Binding of the Month Club

A certain cover design keeps popping into my head.  I like it for no other reason than … I like it!  I don’t know who the designer was; there are certainly more “elegant” designs; that really doesn’t matter.  If I had been browsing in a bookstore in 1902, that book with that cover would be leaving with me, and my $1.50 would be staying.  The point being that some covers just do that to you—make a strong initial impression and then stay with you.  Perhaps it’s an unusual cloth color, or an image that's hard to forget, or both, as with a cover from my June post.(1)  It might be a great example of a design style or what seems to be the representative cover by a certain designer.  It could be a train wreck that you can’t look away from, or something that makes you smile.

To celebrate those covers that either of us just like, our Binding of the Month Club begins this month.  (I considered calling it the B##k of the M#nth Cl#b, but that seems to be trademarked.  So we’ll skirt the edges of infringement with the help of our favorite noun.)

The first offering from the Club is the aforementioned head-popping design:

Hamblen, Herbert E.  The Red-Shirts: a Romance of the Old Volunteer Fire Department.  New York: Street & Smith, 1902.

What a cover!  The story, as far as I can tell, is that of our young hero Robert "Bob" Sinclair who moves from New Hampshire to an unnamed large city.  Here he becomes fascinated with the volunteer fire departments.  He is apprenticed as a stonemason (the same trade as his dour and cheap father) and in his teens becomes involved with volunteer fire department 19.  He has a sweetheart, Sallie Taylor.  And a dog!  A Saint Bernard puppy named Bruno who grows up in the firehouse.  He becomes foreman of the Niagara 50 company (Bob, that is, not Bruno), and rises to even greater glory. 

What follows is adventure! Heroics! Romance! Tragedy!  Nuanced examinations of character! Actually not so much of the last...

But there are "thrilling scenes" aplenty, as well as "jolly good humor" in abundance.  An advertisement from the Overland Monthly(2) sums it all up:

Herbert Hamblen.  Image
from Wikipedia

The author, Herbert Elliott Hamblen (1849-1908) was a civil engineer and an author, born in Ossippee, New Hampshire on Dec. 24, 1849.  He came to New York City as a child and later went to sea as a cabin boy.  After 14 years at sea, from 1864 to 1878, and rising to chief mate, he washed ashore and changed careers, becoming a railroad engineer from 1880 to 1894.  He then became a civil engineer for the New York City Aqueduct Department and began writing books in 1896(3).

It's a little hard to tell who the intended audience is ... general audience? young adults? "every old volunteer fireman"?  The 10 advertisements for other Street & Smith publications at the end of the novel aren't much help.  They  include 2 books for girls, 2 Alexandre Dumas novels, some "eerie tales of 'Chinatown'", a humorous insect book, (The Book of Bugs), and a book on ping pong, edited by a "ping pong expert", bound in silk cloth,  for only 50 cents!

But let's get back to the cover.  The cloth is a dark greenish-blue stamped with five  colors--black, red, white, tan, and light blue--and gold.  A large figure of a fireman carrying a speaking trumpet and apparently shouting to his right dominates the cover.  He's dressed in the titular red shirt and wears a fire hat with a large badge with the number 19 on it.  There is stylized smoke, or it might be clouds behind him.  The pictorial area is framed by a black line border.  On the spine is a fire bell with the silhouette of a building below it.  Both the front cover and spine are lettered in gold.  

Although it's not really visible in the picture above, the cloth has a fine (that is, narrow) vertical rib grain.  Books have been written about grained cloth, but suffice it to say that here the grained cloth not only gives the book both an interesting visual and physical texture, but emphasizes the orientation of the design.  This image of the back cover shows the grain more clearly.  

Notable in this design is the sense of movement.  The fireman is breaking out of the frame in four different directions: his left foot is so far "forward" that it rests between the first two words of the title with his heel almost resting on the serif of the "E" and his toes nearly supported by the letter "I" in the following line; his right elbow just about touches the black frame, while his hat does touch the upper frame; the mouthpiece of the speaking trumpet actually does push past the right frame.  The abbreviated image of "smoke" or perhaps clouds behind him outlines the silhouettes of buildings, and its lower continuation suggests that he might be running down a street.  When preparing a design it was important that the artist have at least some idea of the subject matter or story that was to be contained within the covers.  Ideally, she would have the text to examine before starting the design, since the object of the cover was not only to attract the eye, but to give the potential buyer an idea of what was inside the book.  No small task when he only had one image to accomplish all this.  Sometimes the design might reflect one aspect of the contents, or it could illustrate a representative or important scene.  Sometimes it might give a general impression of the genre (for example, a society novel), or it might simply be decorative.  I didn't need to scan the book for long to find that the unknown designer of this cover had a specific scene in mind.  Bob has recently arrived in the big city and pages 20-21 tell exactly what inspired the cover:

