There
are events, sometimes small, that reverberate down through the years, sometimes
with unexpectedly momentous consequences (“For want of a nail …”).
This is not one of those.
Rather, it’s the story of a misprint composed
by an unknown hand in a book published by the L.C. Page Company in 1901. The
misprint reappeared 111 years later in a personal name authority record
created by the Library of Congress in 2012, and briefly puzzled me, then sent me
down a "Little Puritan" rabbit hole when I stumbled on it in the Library of
Congress authority file 120 years after the misprint was first made. Uncharacteristically, this post is not
primarily about binding design; although to offset any disappointment it does
involve one of our favorite designers here at UNCG, Amy M. Sacker. Instead, it’s about a binding designer in the
role of illustrator--or is it?
Here’s a visual statement of the puzzle:
Before
we get into a discussion of the book, let’s step back for a moment and consider
cataloging and authority control. In our
work cataloging Special Collections materials we use the bibliographic utility
OCLC. Headquartered in Dublin, Ohio,
OCLC describes itself as “a global library cooperative that provides shared
technology services, original research, and community programs to libraries,
including our 18,000 members in 120+ countries.” As of December 2021, OCLC includes a
database, WorldCat, of over 520 million catalog records and over 3 billion holdings.
As part of our work
we frequently contribute to the database of authority records maintained by
OCLC, either by creating new authority records or editing and improving
existing records. Authority
records exist to provide an “authorized” form of name by establishing it in a unique
form to unambiguously identify persons, corporations, families,
geographic names, subjects, titles, genres, etc. The purpose, with personal names for example,
is twofold: to ensure that all works by a person are gathered under a unique
authorized form, and to differentiate each name so that works by other persons
are not attributed incorrectly. These
authorized headings are then used in cataloging and ideally make searching and
identifying more effective for everyone by gathering everything
by a given person under one form of name while excluding materials by other
persons.
For
myself, one of the benefits of the authority file is that it allows me to
quickly find an authorized form of name (if one exists) and cut and paste the
coded form of the heading into the catalog record on which I’m working. A short time ago I was cataloging a book with
a binding by Amy Sacker and wanted to add her name to the catalog record as the
binding designer. Browsing the authority file gave me this hit list:
For whatever reason (though I like to think that it was deep concentration on the task at hand), what I had
not noticed before was that there was another entry, one for an “Amy F. Sacker”
with the same dates, in addition to “Amy M. Sacker” in the browse search results. As far
as I knew, as with the Highlander, “there can be only one” Amy Sacker and I was
intrigued by this second Sacker. [1]
When I selected the record for Amy F. Sacker I encountered the following:
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| Library of Congress Authority File record for Amy M. Sacker |
This is the public display of the authority
record from the Library of Congress authority file. Note that “Sacker, Amy F.” etc. is under the
Variant(s) label on the Amy M. Sacker record, indicating that it is an unauthorized/unused
variant for Amy M. Sacker. If it was an authorized variant of the name that could be used on catalog records, it would appear under a “See also”
label. The source of name note (“Found
in”) indicates where the variant name appeared, in this case on the title page
of A Little Puritan Pioneer by Edith A. Robinson, published in 1901. So, apparently a misprint, though an odd one
as “F” and “M” are not in close enough proximity to routinely make such an
error, whether in a printer’s type cases or on a monotype keyboard (though the M does appear directly above the F on a linotype keyboard). Whatever was happening, this needed some
follow-up.
From OCLC, I found 2 records for A Little Puritan Pioneer, the first for
an electronic book with Amy F. Sacker given as illustrator. The second was for the 1901 print copy, which
we held. Then came another surprise; the
print version gave the illustrator on the title page as “A.F. Schmidt”!
There was no record for a print version of the book with Sacker as
illustrator in OCLC. It seemed certain
that the Sacker title page was in error, at least about the “F.” initial, but I
wanted to try and determine what had happened, so I turned to the illustrations, which seem clearly to be by another hand.
