By Jann Haynes Gilmore, PhD, AWA Board Member

Winter solstice has arrived once more; a change from warming interior sunlight to a darker domestic space that makes one feel like curling up with a good art book. It is a welcome time for those who love art and books.

I have known about the beauty of book cover design created by women for several years through my lovely, departed friend, Sue Allen (d. 2011), who was an expert on 19th century American book covers. Sue was always working on her book, being one of those true scholars who never stopped researching and, thus, never completed her opus. She wrote an important addition to The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University titled: Gleaming Gold Shining Silver, a brochure on book covers from its Baskin Collection. She also taught at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

An important project highlighting American women book cover designers took place in 2020 at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, called Transforming the Ordinary: Women in American Book Cover Design. I attended the exhibition with another devoted friend of Sue Allen. This title succinctly describes this little-known genre among a much larger global development called the Arts and Crafts Movement. It began in Great Britain in the mid- 19th century by notable reformers, critic John Ruskin, and designer, William Morris. Their purpose was to assuage the collision of mechanical energy generated by the Industrial Revolution by urging society to give attention to objects of personal, handcrafted and timeless material culture. Much has been written about the history of this movement but here I highlight contributions made by American women artists who designed book covers.

A label in the 2020 Farnsworth exhibition describes women’s roles:

The heyday of American book cover design was from 1870s to 1930, a time of great experimentation brought on by revolutionary developments in the art and publishing worlds. An eager American audience was introduced to the sinuous, organic design aesthetics of Art Nouveau and the restrained and democratized Arts and Crafts Movement . . . . Women artists flocked to Boston, the publishing capital of the US and other major cities to fill newly-created educational and job opportunities in the nascent field of ‘decorative design.’

This was one of the few areas in which women artists were able to establish a career in the mid-to-late 19th century. New advances in mechanized printing, binding, and ornamentation technologies made the mass production of decorative cloth bindings possible. . . . This satisfied the public demand not only for reading material but also from the banality of mass production to the liberating ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement . . . celebrating the beauty of everyday through . . .the careful production of thoughtfully designed, hand-crafted objects made through the dignity of honest labor.

This label concludes that a tastefully-designed book cover transforms it into a work of art. ¹

For a full history of the Arts and Crafts Movement there are many books available but on my shelf is one I usually consult: “The Art that is Life”: The Arts & Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920, a book that accompanied an exhibition of the same title at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, forty years ago. This project focused on the aesthetics of the movement in which Ruskin and Morris urged replacing the fussy patterns of the Victorian era with nature-inspired simplicity and unity in design. Images and patterns became flat and stylized. ²

Another book focuses more narrowly on women’s contributions to the movement, Women Artists of the Arts & Crafts Movement; 1870-1914, 1979. It outlines the areas of the decorative movement in which women artists were a part: Design Education for Women, Ceramics, Needlework, Metal Work, Furniture and Interior Design, and Hand-Printing, Book-Binding and Illustration, the latter being almost an afterthought to the overall discussion. ³  Most of us know the current revelatory stories of the women ceramists at Newcomb Pottery, a part of Sophie Newcomb (women’s) College/Tulane University in New Orleans and the well-deserved recognition of the women artists who anonymously designed for Louis Tiffany Studios and were only recently credited including Clara Driscoll (1861-1944) who headed the company’s Glass Cutting Department.

Here I focus on three American women book cover designers: Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842-1904), Margaret Armstrong (1867-1944), and Amy Sacker (1876-1965).

Sarah de St. Prix Wyman Whitman
Born in Baltimore, Sarah Wyman was raised in a wealthy family and eventually grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, educated by tutors. In 1866 she married Harry Whitman, a wealthy merchant, and she became one of Boston’s ‘leading ladies’, hosting a literary club in the city and summering in the fashionable Beverly Farms on the North Shore. She had little art training beyond Boston painters and trips to Europe to study the Great Masters. She worked in pastel and oil in landscapes and portraits which won many respected national awards. By the 1890s, having studied with the American artist, John La Farge (work in Trinity Church, Boston), she had become a leading designer of stained-glass windows, establishing her own studio, the Lily Glass Works, in Boston. Also, in 1884, she started designing covers and illustrations for over 300 books, mostly for Houghton Mifflin, Publishers, which included authors Oliver Wendel Holmes, Celia Thaxter, and friend, Sarah Orne Jewett. While embracing the tenets of the Arts & Crafts Movement she minimized her designs and gave careful consideration to negative space using linear drawings of botanicals, asymmetrical composition, and muted colors of green, gold and deep reds.

Wyman was active in New England arts scene inaugurating the Boston Watercolor Club for women only, serving as an officer and co-founder of the Boston Arts and Crafts Society, and serving as president of the Women’s Auxiliary for military troops. As a philanthropist, she benefited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Radcliffe College, and as an abolitionist she supported Tuskegee University in Alabama and Berea College in Kentucky, as well as Howard University in D.C.