"As I wondered at what his words portended, a man carrying a brass trumpet came tearing around the corner, running in the middle of the street. He was by all odds the queerest figure I had yet seen.  He had on a leather hat, with the number 19 on a white shield in front. He also wore a fiery red shirt, and was running as if for dear life. He turned suddenly, put the trumpet to his mouth and called out something that I could not understand, but still kept on running."

Except for the white shield on the hat (on the cover it's red), there's the image.  

Why did I choose this cover?  Aside from thinking it's effective, eye-catching, and--most important--makes we want to read and thus buy the book, I find it a very nice example of the poster style of design.  I won't go into much detail on the poster style; books have also been written on that subject.  There's a nice essay on the poster style and publishers bindings at the University of Alabama's Publishers Bindings Online (PBO) site.  Briefly, although posters have been around for centuries, the 19^th (and 20^th) century illustrated poster style began in France and was taken up in America in the 1890s.  The “father” of the American poster was Edward Penfield (1866-1925), an artist who was born in Brooklyn and died in Beacon, N.Y.(4)  

Image from the Library of Congress.
Prints and Photographs Division

Edward Penfield.  Image from Wikipedia.

He worked from 1891 to 1901 at Harper and Brothers as an illustrator and art editor for the firm and his first poster, for the April issue of Harper's Magazine, appeared in 1893.(5)  His style has been described as effectively combining Art Nouveau, Japonisme, and Arts and Crafts "to create some of the finest posters, advertisements, and magazine covers of the 20th century."(6)  

(Our only Penfield cover in the American Publishers Trade Bindings collection.  Penfield signed his posters and illustrations with his initials, full name, or the "bull horns" monogram shown on the right)

Other publishers soon followed Harper in commissioning posters for their magazines and books, and within a few years America had succumbed to a full-blown "poster craze."  Collectors were enthusiastic and everywhere.  Although the publisher's intention was to use the poster as advertisement and sell more magazines and/or books, the success of the poster as advertisement rather than as a work of art was dubious. In 1896 a collector complained "I purchase the poster now when once I would purchase the book and I do not think my publishers profit thereby."(7)  People were buying or obtaining copies of posters from booksellers, publishers and other outlets, but were not rushing out to buy the books or magazines themselves.  By the end of the decade the publisher poster phenomenon had largely died out.  The designs were instead used on the magazine covers or books themselves.  The characteristic poster style began to appear on book covers towards the end of the 1890s, at the same time that posters themselves were in decline.  The style continued to appear on covers through the first three decades of the twentieth century until it, along with all other styles of cover design, finally succumbed to the dust jacket.  

Let's take another look at The Red-Shirts in comparison to the characteristics of poster style given by the PBO essay:  a bold design--check; a flat, two-dimensional look--check; limited color scheme--check, although 5 colors is in the upper reaches for a book cover; use of the cloth color as part of the image--check; a figural or narrative scene--check to both; stylized features--check; and close integration of image and text/typeface--check.  

Though the poster style came late to American art and even later to American book covers, it was very common by the turn of the century and even more prevalent in the early 1900s.  Many artists adopted it, at least for some of their designs, and for some it seems to be their preferred style.  Our collection contains many examples of this style.  We are now beginning to do some data cleanup and will begin to add "theme" and/or style headings to make it possible to search for such aspects of the designs (don't try searching yet as nothing has been added, but we'll keep everyone updated on our progress).  In the meantime, here are some illustrations of work from well known poster artists paired with one of their cover designs from the collection. 

Will Bradley, 1868-1962

                                                                                                                                                                             Ethel Reed, 1874-

Blanche McManus, 1869-1935

Louis Rhead, 1857-1926

And many others such as Elisha Brown Bird, Decorative Designers, Frank Hazenplug, J.C. Leyendecker, Florence Lundborg, Amy Sacker, and Frank Berkeley Smith.

