Hello! I wrote this article for the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Making Stories magazine, a wonderful knitting magazine which is now unfortunately closed. Please enjoy it here.
Nothing captures the elegance and intricacy of the Art Nouveau era quite like the book covers designed during this brief period of history. For the first time, publishers began to employ artists to illustrate book covers. Designs were stamped directly onto fabric-covered hardcovers, and this portable art was passed from hand to hand in trolley cars and trains and cracked open on chaise lounges and picnic blankets. Those little stamps you find underneath dust jackets on the fanciest hardcovers today? That’s all we have left of the works of art that once enticed readers to open to the first page.
It may not come as a surprise that the three dominant book cover artists of the day were originally trained in stained glass—a book cover’s dimensions echo the frame of a window, and the printing process lent itself to distinct outlines rather than superfine detail. What may surprise you is that these three designers were women. Collectively, Sarah Wyman Whitman, Margaret Armstrong, and Alice Cordelia Morse designed over five hundred book covers from the 1890s through the early 1910s. Though they are sometimes called “competitors,” they actually spent significant time creating opportunities for other women to join them.
Sarah Wyman Whitman was the oldest of the three. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1842, she began training in art after she married at 24, and received her first important stained glass commission when she was 42. She began to design book covers around the same time. According to Harvard Magazine, Sarah was the “first professional female artist regularly employed by Houghton Mifflin.”
Sarah carefully considered how to make impactful art within the constraints of a book cover. She said in a talk for the Boston Art Students Association, “You have got to think how…to put the touch of art on this thing that is going to be produced at a level price.” She also called books “aesthetic tracts” and remarked that they “go everywhere.” Her style is easy to spot: a single motif, or perhaps two, surrounded by a background of empty space. She designed over 200 book covers for various publishers and made stained glass windows for significant places such as Harvard University and Grace Church in New York City. Despite, or perhaps because of, her own late training, Sarah helped found Radcliffe, the women’s college that eventually became part of Harvard University.
Alice Cordelia Morse was born nineteen years after Sarah, in 1891, in Ohio, to a middle class family that moved to the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. She studied drawing at Cooper Union, a prestigious college in New York City, trained under stained glass artist John La Farge, and then worked in Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glass studios. She designed over seventy stained glass windows there. At 26, began to get commissions for book cover designs. Though she “only” designed about eighty covers, hers tended to be for more expensive publications. Alice’s style was the most chameleon of these designers, changing to suit the book. A collection of her work is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Margaret Nielson Armstrong was born six years after Alice in 1867 to an artistic family in the Hudson River Valley of New York. Her father was a stained glass artist and her sister Helen was also an artist; they sometimes collaborated. Margaret took art classes at Cooper Union, and likely had some training under both La Farge and Tiffany, who were family friends. Margaret’s style is nature-filled; she had a lifelong interest in botany. Margaret also began the trend of designing similar covers for all of the books by the same author, creating a sort of style calling card for individual writers that we still see in bookstores today. Margaret began writing her own books in the early 1910s, including three murder mysteries. She designed over 270 book covers.
All three designers exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exhibition (the “World’s Fair”) in Chicago in1893. Alice authored the chapter on illustrators in the guidebook for the first-ever Women’s Building. “Mrs. Sarah W. Whitman of Boston and Margaret N. Armstrong have taken a firm hold on the publishers, and won recognition from the public, by their appropriate, tasteful, well-studied book decoration,” she writes. There is an asterisk after the line that leads to a footnote from the editors: “Miss Alice C. Morse, the writer of this paper, has made a wide reputation by her excellent and serious work in the designing of book covers.”
This attitude of sharing and uplifting one another is as inspiring as the designs themselves.
