Matrimony and Monograms

When we catalog a book for the Charles M. Adams American Trade Bindings Collection--or any other collection when we want to feature the cover--we have two main challenges:  a fair representation of the binding design, endpapers, etc. through our description, and trying to determine who designed the cover.  Sometimes the latter is easy (when we know the signature/monogram or the designer is identified in the book or from a reference source), sometimes it is difficult, and, most often, it is impossible.  Though I don’t have exact numbers on this, out of the approximately two hundred plus signatures and monograms we know about, probably less than half have been identified, and far more bindings are unsigned than signed.  So it’s doubly rewarding when we encounter a puzzle that is not too difficult to solve (reward 1), and also gives a small glimpse into the life of an artist (reward 2).  Such was an identification problem I faced some time ago. 

The book was an attractive title by Laura E. Richards , one of six children of Julia Ward Howe and Samuel Gridley Howe.  She was the author of around 90 books which include Captain January and many other children’s books, biographies (including a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Julia Ward Howe), and others.  Its title was The Silver Crown: Another Book of Fables (Little, Brown, and Co., 1906), and among the tree roots at the foot of the cover was a monogram.

The monogram consists of a large “S”, a “W” within the lower counter of the S, and a vertical line through the upper counter of the S and possibly descending to the bottom curve and filling the apex of the W, although this is hard to see without magnification.  When enlarged the vertical line appears to meet the apex of the W and follow the left stroke down.   In addition, the W seems to be tipped towards the right with the left vertex raised slightly above the curve of the S.  So we have a large S, a smaller W, and possibly an I, or a J, or even a T with a rounded top.  I was not familiar with any of these particular combinations.  

The question of the letters in the monogram was quickly answered by the decorated title page which was clearly signed with a vertical JWS.  

But looking further into the book yielded an unexpected bounty:  the book contains 45 fables, each one beginning with a decorative initial.  Of the 45 initials, 30 are monogrammed, plus the additional title page and cover monograms.

What was unusual was that nearly all of the monograms were variations of JWS in different configurations, some with periods, some lacking a letter or two, some in frames, most simple letters but a few overlapping, as with the cover monogram.  The ornamentation varies for all of the letters, some reflecting the fable.  Here are several of the signed initials—it should be obvious which one begins the fable called “The Serpent”! And see if you can spot the one which begins “The Tangled Skein.”         

To really get the feel of how this appears, here are all 30 monograms (not in page number order).

 Of course, cover designers, illustrators, and decorators are not bound to any one form of signature or monogram (although some, such as Margaret Armstrong, used a distinctive monogram from the beginning and kept it throughout their careers).  A case in point is the DecorativeDesigners, whose well known “DD” monogram with the second “D” reversed showed many variations during their 30 year existence, from the Ds barely touching to fully interlocked, and represented in any number of fonts.  Other designers who used a variety of monograms include Theodore Brown Hapgood, Amy Sacker (gathered by our own Mark Schumacher at his Amy Sacker website under Sacker monograms), and F. Berkeley Smith who variously signed bindings S, BS and FBS, with or without a number of different frames, causing all manner of confusion between his covers and those of other designers with similar initials.

Still, 32 variations in one book seems just a little excessive! 

Turning to the identity of the designer/decorator, I knew that Julia Ward Richards, Laura’s daughter, had done binding designs and illustrations for several of her mother’s books, five of which are pictured here.

 ... with their respective monograms.

The monograms looked very similar to those in The Silver Crown except for the final letter—the arrangement, the spotty use of periods, even the style of some of the covers were similar to certain initials in The Silver Crown.  You've no doubt guessed by now what I found when I checked the autobiography of Laura Richards.  In the final chapter, “Milestones,” she says: “In 1905 came the first milestone with an orange blossom laid on it. Julia Ward, my mother’s namesake, married Carleton Anderson Shaw.”  Our mystery designer was indeed Julia Ward Richards, who was known after Dec. 27, 1905, when she was married at Gardiner, Maine, variously as Julia Ward Shaw or Julia Ward Richards Shaw. In 1910 Nathan Haskell Dole wrote of her: “Another daughter, Julia Ward Richards, now Mrs. Carleton Shaw, has had similar success with her pencil.  She has made a specialty of designing book-covers, and in this way her work has been pleasantly associated with that of her mother.” 