Today, posters from the 1890s are scarce and expensive.  But designs from masters of poster art can also be seen on thousands of book covers.  We hope you'll browse our collection for covers designed by your favorite poster artist.  The only drawback to actually having some of these is that they're difficult to hang on the wall.

Please feel free to join in the Binding Club.  No obligations, no dues.  But do send us your choice for binding of the month.  Tell us why you like it (“just because” works for us).  And don’t forget to visit our online collection at American Publishers’ Trade Bindings.

(1)

(2) Overland Monthly, Nov. 1902, p. iv.  Viewed online.  

(3) New York Times, Jan. 15, 1910.  "Queries and Answers", p. 34.  Viewed online.

(4) A quick pause to admire the name "Penfield" for an artist.  It's the same pleasure found in a fishmonger named "Salmon," or a dentist named "Toothaker."  Imagine my joy when I found that Penfield studied under George de Forest Brush!

(5) The Library of Congress has a large number of posters digitized.  See in particular their Artist Posters collection at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/pos/  All poster images are taken from this digital collection.

(6) Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975. Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 1999.
(7) American art posters of the 1890s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987, p. 51. Cited in Nancy Finlay’s essay, "American Posters and Publishing in the 1890s," which is particularly valuable for this context.

Going out

We have a few beautiful bindings that came in over the last few weeks.  After cataloging they're making their way to their future home in Special Collections. We can identify binding designers for some of them, and some, as usual, are still a mystery.

 This copy of A Rose of a Hundred Leaves by Amelia E. Barr was published by Dodd, Mead and Company sometime in the early 1900s. We know it wasn't after 1905 because it's inscribed "Xmas 1905" and it was copyrighted in 1891. We know that Alice Cordelia Morse created  this particular binding thanks to Mindell Dubansky's book, The Proper Decoration of Book Covers. There is another version of this binding for this title, also by Alice Morse, that keeps the same concept but has a more elaborate spine and lacks the author's name at the foot of the front cover. It's also a different shade of green and the title decoration seems to be a little bit smaller, although the book itself is bigger so the decoration might be the same size. This edition was deemed the "pocket" edition according to Dubansky.

Marse Chan by Thomas Nelson Page was also designed by Alice Cordelia Morse. Once again, we know this thanks to the work of Mindell Dubansky. As you can see just from these two examples, Alice Morse was a very talented binding designer. The styles on these two bindings are very different, even down to the lettering. This book will be in the Charles M. Adams American Trade Bindings Collection.

Nathalie's Sister by Anna Chapin Ray will go to the Girls Books in Series Collection. It was published by Little, Brown, and Company of Boston in 1909. It's part of The Teddy Books series which, as you can see, appears on the cover. Even though this binding is not signed, it has been attributed to Amy Sacker by our own Mark Schumacher (see his Amy Sacker website ). This title was first published by Little, Brown in 1904 and which has the same cover design but with Amy Sacker's monogram in the lower left corner of the top panel. As we have said in earlier posts, as books go through successive printings, the publisher often would start stripping off the fancier, more attractive parts of the bindings so they could produce them more cheaply (they even stripped away designers' monograms!). The first printing not only had Amy Sacker's monogram but the lettering and ruled borders of the panels were in gilt rather than in ink (as on this copy).
                                                                                         
                                                                                                                                                           

We don't know who designed the rest of the bindings, but the research is always ongoing.

Persis Putnam's treasure by Myra Sawyer Hamlin; illustrated by R.C. Hallowell. Nan series.  Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1908.. 

Sometimes we transfer books from the Library's general stacks into Special Collections. The People of our Neighborhood by Mary E. Wilkins seems to have been first published serially by the Curtis Publishing Company of Philadelphia.  It was issued in book form in 1898 as part of the Ladies' Home Journal Library of Fiction, jointly published by Curtis and Doubleday & McClure of New York. It has a completely different cover (we hold this edition in our Woman's Collection). The copy pictured has the imprint: New York: Melville Publishing Company, 1903. It also includes The Jamesons, by the same author, bound in at the end of the volume, with the imprint: New York: International Association of Newspapers & Authors, 1901. Even though the title page for this copy of the book has the "Melville Publishing Company" as the imprint, it retains the International Association of Newspapers & Authors binding design (note the "I.A.N.A." at the foot of the spine). This will be part of the Woman's Collection

Mabel's mishap by Amy E. Blanchard. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1900. Illustrations by Ida Waugh. Part of the Lad and Lassie series in the Girls Books in Series Collection.