There are five full page illustrations and a further five in the text,
all of them signed “A F S” in script, which would fit with either Schmidt or a misprinted
Amy F. Sacker.
 |
Illustration on page 19
|
 |
| Illustration on page 5 |
 |
| Illustration on page 57 |
 |
Illustration on page 63
|
 |
| Frontispiece |
 |
| Monogram on frontispiece |
However, the style of the illustrations and the monogram clearly rule
them out as Amy M. Sacker’s work, as can be seen from authentic Sacker
illustrations:
 |
Sacker illustration--A Little Puritan Rebel
 | | Sacker illustration--A Little Puritan's First Christmas |
|
 |
| Amy Sacker illustration--A Loyal Little Maid |
 |
| Sacker illustration--A Little Daughter of Liberty |
We have already seen from the image of the
title page of A Little Puritan Pioneer, given above, that “Amy F. Sacker” was credited by the publisher--at least at one time--with the
illustrations, though this is in error.
To
add another wrinkle to an already wrinkly situation, the contents and illustration
pages have headpieces that were designed by Amy Sacker and have her monogram.
These headpieces were frequently
used in other books. Mark Schumacher, our
former colleague and Amy Sacker expert, lists 69 titles on his Amy Sacker Site where one or both designs were used, including many in L.C.
Page’s Cosy Corner Series (more on this series below). [2] So in a sense, Sacker did make a
contribution to illustrating the book!
I went to Publishers’ Weekly searching for more information on this
title since I was curious whether Amy Sacker was given as the illustrator in
advertisements for the book. The first
mention I located was in the July 13, 1901 issue, where it appeared in a “Record
of Series” and was listed with nine other titles in the Cosy Corner Series
published by the Boston firm of L.C. Page & Co. The Sept. 28, 1901 issue
includes a full page advertisement on p. 676 for “[t]en new volumes in the Cosy Corner Series of Charming Juveniles … [T]his series shall contain only the very
highest and purest literature—stories that shall not only appeal to the
children themselves, but be appreciated by all those who feel with them in
their joys and sorrows---stories that shall be most particularly adapted for
reading aloud in the family circle. The numerous illustrations in each book are
by well-known artists, and each volume has a separate attractive cover design.” Unfortunately, there is no mention for any of
the volumes of whom the well-known artists might be. As for the cover designs, attractiveness lies
in the eye of the beholder, with designs ranging from A Bad Penny, quite
attractive and designed by Alfred Brennan, with his monogram, to A Little
Puritan Pioneer, for me the least attractive of the lot. [3]
 |
| "AB" monogram of Alfred Brennan |
I then checked the Library of Congress Copyright Office’s Catalogue of
Title Entries of Books and Other Articles.
Here the title was briefly described and included a statement that it
was illustrated by Amy F. Sacker, with a copyright date of Sept. 3, 1901, which
was also the date when two copies were received by the Library of Congress. [4].
As
I noted above, there was not a record for a print version of A Little Puritan Pioneer with Amy
F. Sacker as illustrator in OCLC. This
is not particularly surprising, since cataloging rules and interpretations have
changed many times over the years, and in older cataloging illustrators, for
example, were often not transcribed as part of the catalog record. I did wonder at what time the illustrator error
had been noticed and corrected. Although the error made it through the entire
publishing process, from copy editing through proofing and printing, I
suspected that not many copies with the error had made their way into
circulation before it was corrected. Some
of the eight institutions holding copies on the “Schmidt” catalog record might
actually have Sacker on the title page, but I only knew of three copies that were
definitely extant, two of which are held by the Library of Congress. The copy from which the digitized version was
made is held by the Boston Public Library, as shown by their ownership stamps.
It also
made sense that the Boston Public Library held a copy of the earlier issue or state since
L.C. Page was a Boston publisher and they probably acquired their copy shortly
after publication. In fact, one copy (their catalog lists two) was a gift from
the publisher, noted on their bookplate on the front pastedown, with an
additional handwritten date, Oct. 3, 1901, on the verso of the title page.
It is possible to speculate from this admittedly slim evidence that only
a few copies survive with the Sacker misprint.