I enjoy speculating about just when Julia prepared the initials and cover for her mother’s book.  She was married on December 27^th and her mother’s book was listed as “published today” in the October 13, 1906 Publisher’s Weekly, and was then listed in the “Weekly Record of New Publications” in the October 20^th issue.  Did Julia work on the new monograms after her marriage, in the ten months between that event and the publication of the book?  Or did she perhaps spend some time before the end of December in designing the initials and working out how she would sign them.  To me, the monograms seem to be more than just fitting a space in the initials.  Whether real or not, there is a feeling of trying things out—varying the letter shapes, seeing what looks good and where--about them.   This is particularly true of the monograms with overlapping letters.  Most of these include the W in the upper counter of the S and do not seem fully worked out.  Throughout, there is a playful feeling of experimentation with that new letter S.  Only the cover monogram looks “finished”--or close to it.  Though her gravestone reads “Julia Ward Richards” the Richards’ “R” is seen nowhere in this book. 

And there we will leave it.  I have not seen any book covers or illustrations in books by Julia Ward Shaw after “The Silver Crown” and if they exist I certainly don’t know if any are signed (although the cover of Laura Richards' 1907 book Grandmother certainly resembles Julia's work).  Nathan Dole’s 1910 piece on Julia Ward Howe quoted above does not make it clear if he is speaking about Julia in the present or in the past.  If any turn up I’ll update this post; but as far as I know, the cover monogram on The Silver Crown is the last by Julia Ward Shaw.  And it’s a good one.

The Silver Crown might be unique.  Though I've seen designers use a number of signatures and monograms over time, I've never seen one so painstakingly—or playfully--working out a monogram in a single place.  Certainly not in such a public one!

Julia Ward Richards Shaw

Laura Elizabeth Richards

Julia Ward Richards Shaw was the 4^th of Laura Elizabeth Howe’s and Henry Richards’ seven children.  She was born in Gardiner, Maine on August 30, 1878, and died in Concord, Massachesetts on June 18, 1977 at the age of 98.  She was buried at Groton, Massachusetts.  She married Carleton Anderson Shaw (born Lexington, Massachusetts, May 9, 1873, died Groton, Massachusetts, February 4, 1937) in Gardiner, Maine on December 27, 1905.  Carleton taught at the Lawrence Academy, Groton, Massachusetts, for a year, then established the Red House School in Groton where he was headmaster until his retirement in 1932.  The Shaws had four children, Henry (born Nov. 17, 1906), Elizabeth (born Oct. 16, 1908), John Dyer (born July 29, 1911), and Robert Hollowell (born July 20, 1914).

 Sources:

Dole, Nathan Haskell.  “Julia Ward Howe and her talented family.”  Munsey’s Magazine, v. 42, no. 5,   February 1910). P 619. Website, viewed Mar. 20, 2015,

Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, v. 14, no. 55, March 1906, p. 560. Website, viewed Mar. 23, 2015

Harvard College Class of 1895. Fifth report. Cambridge: Printed for the class, June, 1915, p. 290-1. Website, viewed Mar. 23, 2015.

“Carleton Anderson Shaw” obituary at:  Groton Public Library Digital Collections; page: Groton Town Diaries, 1918-1971. Website.  Viewed Mar. 25, 2015. http://books.gpl.org/greenstone/collect/towndiar/index/assoc/D4734.dir/Vol4_1937_049.pdf

Publishers’ Weekly.  Aug. 18, 1906 (no. 1803) p. 371.  “Little, Brown & Co. have in preparation…”

Publishers’ Weekly.  Oct. 13, 1906 (no. 1811), p. 1027 “Little, Brown & Co. publish to-day … The Silver Crown,” by Laura E. Richards, a book of fables for old and young”

Publishers’ Weekly.  Oct. 20, 1906 (no. 1812), p. 1091.  Listed in “Weekly Record of New Publications” All viewed from website.

Richards, Laura E.  Stepping Westward. New York: D. Appleton, 1931, p. 387.

www.findagrave.com  Julia Ward Richards Shaw page. Web. Viewed March 25, 2015.  http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=shaw&GSfn=julia&GSmn=ward&GSbyrel=all&GSdyrel=all&GSob=n&GRid=66343552&df=all&

“Maine, Vital Records, 1670-1907”, index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/2HKF-83X : accessed 17 March 2015), Julia Ward Richards, 1878.

Books shown:
Richards, Laura Elizabeth Howe.  The silver crown: another book of fables. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1906.
Richards, Laura Elizabeth Howe.  Geoffrey Strong. Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1901.
Richards, Laura Elizabeth Howe.  Mrs. Tree. Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1902.
Richards, Laura Elizabeth Howe.  The Merryweathers. Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1904.
Richards, Laura Elizabeth Howe.  Mrs. Tree's Will. Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1905.
Richards, Laura Elizabeth Howe.  The Armstrongs. Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1905.