Dorothy Brooke at Ridgemore by Frances Campbell Sparhawk.  New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1912. Part of the Dorothy Brooke books series, this title will be added to the Girls Books in Series Collection. 
It is in its dust jacket (not pictured).

*All books, unless otherwise noted, were donated by Mark Schumacher in memory of his mother, Dorothy Schumacher.

**Note on series: UNCG has created our own series for some of these books. Just because we have a series listed, does not mean that that book necessarily has a series statement present or was issued in a publisher's series. 

The flowers that bloom in the spring ...

Tra la!

I was taking a walk around campus the other day, idly kicking up grass toupees, when I passed a small enclosed garden with some beautiful blooms.  I can tell a pansy from a pie plate, but beyond that I'm fairly hopeless at plant identification.  Not so with many binding designers.  Among them the best botanist was probably Margaret Armstrong (1867-1944).  For collectors, researchers, and admirers of American trade bindings, Armstrong needs no introduction.  But unless you're able to see a large number of her bindings, it might not be obvious just how important an element nature was to her aesthetic.

Of her 300+ known designs well over half feature floral designs or motifs and her title page and text border designs usually also featured botanical elements.  We could say that this culminated in her 1915 title Field Book of Western Wild Flowers (Putnam 1915) for which she supplied not only the text but 550 illustrations.  With several other women, she traveled across the West and into Canada in search of specimens, and she and her friends were the first women to descend to the floor of the Grand Canyon.(1)  As Gullans and Espey describe her: “She was a fine, amateur botanist, and would later in her career become the nearest thing to a professional that one can be without the certifying academic degrees.” (2)  A selection of her designs seems the perfect way to close out this season.

So as the hot and steamy North Carolina spring gives way to the hotter and steamier North Carolina summer, I offer this posy of pictures of Margaret Armstrong bindings.  Some of them may be new to you and some may be old favorites.  Enjoy them all!

Let's start with a few on appropriate subjects in appropriately colored cloths. 

Frances Theodora Parsons, who usually wrote under the name Mrs. William Starr Dana, was a botanist who authored the first field guide to North American wildflowers, How to Know the Wildflowers (1893).  Armstrong did two covers for this book—for the 1893 edition and a different design for the 1895 edition.  An 1897 reprint of the second design is pictured at the head of this post.  According to Season was published in 1894 (left) and was issued again in 1902 with a completely different cover design also by Armstrong (and be sure to look at a third design for this title shown later in the post!)  She also designed the cover for Parson’s How to Know the Ferns (1899).  Her own Field Book of Western Wild Flowers (1915) was frequently reprinted on a number of surfaces including limp leather and a wide variety of cloth colors.  The Commuter’s Garden (1914) edited by Walter Hayward is an odd one.  Gullans and Espey note the “clumsy” lettering squashed into the small central space as not by Armstrong and speculate that the design was done earlier and adapted for this late (in Armstrong’s design career) printing.  However, no earlier book is known to have this design--perhaps Armstrong or the publisher, Crowell, for whom she did a number of covers, had it on hand.






Two classic designs for Victorian poets.  The Tennyson (1905) was issued in several cloth colors and features that essential garden accessory, the sundial.  Though difficult to see without enlarging the image, the blossoms on Pippa Passes (1900) are actually stamped on a rectangular cloth onlay which is pasted to the green cover cloth.



















Here they are: the quintessential Margaret Armstrong designs.  Two representative covers from the Myrtle Reed “lavender” series and the Henry van Dyke “blue cloth” series.  If one knows no others, these designs leap off the shelves of used book stores shouting, “I am Margaret Armstrong.”  Though each cover design is distinctive in both series, the general look of them was  so well-known that a buyer could spot them from across a room just by their spines.  Armstrong did a dozen titles in each series over decades and the look of the covers became an essential part of books from these authors.  Even after she tired of working on these series, publishers continued to issue books with similar designs by other (unknown) designers in the characteristic cloths.  Both were continually reprinted, the Reed titles in particular, sometimes several times a year.  The Reed books were bound in a variety of materials other than the standard lavender cloth.  These include cloths in a darker lavender, lavender silk, green or gray, red leather, standard leather, and ooze leather (now called suede).  Some were housed in dust jackets and/or printed cardboard boxes.  Old Rose and Silver was first issued in September 1909; the copy pictured is the sixth printing from July 1910 (so at least six printings were called for in less than a year—hard to believe if you’ve tried to read it!)  The Blue Flower was issued in 1902.  Although Armstrong produced designs for a number of series, both for individual authors (Washington Irving and H.C. Bunner, for example) and for subjects (such as the “American summer resorts” series), none came close to the impact these two had on the reading public.