Through
a strange coincidence, while I was looking into this title a second copy of the
book was donated to the UNCG Library by Mark Schumacher with an “Amy F. Sacker” title
page. Did I need to revise my original
supposition about the prevalence of the Amy F. Sacker issue? Perhaps the misprint existed for a longer
time, and more copies of the book were sold with the misprint after all.
The
Publishers’ Weekly advertisement of September 28, 1901 describes the ten Cosy
Corner Series volumes as large 16mos (sextodecimos).
Our well-loved copies of both the Sacker and Schmidt issues make an
examination of the books’ structures quite easy. Each consists of six gatherings of eight leaves
(16mo in 8s), with the Sacker issue made up of [10], 74, [12] pages, and the
Schmidt issue [10], 74, 10, [2] pages.
The Sacker issue has an advertisement on the half title page verso (p.
[2]) for “Works of Edith Robinson” listing five titles including A Little Puritan Pioneer, and [12] pages of advertisements at the end. The Schmidt issue half title page is blank
with 10, [2] pages of advertisements at the end. In both issues the advertisements are not
inserted but are printed as part of the final gathering of 16 pages. The advertisements at the end of the volumes
vary considerably. The Sacker issue
contains: full page advertisements for “new juveniles” (p. [1-7]), including three of the ten Cosy Corner titles listed in Publishers' Weekly, the first four volumes in the Little Cousin Series, and seven others; “Cosy Corner Series of Charming Juveniles” (p.
[8-11]) with 39 titles listed, not including the three volumes in the full page ad;
and four titles in the “Gift Book Series for Boys and Girls” (p. [12]).
The
Schmidt issue contains ten pages of advertisements for the Cosy Corner Series, listing 56 titles including all of the Cosy Corner cohort listed in the Publishers' Weekly advertisement and eight additional titles. The layout of
the series ads is completely different; they are in a different and larger font, with most of the ads arranged under
author headings, and with much lengthier
descriptions.
 |
Cosy Corner ads--Schmidt version
|
 |
| Cosy Corner ads--Sacker version |
Pages [11-12]
advertise the Little Cousin Series, the first four volumes now listed as “first
series” with an additional option for purchasing them as a boxed set. Page [12] announces six additional volumes as
a second series.
All this helps to establish the date when the Schmidt
version was issued, in this case 1902.
All of the new Cosy Corner titles that I can find in OCLC are copyright
1902, although some apparently have title page dates of 1903. Some of them represent digitized versions
that confirm the 1902 date, and three titles are digitized from the Library of
Congress and are stamped as received in May, June, or July 1902. Similarly, while the first four volumes of
the Little Cousin Series--the only titles in the Sacker issue--are all
copyright 1901, with one stamped as received by the Library of Congress July 26,
1901, the next six volumes, the “second series,” are all copyright 1902, with
digital versions of four of them stamped as received by the Library of Congress on
June 30, 1902.
To
answer the question posed above, unless some intermediate copy with different
ads is found, it appears that the Sacker issue persisted until it was partially
reset with the title page corrected to “A.F. Schmidt,” the list of Edith
Robinson titles omitted on the half title verso, and a new set of
advertisements replacing the ads on the final 12 pages of the last gathering of 16 pages,
dating to sometime in mid-1902. Presumably,
if there were any errors in the text of the work these would also have been
corrected in the Schmidt issue, though I haven’t gone so far as to check
this! With some confidence, we can
therefore state that the A.F. Sacker issue was published in 1901 and the A.F.
Schmidt issue was published in 1902. We
can also speculate that numerous copies of the misprinted issue might have
circulated in 1901 and early 1902, and only when further copies surface can
this be proved or disproved. The fact
that only eight libraries have added holdings to the OCLC record for this title
makes the possibility of numerous other copies appearing seem unlikely. Of course,
there may be copies of the Sacker issue extant but with a cancel title page
with Schmidt as illustrator, but that situation remains speculation until such
a copy is discovered.
