The Caius Foundation × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A August study.
Gonville & Caius College, in its own words “a self-governing community of scholars,” was founded as Gonville Hall by Edmund Gonville in 1348 and re-founded in 1557 by Dr John Caius, once a student and Fellow, who returned to remake the place under his own name. Caius also built gates. Three survive as a sequence in stone: a new student enters through the Gate of Humility and passes the Gate of Virtue through the years of study. Only at graduation does a Caian walk out through the Gate of Honour to receive the degree.
An ocean away, The Caius Foundation raises money in the United States for the College. It is a 501(c)(3) educational fundraising organization; its 2024 federal filing reports $631,014 of revenue, with contributions as the principal source, and the College's legacy guidance points American supporters to it for bequests. Everything below is our framing alone. Nobody in Cambridge or New York asked for a gift set, and we drew one anyway, out of admiration for a college that has been receiving people through doorways since 1348.
Pressed – the Gate of Honour
The College's compact digital mark is the Gate of Honour drawn in near-black line, a domed tower above a crownlike parapet, slender arches repeating along the flanking walls below. The official file measures 110 pixels across, so we redrew it faithfully at die resolution before touching any leather. The device runs tall, about 0.54:1, and a tall device decides the orientation for us: upright tags, stamped width-wise, with the gate standing on leather as it stands in stone.
The trio render assembles three passed singles into one photograph. Black leads and carries the gate in gold foil, the single gilded pass of the study. Its companions take a blind deboss: country-gray, a warm stone gray for the masonry the real gates are cut from, and sangria, a deep scholar's wine.
The Atlantic Return
The Gate of Honour is the College's own device, so the companion die comes from the Foundation's side of the story, and that side is a crossing. A gift raised in New York travels east over the Atlantic and lands, at the end of a long arc, on a Cambridge threshold. We call the mark the Atlantic Return, and we cut it to hold one turn only.
Three strokes carry the whole plate. A level waterline stands for the ocean. One long arc springs from the western end and crests mid-crossing; it comes down through a small round-arched doorway on the far shore, the tip stopping just inside the opening, above the threshold. The doorway stays deliberately plain, without dome or finial, so the College's gate keeps its distance. Our first drafts were greedier: we pressed all three gates into a single plate, and at tray scale the sequence read well. At the six-millimetre corner of a journal it collapsed into gray noise, and a two-millimetre brass rule has no patience for noise. The arc held at every size we tried, so the arc stayed, though we still wonder whether an old Caian will miss the other two gates.
On the toiletry bags the mark turns quiet. It sits at maker's-mark scale in the lower right corner of each front face, blind debossed into the photographed pair of black over dark espresso; even the black bag goes without gold here, by house law.
For the keychains we split the finishes. The black fob takes the arc in gold foil, echoing the gilded tag at the head of the set, while the sangria fob takes a blind deboss. Both marks sit centered below the rivet, generous inside the stitching.
Arizona is the tray's one leather, and it renders as a golden tan that can photograph brighter than life. Here the die gets its broad plate, pressed at the center of the base and clear of the stitched border, so the whole crossing reads at arm's length. A tray is where the day's pockets empty; the keys land somewhere over the mid-Atlantic.
Last come the journals, dark espresso beside country-gray, the mark again compact in the lower right corner, clear of strap and stitching. Notebooks felt right as the closing piece; a foundation for scholars deserves somewhere for the writing to begin.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you're The Caius Foundation and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.