How do you like your days?  With, or without dogs?  (both published in 1904).

















Published by Houghton Mifflin, The Tent on the Beach (1899) is considered one of Armstrong's masterpieces (there are many!)  Note that the gold stamping is in three forms:  gloss, matte, and embossed (the crabs at the foot of the cover).  The design was used on at least 5 colors of cloth, of which two are in the American Trade Bindings Collection.  

This design made an unexpected reappearance 91 years later on a Houghton Mifflin reprint of According to Season, by  Mrs. William Starr Dana.  Feel free to speculate on ... what were they thinking??  The cover has nothing to do with the contents, and why did it reappear at this time?  Did Houghton Mifflin still have "rights" to it?  Did it appear on any other titles in the intervening century?  Did Houghton Mifflin just need an "antique looking cover" to put on a reprint?  These kinds of questions and the odd byways of publishers' bindings keep our interest fresh and work with these materials too much fun.

Here’s an unusual title.  This little book (above) was issued in 1910 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in a box as part of the “Ariel booklets” series.  Many titles were published in this series but most of them were issued in bright red “leather” with gilt decoration on the cover.  As far as I know, only titles bound in suede were designed by Margaret Armstrong.  Gullans and Espey do not list this title or any other Ariel Booklet in their checklist of her binding designs.  I would conjecture that this is a gift book and was probably also issued in other formats, the suede binding putting it at a higher price than standard issues.  I don’t know if any other titles were issued in this binding but I suspect that there are a few more titles out there … somewhere. 

Margaret and her sister, Helen Maitland Armstrong, worked on a series of books by Marguerite Bouvet, but Tales of an Old Chateau (1899) was the only one in an “out of series” binding.  This copy was issued in 1901.  I like the two dark green pod-like things flanking the title though I have no idea what they represent.  Can anyone help with this?

Two titles published by Bobbs-Merrill, The Pioneer in 1905 and Huldah in 1904.















As we near the end of our floral journey, here are two more designs, one considered a masterpiece and one--not so much.  Zelda Dameron is another Bobbs-Merrill title published in 1904, and Blue-Grass and Rhododendron was published by Scribner in 1901.  Which one catches your eye?



Finally, three of my current favorites.  Two are pictorial--one of my weaknesses.   To my taste, Pipetown Sandy, in particular, would make a wonderful poster.  And yes, it was written by that John Philip Sousa (after all, in keeping with this post's theme, he was known as "The March King"). (3)
The importance of condition for these covers is repeatedly stressed by anyone who has anything to say about them.  The Irving title makes this point better than any argument with its almost pristine white cloth. When one can find a copy of any decorated binding of this period in excellent condition, as is Rip Van Winkle, the difference is that of a cloudless spring day to an overcast February afternoon when one wants to see the sky:  the latter holds out some promise, but the former is breathtaking.  The gold, green, red and yellow stamping fires a twenty-one tulip salute against the background of white coarse cloth.  Simply gorgeous!






At the top of my Margaret Armstrong list, and the last cover I'll show today, is a late design, The Quest of the Dream (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1913).  We're fortunate to have a deluxe edition in dust jacket and slipcase, on both of which the cover design is repeated.  I like to put myself in the position of a book purchaser in 1913 who would come across this title in a bookstore.  The design looks nice on the slipcase though it's simple, and with its plain line border lacks the ornamentation that so many bindings featured--kind of romantic, though the brown on tan doesn't do it any favors.  Slipcase set aside, we find a printed dust jacket with the same images in the same colors.

But then I remove the dust jacket and am just about stunned by the actual cover with its brilliant blue cloth stamped with a single white poppy blossom against what appears to be the moon.  It's impossible to tell from the image, but the gilt is in both gloss and matte--the moon being the only feature in matte. On the cover, the poppy seems to be floating slightly above the surface of the cloth, which has a very fine rib grain, particularly where it overlaps the moon.   Needless to say, I purchase the book.

Until next time when we'll show some recent acquisitions destined for our bindings collection.

