Katharine Adams (1862-1952) was an English bookbinder associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. During her career, Adams designed approximately 300 bindings, using her own hand-crafted tools to create intricate gold-tooled details. Adams was born in Bracknell, Berkshire, England on November 25, 1862, to Catherine Mary Horton and Reverend William Fulford Adams. In 1865, her family moved to Little Faringdon, Oxfordshire. A few years later the artist and textile designer William Morris (1834-1896) moved his family to nearby Kelmscott Manor. The close proximity of the families resulted in the lifelong friendship between Katharine, Jane Morris (1839-1914), an embroiderer in the Arts and Crafts movement and artists' model, and her daughter, the artist May Morris (1862-1938), who founded the Women's Guild of Arts. It was with the Morris that Adams began some early experiments in bookbinding using cobbler's leather and needlework.

Adams trained for short periods of time in London with Sarah Prideaux (1853-1933) and T.J. Cobden-Sanderson (1840-1922), then began binding professionally during the 1890s. From 1899 to the 1930s, Adams regularly exhibited her work at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. In 1897, she opened a workshop in Lechlade, and received her first commission from Jane Morris. Adams established the Eadburgh Bindery in Broadway, Worcestershire, in 1901 where she worked alone before employing and training two women assistants. During this time, she taught binding to the nuns at Stanbrook Abbey, where she became friends with Dame Laurentia McLachlan (1856-1953), OSB, the Abbess of Stanbrook.

In 1898, Adams won first prize at the Oxford Arts and Crafts exhibition and shortly after she began receiving regular commissions from leaders in the Arts and Crafts movement, including Charles Harry St. John Hornby (1867-1946), the founder of the Ashendene Press and Sydney Cockerell (1867-1962), the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, both of whom became close friends. Early in the twentieth century, Adams began exhibiting in Europe and abroad, winning several awards. She became the second president of the Women’s Guild of Arts in 1935 and in 1938 she became a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Included among Adams’ important bindings are Queen Mary’s psalter, the Tutte le opere di Dante Alighieri, (Ashendene Press, 1910), and the Doves Press Bible (1903-1905), which she bound with T.J. Cobden-Sanderson.

In 1913, Adams married scholar Edmund James Webb (1853-1945) the son of Reverend Benjamin Webb and Maria Elphinstone Mill. The couple moved to Oxfordshire in 1915 and returned to Gloucestershire in the 1930s. Adams used her maiden name throughout her personal and professional life. Katharine Adams died in Gloucestershire on October 15, 1952.