Much
has been said here about the A.F. Sacker vs. A.F. Schmidt title pages, but that begs
the question: who was A.F. Schmidt? To
answer this, I first searched OCLC with no results, then turned to an old
standby, Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975. Though no A.F. Schmidt was
listed, I did find a cross reference from Albert Felix Schmidt to Albert F(elix)
Schmitt. Schmitt was a painter, born in
Boston in 1873, who studied at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, the Cowles
Art School in Boston, and the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he
was considered a top student and was “regarded as one of the finer proponents
of the Boston School style of painting” [5]. He was one of the creators of what became the
early Boston Modernist Style. He was
offered the post of the court painter for the Vatican, which he accepted. He spent the rest of his life in Biarritz,
France, where he died in 1953 [6]. Although interesting, this doesn’t definitively answer if A.F. Schmidt is the same person as Albert Felix Schmitt.
Schmitt was a painter
who worked in oils and watercolors, whereas the illustrations in The Little
Puritan Pioneer are drawings. We
do have some examples of Schmitt’s work in two other
titles we hold: Louisa May Alcott’s May Flowers (Boston: Little Brown, 1899)
and Clara Louise Burnham’s Jewel’s Story Book (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904),
but these seem to be reproductions of paintings.
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| Jewel's Story Book: "I hear a sheep" |
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| A.F. Schmitt--frontispiece, Jewel's Story Book |
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| A.F. Schmitt--May Flowers |
In addition, only signatures rather than monograms are used.
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| May Flowers--signature |
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| Jewel's Story Book--signature |
An exhibition of his work at the Boston Art Club in 1921 lists
and illustrates only oil paintings and watercolors, which are also signed Albert F. Schmitt rather than monogrammed. [7]
 |
| The White Vase |
 |
| On the Piazza |
 |
The White Vase--signature
|
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| On the Piazza--signature |
None of this
precludes all the illustrations being from the same hand, but without further
evidence I must consider the identification probable but tentative. Perhaps the publisher requested drawings, or Schmitt was
trying his hand at illustrations in a different medium but wasn’t sure how favorably
they would be received. The choice of
the alternate spelling “Schmidt” and the use of a monogram may have been an
effort to lightly disguise the illustrator’s identity. Or there might actually have been another artist named A.F. Schmidt. [8]
As a sidenote, I note with pleasure that in
one of the books, Alcott’s May Flowers, the Schmitt and Sacker combination comes
full circle--not as a Schmidt/Sacker amalgam, but rather as contributors of the
illustrations and the binding design, respectively!
 |
| Sacker cover. Attribution by Mark Schumacher |
I
was able to find almost no information about Edith Robinson, other than she was
born in Boston, Mass. on February 17, 1858, the daughter of George and Sarah
Louise Robinson, and was educated at the Girls’ High School in Boston. [9] She was the author of 11 books, 10 of them for
children. In addition to the Little
Puritan books she also wrote Forced Acquaintances: a Book for Girls (Boston:
Ticknor and Company, 1887) [10]; Penhallow Tales (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1896),
the lone non-juvenile title; and, The Captain of the School, illustrated by
Alice Barber Stephens (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1901).
A
final question that remains is why did “A.F. Sacker” get onto the title page of
The Little Puritan Pioneer in the first place?
While this can probably never be answered definitively, I do think that there’s
a clue in the publication history of Edith Robinson’s Little Puritan books. Edith Robinson wrote eight Little Puritan
books between 1896 and 1905, with a compilation of four of these titles
reissued in 1931. All of them were
published by L.C. Page and Company in their Cosy Corner Series. The University of North Carolina Greensboro
Special Collections has an extensive Girls Books in Series Collection and holds
all of these titles, though not all are first editions. These titles in
chronological order are: 1) A Loyal Little Maid (1897, c1896), with binding
design and illustrations by Amy Sacker [11]; 2) A Little Puritan Rebel (1898),
with an unsigned binding design attributed to Sacker in a contemporary
advertisement and illustrations by Sacker; 3) A Little Daughter of Liberty
(1899), with binding design by Alfred Brennan and illustrations by Sacker; 4) A Little Puritan’s First Christmas (1900), with unsigned but attributed binding
design and illustrations by Sacker; 5) A Little Puritan Pioneer (1901), with
illustrations by A.F. Schmidt; 6) A Puritan Knight Errant (1903), with a
binding design by “MH” (unidentified) and illustrations by Lewis Jesse
Bridgman; 7) A Little Puritan Bound Girl (1904) and 8) A Little Puritan Cavalier (1905), both with illustrations by Etheldred Breeze Barry.