(1) For an account of their journey see: Armstrong, Margaret, “Canyon and Glacier”. Overland Monthly, v. 59, no. 2, p. 95-104. https://archive.org/stream/overlandmonthly259sanfrich#page/n153/mode/2up

(2) Gullans, Charles and John Espey. Margaret Armstrong and American Trade Bindings. Los Angeles: Department of Special Collections, UCLA, 1991, p. 36.

(3) Image from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (cph 3c10617 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c10617)

Publisher's series bindings

These beauties are getting cataloged today! As you can see from the image, they have the same binding designs just with different colors and different images in the frames. I love when bindings like these come across my desk for a couple of reasons. (1) Creating the binding description is less time consuming because you just have to switch out a few details, and (2) I just like to see how many times a series binding can be used on different books. We have several of this particular series binding in CONTENTdm but we like to scan variant bindings of the titles to see the different ways they were issued at the time.

Here are other titles that have the same binding design* as the ones I am cataloging:

Famous beauties in art

Beautiful women in art

Famous authors (women)

Music in art

Famous beauties in art

Famous actors of the day

Famous stars of light opera

The prisoner of mademoiselle

The prisoner of mademoiselle

The lovers' treasury of verse

Amy Sacker designed this particular binding for L.C. Page & Company. The oldest version UNCG holds dates back to 1899 (Famous actors of the day) and continues at least through 1910 (The lovers' treasury of verse). Her innovative styles were relevant for years which is an accomplishment not many designers can claim. To learn more about Amy Sacker you can read all about her on Mark Schumacher's site.

What was most surprising to me about this particular series was how little it changed over that time. Sometimes when publishers reused bindings they would slowly start stripping away the frills in order to produce them more cheaply. This is especially true for the same title being reprinted over the years. The first printing would be beautiful, with illustrations and gilt and anything else you can think of. The next printing might replace the gilt with black, still nice, but a little bit cheaper. Then the next installment would take away an illustration or piece of garland (or a binding signature) and so on and so on until there was just the title left on the book. In this case, the cover of the binding stayed the same except for color variations and paper onlays that were switched out to match the subject of the binding. The Prisoner of Mademoiselle, which was published in 1904 (right in the middle of the years during which the cover design was used) had the most differences. The paper onlay didn't use an illustration or photograph; instead it had a woman's silhouette.  The spine had an additional ornamental design and lettering that were not on earlier or later versions of the binding design. This particular version of the binding was also used on the Grosset & Dunlap printing of The Prisoner of Mademoiselle, except that the silhouette was stamped on the cloth rather than an onlay. It wasn't uncommon for publishers to sell the rights for books or make accommodations (in the publisher's favor of course) with other companies which included the illustrations and book designs.

The bindings weren't the only thing that carried over from book to book, the endpapers and title page designs were also reused in some instances. Most of the books (with the exception of a few such as The Prisoner of Mademoiselle) had the series endpapers that can be seen on the left.  The three prominent visuals in red are two opened books towards the bottom and the Page printer's mark with the Latin motto "spe labor levis" which can be translated as "May the work be light" or "Hope lightens labor" or "The hope of light labor."  The visuals in red are surrounded by a green garland and floral designs with a crown at the foot of the page.

The title page (seen on the right) takes elements from the endpapers and uses them in a decorative border. What I find most fascinating about this is that while the endpapers lack a signature identifying who created the design, the initials H.B.A. can be seen in the lower right hand corner of the title page border. Who H.B.A. is I can't say. My first thought was Helen Armstrong, Margaret Armstrong's sister, but her full name was Helen Maitland Armstrong so that ruled her out immediately. Looking at L.C. Page & Company's records might provide insight as to who H.B.A. could be but I'm not sure who holds their correspondence/archives, so that will have to be left for another day when there is time to do more research on H.B.A.








Why do publishers, in this case L.C. Page & Company, reuse binding designs and illustrations on several books? The number one answer that I can come up with is that it's the most cost-effective way to produce books, so a business strategy. If you already have the plates to print the books and a beautiful cover that you commissioned, you might as well get your money's worth out of them. It's similar to what we do with recycling the metadata. We create it in our cataloging records but then it is recycled and reused in CONTENTdm. It makes life easier and doesn't take up as much time which in turns saves money.

These particular bindings weren't the only series bindings for which Amy Sacker was responsible, or that Page would put out, but that is a subject for another post at another time.

*Binding images taken from UNCG's CONTENTdm American Publishers Trade Bindings Collection