National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month

To celebrate National Poetry Month here are a handful of cover designs from our collections.  All of them are from books of poetry.  Judging by their covers, these should contain some fine verses.  But we're not supposed to do that, are we?

A Margaret Armstrong design

From Theodore Brown Hapgood 

     

   By Amy Richards

Frank Berkeley Smith

  

Amy M. Sacker

Marion Louise Peabody

Two by Sarah Wyman Whitman,  The One Hoss Shay (right) was issued in several colors of cloth and "ooze calf" (with a texture something like suede) as seen on this copy.

Frank Hazenplug (see if you can spot the monogram*)

The Decorative Designers. The Daskam title was designed by Lee Thayer and was one of her favorite designs of those she created.

Burton Donnel Hughes

An excellent example of striped cloth, which had a brief vogue in the later 1840s. The front endpaper has the binder's label of Benjamin Bradley.

And our final two covers. The reason for selecting the first is self-explanatory; the cover may be a design of Gordon Ross, who illustrated the book. I added the second so you can finally see the cover of the book at the head of our blog.

Books pictured:

Horatio Sheafe Krans, ed. English love poems. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909.

Edwin Arlington Robinson. The children of the night: a book of poems. Boston: Richard G. Badger & Company, 1897.

Henry Van Dyke. The builders, and other poems. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905.

Wilson, Robert Burns. The shadows of the trees. New York: R.R. Russell, 1898.
Frederic Lawrence Knowles. Love triumphant, a book of poems. Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1904. 
R.L. Paget, ed. Poems of American patriotism, 1776-1898. Boston: L.C. Page and Co., 1898. 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The hanging of the crane, and other poems of the home. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1894. 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The one hoss shay, with its companion poems. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1892. 
Robert Manners. Cuba, and other verse. Chicago: Way and Williams, 1898. 
Josephine Daskam. Poems. New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1903. 
Harvey Maitland Watts. The wife of Potiphar: with other poems. Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1911. 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Ballads and other poems. Boston: W.D. Ticknor, 1848. 
Edmund Vance Cooke. Impertinent poems. New York: Dodge Publishing Co., 1907.

Eddy, Mary Baker. Poems. Boston: The Trustees under the will of Mary Baker G. Eddy, 1910. 

*and here's the monogram from the cover of "Cuba and other verse":

Coming soon...

These beauties have made there way to my desk to be cataloged! Stay tuned for some exciting posts on some of the most influential binding designers. In this batch, there are bindings by Amy Richards, Amy Sacker, Sarah Whitman, Marion L. Peabody, Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Margaret Armstrong, Blanche McManus Mansfield, and some that are unsigned. 

Girl Scouts

I was driving in to work this morning and I heard on NPR that today marks the 103rd anniversary of the founding of the Girl Scouts! What a great time to showcase the Girl Scouts series from our Girls books in series collection that are up online. The physical volumes are held in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG University Libraries.

This binding published by A.L. Burt in 1922 isn't signed or attributed to a designer. You can click on the image above to link directly to the binding image in CONTENTdm to zoom in and look at the details of the bindings (and verify that it's not signed -- if you find anything that you think looks like a signature, let us know!).

This book was also published by A.L. Burt and like the above volume, this binding has not been signed and hasn't been attributed to anyone yet. While in the same series and published by the same publishers, these two bindings are very different in terms of style and overall detail. It's likely that these bindings were designed by two different people. 

This binding, published a year later than the above bindings (1923) by a different publisher, John C. Winston, IS indeed signed by Decorative Designers. There will be a blog post later discussing this firm in greater detail. You can see the interlocking "DD"s in the lower left corner of the front cover.

See? 

I always love it when bindings relate to items in the news! 

Stay tuned for Paul's post soon! I won't tell you the topic but just know, it's a really good one!

Researching without the resources : Bruce Rogers

I probably have mentioned this several times by now, but it's worth mentioning again (and in all likelihood you will hear it again), I love to do research. There's just something about rediscovering information that you didn't know was there to begin with.

I'm in the middle of doing something exciting that I will hopefully get to share with you guys soon. I'm combing through book advertisements to see if there is any mention of who the book cover designer was. So far I've checked out some key phrases in the New York Times and now I'm moving on to Google Books.