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| Amy Sacker cover 1898 |
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| Amy Sacker cover 1897 |
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| Alfred Brennan cover 1899 |
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| Alfred Brennan monogram |
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| Amy Sacker cover 1900 |
 |
Sacker as illustrator version 1901
|
 |
| 1904, c1903 |
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| "MH" design 1903, c1902 |
 |
| 1905 |
The compilation, Little Puritan Stories (Pioneer, Christmas,
Bound-Girl and Rebel), was reissued with the original illustrations in 1931.
The
series ran from 1897 through 1905, with a new volume appearing annually except
in 1902. I find it significant that the first four titles were illustrated by
Amy Sacker, and she is so credited on the title pages.
As noted above, she also provided the binding
designs for three of the titles, although only one, A Loyal Little Maid, carries her monogram.
So, with four already published titles associated with Sacker, one
might assume that the next volume would also include her distinctive style of
illustrations. But perhaps she was unavailable
due to commitments to other projects or had lost interest in continuing with
this series. Gullans and Espey note that this flagging of interest often happened
with binding styles established by Margaret Armstrong for individual authors
including Paul Bourget, Henry Van Dyke, John C. Van Dyke, Mary Raymond Shipman
Andrews and, perhaps most famously, Myrtle Reed, with later bindings designed
by other artists [12]. Presumably Armstrong was not the only artist to turn
to other, more rewarding work. L.C. Page
might have wished to go in another direction with the illustrations too. But through force of precedent, an illustrator’s name with some similarity to A.M. Sacker, a rush to get this book
out, or any number of other explanations—speculations are free!—Schmidt became
Sacker, at least briefly.
Or
perhaps L.C. Page just goofed. There is
intriguing evidence that this might have been the case, and it comes from two later volumes in the Little Puritan Series: A Puritan Knight Errant, and A Little Puritan Cavalier. I mentioned
above that although we hold all the titles in this series, all are not first
printings, one of these being A Puritan Knight Errant, which we have in 1906
and 1908 printings only. The cover
design by “MH” pictured above is actually from a digitized copy of the first
printing (1903) held by the Library of Congress.
There is no indication that this title is in the
Cosy Corner Series, either on the cover, preliminaries or among the eight pages of
advertisements at the end of the volume, and the catalog record indicates that
the book is 21 cm tall. L.J. (Lewis
Jesse) Bridgman is identified as the illustrator, and the illustration facing
page 104 is signed with his monogram.
Apparently,
Page wished to also issue this title (or they neglected to do so with the first
printing) along with the other Little Puritan books in the Cosy Corner Series. One of our copies, the fourth
impression, July 1906, is in the Cosy Corner Series (stated on the cover and
new title page, though not in the ads at the front or back of the volume). The book measures 18.3 x 12.9 x 1.8 cm. But with either the fourth, third, or second
impression--whenever the new Cosy Corner format was introduced—a double error
was also introduced:
Oops!
And here are the title pages from the 1903 and 1906 printings. Note the illustrators:
Oops … again!
We can speculate that Page, wishing to publish the Knight Errant in the
new format and reduced size, reused the cover of the last book published in the
series, A Little Puritan Cavalier, first published in June, 1905 (our copy is a
second impression, April 1910), rather than having to reduce the size of the die
by at least 1.3 cm. or commission a new image. Close counts, right?
We can hope that the title page error for the illustrator is simply
because they forgot, and not that they just didn’t care. Whatever the explanation is, the Puritan Knight Errant is "errant" by either of its definitions. A final oddity can be seen with our 1908 printing, which states on the
title page verso “Published, August, 1902; fourth impression, June,
1908.” (And another oddity, remember that our smaller Cosy Corner version was also called the fourth impression, but is dated July, 1906!)
With
this printing we’re back to the larger format and original binding design by “MH.” The book is now in the “Princess Series” (20.3
x 13.8 x 3.3 cm., on heavier paper with wider margins), with a new title page to
reflect this (the 1903 printing shows no more evidence of this series
than it does the Cosy Corner Series), and the series title also on the cover.
