The paper concludes that it was the artistic crafts that Gudonytė-Bizokienė saw as her main goal, while the fashion salons were only an appendage to her educational work. Crafts education was credited with a higher status in the Lithuanian schools of vocational education. However small, the group of the school's graduates that the research was able to identify demonstrates excellent professional skills and readiness to work in the sphere of crafts education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the work of Kaunas bookbinding studios during the Interwar period. The research resulted in a large amount of archival data on the identities of the bookbinders from that time, as well as their professional qualifications, capacities, work management, level of mechanization, services on offer, materials used, product prices and requests from clients. The research aimed to reveal the differences between the industrial, custom high-street and custom artisan bookbinding. However it turned out that they were all closely intertwined. The analysis of the documented bookbinding equipment in various workshops has shown that the process of mechanization was rather slow, and that even the mass production was dominated by manual work. Back then, many books would leave the printing presses soft covered, and authors themselves often had to personally seek out the bookbinders for more durable book covers. Back then Kaunas had several types of bookbinding studios: industrial printing house bookbinders, private bookbinding businesses, and individual artisans. However all these types of workshops were able to provide the same range of services -- from mass productions to one-off books, both normal and artist editions. For instance, printing house bookbinders would not only take care of the mass production but also accept individual orders, even for one-off prints. Furthermore, all bookbinding studios were not only binding books (and documents) but also producing folders, photo albums and greeting cards, as well as padding the maps and charts with fabric and offering book 'restoration' services. Although Kaunas had no bookbinding school, many artistic bookbinding experts knowledgeable of the many intricacies of the craft. The craft of bookbinding often intertwined with leather decoration business -- the latter also used the same materials and offered products such as photo albums and notebooks. The Interwar leather processing and bookbinding industries were highly influenced by "Šatrija", a bookbinding company which had the Estonian expert Aksel Karing workin under their employ. He introduced some artistic and technical innovations of leather processing, thus significantly popularising this trade. The research concludes that the Lithuanian artistic bookbinding has been influenced by the Estonian school much earlier than it was thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]