Lettercutter Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley, the student and widow of David Kindersley, has been made an MBE in the New Year’s honours list.

The award comes as Lida, who now runs the workshop in Cambridge that David established in 1946, prepares to mark what would have been David’s 100^th birthday this year with events at Cambridge University Press actually on his birthday, 11 June, and the British Library the day after. David and Lida designed the bronze gates of the British Library, made up of the words ‘British Library’, and cut the name in the same font in the red Corsehill sandstone above them.

On 30 April, a whole floor of Waterstones bookshop in Cambridge will be set aside for the launch of a reprint of one of David’s books, Mr Gill, about his years working with Eric Gill, and a graphic novel written by Tom Sherwood and illustrated by Lida and Fiona Boyd, who works alongside Lida in her workshop.

Lida says her MBE is ‘for services to lettercutting’. She told NSS: “I’m rather chuffed they used the term lettercutting.” She says she was surprised by her own pride at receiving the honour. “To receive this recognition that, from a public point of view, one is noticed is very nice.”

Lida employs six other lettercutters in her workshop, including three apprentices and her youngest son, Vincent, who is also learning lettercutting.

She is critical of employment taxation and legislation, which she says discourages craftspeople from employing people and passing on their skills. “If I can have a little rant: You should be getting money thrown at you for letting people come into your workshop but it’s the other way round.”

Nevertheless, she does not like working alone and says: “I would rather have people working with me than money in the bank”.

Over the years Lida has trained 60 others in the craft at which she excels. She has also written and contributed to several books about lettercutting, including Letters Cut in Slate, which she co-authored with David Kindersley in 1981.