The larger format
Princess Series (titles generally 21 cm tall) was established by 1908 with its uniform illustrated
title pages. Perhaps Page wished to make the
Puritan Knight Errant available in both series to maximize sales as both seem to
have been quite successful, judging from the number of titles issued in each. This seems possible, as an advertisement
in the Feb. 29, 1908 issue of Publishers’ Weekly (p. 917) for the “The Princess Series of Copyright Fiction for Girls” notes that the series was inaugurated
in 1907 with 13 volumes, and that a further 12 titles were added due “to the demand
for high class copyright fiction for young girls at a popular price together
with the handsome appearance of the books themselves.” The original 13 volumes are listed in the
Sept. 28, 1907 issue, the first appearance of the series in Publishers' Weekly. The Puritan Knight Errant appears in the Jan.
26, 1907 issue, but only as part of the Cosy Corner Series; however in the Sept. 26,
1908 issue it appears as part of the Princess Series, along with the 11 other 1908
titles. The title first appears in 1902 and 1903, but not as part of any Page
series; it then reappears in the Sept. 15, 1906 issue where it is described as “First
published in 1902. Now included in the Cosy Corner Series”--with illustrations
by L.J. Bridgman. It would be interesting
to see if any copies of the Cosy Corner version are out there with the illustrator
corrected from Etheldred Barry to Bridgman on the title page.
Before closing this post, we should take at least a brief look at the
binding design on A Little Puritan Pioneer.
As mentioned above, I consider this the least effective of the 10
designs in this installment of Cosy Corner Series books (images of the
remaining nine designs are included in footnote three). The library holds two copies of the book; the
first is the 1901 issue with the “Amy F. Sacker” misprint and is bound in dark
yellow calico-texture cloth. The second has
the corrected title page and is bound in olive gray calico-texture cloth.
 |
| 1901 issue with Sacker title page |
 |
| 1902 issue with Schmidt title page |
Since the Boston Public Library copy with the misprint is bound in olive
gray cloth, we probably should not make much of the color difference. Perhaps the yellow cloth issue came first and the Boston Public copy came from a later binding run that continued into 1902, but this is only speculation. Both issues are stamped in reddish-brown, green, blue, yellow and black, and the background sky appears to have once been stamped in another color, perhaps white, cream or gray, but time and use have made it impossible to tell on any of the three copies.
 |
| Boston Public Library 1901 issue with Sacker title page |
There is one difference in our two copies that shows that some work was done on the binding stamps between the first and second issues. When put side by side it is very clear that a larger size font was used for the author's name on the spine. Was this change made as part of the reissue of the book with a corrected title page? Or was it made as a separate correction of the binding only?
Our copy of the 1902 issue also has a registration error on the cover, with the dark green of the trees at upper left stamped too far to the left, leaving the right side uncolored. Is this a sign of a hasty reprinting? Neither of the 1901 copies show this error.
The binding design itself is chiefly a crude rendering of the Schmitt illustration on page 27.
The figures in the canoe are particularly bad--even disturbing--with the young girl looking not at the almost featureless man paddling the canoe, but out at us from under a swathe of blue cloth. Her face looks more like a cutout, as faces often looked in the cheap woodcuts used to illustrate children's books in the previous century. It's a marked drop off in quality from the previous four titles in the series and a low point in the series. Once again, I wonder why, after using well-known artists for the first four books, this choice was made by L.C. Page.
Schmitt's original illustration appeared in the second chapter of the book with the intriguing title "The Crab." After a quick glance through the early pages of the book, I discovered that the canoeing scene was not a casual paddle across a lake but was actually the culmination of a rescue from what seemed to be a monstrous crab. The girl, Anne Chilton, while searching for fresh water on a shunned peninsula for her feverishly sick mother and brother, wanders into a wide marshy area. This region, legend had it, was the home of a giant killer crab. As the tide comes in she finds herself in what seemed to be ribbed sand in long tentacles with claw-like extremities. Suddenly the claws stir and it seems "all about her the tentacles were waking into horrid life … She had rushed into the very danger from which she fled, and was standing upon the back of the Crab!" A hermit hears her cries and paddles to the rescue, pulling her into his canoe. "The water was over the spot she had just quitted, and, as in a nightmare, Anne saw the crab rise to the surface, and stretch out long, waving arms after its escaping victim."