Whitman designed the carved crest for the original portal entrance to Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for her friend, its namesake. Late in life with health issues, she moved to South Berwick, Maine, where she became a neighbor of Sarah Jewett. The Farnsworth Museum states her importance: “Whitman’s artistic vision and commercial success made her an inspiring role model for generations of female artists. “⁴

Margaret Neilson Armstrong (1867-1944)
Margaret Armstrong was a multifaceted book cover designer. She was born and died in New York City, daughter of a diplomat and a descendant of the Dutch founders of the city. Her career began in the late 1880s with her greatest commissions coming from publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, totaling about half of the 314 covers she created. Armstrong was very much influenced by Art Nouveau forms and created botany-related motifs, with bold colors, gold stamping, and also asymmetrical compositions. It was said that her designs “seemed to be moving while standing still.” Her most famous book author was Robert Louis Stevenson.
In 1895 her book covers began to feature her monogram as “MA”. She was most interested in plant species and traveled and camped in the western United States and Canada from 1909 to 1914, collecting species, some of which she discovered. She was also one of the first women to descend into the Grand Canyon. In 1915 Armstrong wrote her Field Book of Western Wild Flowers, considered to be the first comprehensive guide on the subject. In her career, she also wrote three acclaimed mystery novels.
Armstrong ‘s creations exhibit less stylization than Whitman but she developed a distinct lettering system recognizable by her flourished ‘R’. She also selected her own fabric for covers and used more than one color in the design layout. Armstrong was a pathfinder in cover design and inspired so many followers that publishers, who recognized that beautiful covers could sell books, often hired artists to imitate Armstrong’s work. ⁵

Amy Maria Sacker (1876-1965)
Amy Sacker was formally trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and was a prolific designer for book publishers like Joseph Knight, L.C. Page & Company, and Houghton Mifflin. She worked prolifically in bookbinding, metal, wood, and fabric design at the Cowles School of Design in Boston until it closed in 1901, after which she founded the Amy Sacker’s School of Design (and Interior Decoration) in the city where she taught for 40 years.  Sacker’s unique style of design employed figurative compositions that dominate the entire cover instead of typical botanical ornamentation. She also illustrated children’s books. In 1899 she was elected as a master craftsman in the Society of Arts & Crafts. She taught at Simmons College beginning in 1904 and lived in the Back Bay in a suite at the nearby Fenmore Apartments, a professional women’s apartment hotel, until her death. She also toured Europe, inspired to create in mediums of painting, jewelry, basketry, leatherwork, portraiture, greeting cards, and bookplates. ⁶

Postscript for further interest:
The Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, founded in 1983, moved to Charlottesville in 1992 and has as its mission “to support the study of the history of books and printing and related subjects.”

The Grolier Club, NYC, 1884, is the oldest society for bibliophiles and history of graphic artists.  Its programs include a library, exhibitions, lectures, and publications related to book history.

Museum of the American Arts & Crafts Movement, St. Petersburg, Florida, is the only American museum dedicated solely to the movement. Its collections include furniture, pottery, tiles, photography, graphic and fine arts, books, metalworks and period room installations.

Endnotes:

1. Exhibition Label, Transforming the Ordinary: Women in American Book Cover Design, Angela Waldon, curator, Farnsworth Museum, Rockland. Maine, 2020.

2. Wendy Kaplan, [with contributors] “The Art that is Life”: The Arts & Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, 1987.  Book Brochure: “Reform in Craftsmanship: The reformers belief in the restorative power of craftsmanship and the joy the worker would take in creation not only led to the proliferation of individual craftsmen studios and small shops and printing presses, but had an effect on factories as well: greater concern for the workers’ well-being, recreation sources and pleasant landscaping.”

3. Anthea Callen, Women Artists of the Arts & Crafts Movement: 1870-1914, Pantheon Books, New York, 1979.

4. Sarah W. Whitman, Wikipedia, en.m.wikipedia.org; Exhibition Label: Sarah Wyman Whitman, Farnsworth Museum, Transforming the Ordinary, 2020.

5. Barbara Bieck, “Art of the Book: Margaret Armstrong and Her Bindings,” The New York  Society Library, May 8, 2017, nysoclib.org; Margaret Neilson Armstrong, en.m.wikipedia.org.; Armstrong, Farnsworth, Transforming the Ordinary, 2020.

6. Sacker, Farnsworth Museum, Transforming the Ordinary, 2020; Anna Boyles, “The Fenmore: A Professional Women’s Apartment Hotel,” boston.gov (official website of City of Boston); Amy Maria Sacker, en.m.wikipedia.org; Meredith Mann, “Designing Women: The Art of Cloth Bindings”, New York Public Library, March 24, 2016, nypl.org.