A while back, I stumbled on a perfect ad that showcases just how awesome book advertisements were back in the day. They were so detailed--well, some of them. Let me say that there are a lot of good bibliographies out there that will help you find the same information. Some libraries are smaller than others and have limited access to those resources, however, so being able to do it a free (well semi-free) way is always a positive. You'll still have to pay for your own internet, but you know what I mean. The main purpose of this post is to show you how you can utilize free resources on the internet when doing your binding research. Most of you probably already know how to do this, but it never hurts to see someone else's process, right? I was perusing Google Books and I stumbled across The book buyer. Here's the title page of the one I was looking at:

(You can click on the image and it will take you to the book in Google Books)

Super helpful publication, I must say. I searched within this publication for, "book cover designed by" and ta-da I got got some hits. Will this method pick up everything in the book? No. It depends on how good the OCR was of the image but it'll definitely get you started... hopefully.

Here were my results:

The first image had the words highlighted as well; they just weren't highlighted anymore when I captured the screen shot. As you can see these advertisements were pretty informative. They offer the title, author, publisher, amount to purchase the book, all things you would expect to see; but then some go on to list illustrators and, at times, cover designers which is just what I'm looking for. Stone & Kimball and Copeland & Day were really good about informing their public about cover designers. The first image shows 3 books that had binding designers attributed to them, which is awesome since I couldn't find a signed binding of those in the Internet Archive (fyi: if you haven't used Internet Archive, you are missing out! I cannot tell you how much I love this site. Check it out when you get a moment. I promise, you will not regret it.). 

The second page had bindings by Bruce Rogers. Now some of you book enthusiasts probably have heard of him. I'm still new to the binding game so I don't have a lot of knowledge stored up about every binding design...yet. Slowly but surely, my friends. Doing a quick search in our CONTENTdm site shows me that we do have bindings by him (See). None of the bindings are signed, so how did we attribute them to Bruce Rogers? For that I had to go to our catalog (this makes me wonder if we should put references in our CONTENTdm records, probably wouldn't hurt anything but I'll have to think more on that later. Would you guys like it if we had our references in the CONTENTdm record?).

When you look in our catalog, you find this note:

This means that we found the information that Bruce Rogers was the binding designer in two places: Frederic Warde's Bruce Rogers : designer of books, and Sidney Kramer's A history of Stone & Kimball and Herbert S. Stone & Company. Luckily, we have these references in our collection so it was just a matter of looking up the particular book. For those of you who don't have these resources, you will have to stick with the first way I demonstrated of finding the information (a.k.a. the free way).  I stumbled across the information but you can do a keyword search for the book title and it should still come up. (Side note: sometimes we don't have time to do in-depth research of every book we get, so we'll just add it to the collection and make changes if we find more information later). 

The researcher in me was curious, though. Who was Bruce Rogers? Quick Google search brought up a Wikipedia page on him. Now we all know that Wikipedia sometimes isn't reliable, but I will say, they often have an awesome reference list that will link you to some pretty cool information. Like this book, for example, that was linked on Wikipedia to a book on the Internet Archive (here's Internet Archive again). Honestly, I love Wikipedia. You might have to be cautious when using the information, but we always have to be cautious with any information we find. It's definitely a great place to start for binding research in my opinion.  While we have this book in our collection as well, it's nice sometimes to just be able to make a quick reference to it at my desk and get on with my work, so I'm really glad it's digitized. You can flip through the book below if you like.

You can click the link or hit the expand button and you'll be able to view it in an larger version.

But getting back to the question at hand, who was Bruce Rogers? This book gives his full name as Albert Bruce Rogers. Evidently he went through three forms of his names which will be how you can tell the time period of his work. He started out as "Bert", then he went by "Albert Bruce Rogers" (he evidently substituted the u in Bruce with a v), and then finally he settled on "Bruce Rogers" (Work, 1939, p. xxii).

From the research I have done, he's a big fish and I'm slightly embarrassed that I didn't know who he was, but that's the joy of researching. Did you know that he created the Centaur font? Pretty awesome guy if you ask me.

So recap on free resources:

Internet Archive: Place where you can find books digitized. Usually they are before 1921 but there are some stragglers like the one above that are digitized later. It's a great resource to look at different book covers or for finding early bibliographies.

Google Books: Google books has so many resources in one place. You can check out titles such as Publisher's Weekly, The book buyer, The dial, and others that are fabulous resources. Love Google Books and the fact that they are keyword searchable.

Interlibrary Loan: This one I didn't mention above but it's a  really good resource if your library has it. Some public libraries charges a small fee for this and some academic libraries may as well. UNCG does not charge for it. Interlibrary Loan is borrowing books from another institution. If your library doesn't have it but the university down the road (or farther away) does, you can ILL the book and the institution that does hold the book will mail it to your institution (or scan it and email the selection you want if it's allowable and passes all the copyright laws and regulations). If you have this at your library, it's a great resource to take advantage of.