Now THAT would make a great cover design!
(And spoiler: it wasn't a crab). [13]
References
[1]. Many thanks to my daughter who made the edited Highlander/Sacker image, mercifully replacing the one I originally put together.
[2].
Sacker headpieces for contents and
illustrations appear on 69 titles, almost all of which are on publications by
Boston publishers L.C. Page or Joseph Knight. Other Boston publishers using
these designs were: Ginn & Co. (one title); Little, Brown (six titles);
Houghton Mifflin (three titles); Oliver Ditson (one title), and Charles Goodspeed (one title). New York publishers using them
are Caldwell (one title), and A. Wessels (one title). Thanks to Mark for the many images used from his website. Other images from UNCG's American Publishers Trade Bindings digital collection and the Internet Archive.
[3]. The 10 titles listed in the advertisement for the Cosy Corner Series are: 1).
A Little Puritan Pioneer;
2). Frances Margaret Fox, Betty of Old Mackinaw; 3). John T. Wheelwright, A Bad Penny, with the monogram of the designer, Alfred Brennan;
4). Louise de la Rame (Ouida), Findelkind;
5). Mrs. Ewing, Madam
Liberality;
6). Frances E. Crompton, Gatty and I;
7). A. Comyns Carr, The Fairy of the Rhone;
8). E. Livingston Prescott, A Small, Small Child;
9). Mary Knight Potter, Peggy’s Trial;
10). Frances Hodges White, Aunt Nabby’s Children.
[4]. Volume 29, 4th quarter, 1901, p. 397. Note that the copyright entry describes the book as a 12mo as opposed to the publisher's description of the series as a large 16mo, the difference being that the Library of Congress described the book according to a standard size for a duodecimo, 7 3/8 x 5 inches (19 x 13 cm) rather than by format.
[5]. Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975. Sound View Press, 1999, p. 2928. askART,
Albert Schmitt, Biography from The Boston Art Club, viewed March 24, 2022.
[6]. askART. "Albert Schmitt."
[8]. There are entries in Who's Who in American Art, v. 4, 1940-1947, for both a painter, Albert Felix Schmidt, living at 556 West 156th Street, New York City; and an illustrator, Felix Schmidt, at 232 East 40th Street, New York City. While the former is almost certainly our "Schmitt", no further information is given about either.
[9]. Woman’s Who’s Who of America. Edited by John William Leonard. New York:
American Comonwealth Co., 1914- Vol. 1914/15, page 694-695.
[10]. Forced Acquaintances was reprinted: New York: R.F. Fenno & Co., [1902?] as
no. 18 of the Summer Series, and New York: H.M. Caldwell Company, [1907?] in
the series Famous Books for Girls, new edition, 1907, no. 18.
[11]. The first book in the Little Puritan Series, A Loyal Little Maid, was copyright 1896 by Joseph Knight Company, and a digital version
of the Library of Congress copy has a title page with Joseph Knight as
publisher and a date of 1897; this title page also has a copyright stamp dated
August 31, 1896. In 1897 The Joseph Knight Company became L.C. Page & Company when the brothers L.C. and G.A. Page, both employees of the Joseph Knight Company, took over the business.
Our copy with L.C. Page
& Company on the title page is dated 1897 with an 1896 copyright on the
title page verso. Although there is an
OCLC record that indicates that a version exists with the title page dated
1896, I have not seen either a printed or digitized version with 1896 rather
than 1897 on the title page. It should be noted that the Library of Congress
catalog record, from which the OCLC record purports to be transcribed, gives
the date as 1897 in LC’s online catalog.
[12]. Gullans, Charles
and John Espey, Margaret Armstrong and American Trade Bindings, UCLA, 1991, p.
28.
[13]. The "Crab" turns out to be quicksand.
