Artist-designed book covers

As we learned from the New-York Historical Society's 2007 exhibition A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls, women artists played a crucial role at Tiffany Studios, working anonymously to design and produce many of the most impressive leaded-glass windows, mosaics, and small luxury goods that Louis Comfort Tiffany's celebrated firm sold during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the scores of such employees was Alice Cordelia Morse, an 1883 graduate of the Woman's Art School of the Cooper Union in New York City who would later become one of the most prolific and versatile woman designers of the late nineteenth century.

The mission of the Woman's Art School was to train middle-class students such as Morse to become professional artisan-designers. She specialized in drawing, but classes were also offered in china painting, clay modeling, wood engraving, photography, and art history. The school's administrators worked hard to cultivate relationships with the commercial firms that hired its graduates; design classes were funded by the chromolithograph publishers Louis Prang and Company of Boston; and Tiffany and Company hired many of the school's graduates in glass decoration and interior design.

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Morse joined Tiffany Studios as a designer and painter of stained glass in 1885, and though she left the firm in 1889 (she later complained of the long hours) and it is unknown if any of her stained-glass designs were ever executed, the experience was formative, for it was during this time that she began designing the book covers, or publisher's bookbindings as they are known in the field, for which she would garner some measure of acclaim during her lifetime. As Morse later explained, the shift from stained-glass to book-cover design was not as unlikely as it might at first seem. "All the applied arts are more or less alike," she once said, "but I think book-covers resemble glass more than, say, wallpaper or silk, in that you have a complete design in a given space, whereas wall-paper and silks repeat indefinitely."

An exhibition currently on view at the Grolier Club in New York City features more than eighty books with covers designed by Morse, along with literary posters and other ephemera related to her work. The curator is Mindell Dubansky, who is a preservation librarian at the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She embarked on the research that culminates in this exhibition about ten years ago after having discovered a box containing fifty-eight covers designed by Morse in a storage room of the museum's prints and

drawings department. According to the 1924 Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the prior year Morse donated the book covers to the museum, and they were exhibited in the library with the intention that "they should prove of great usefulness to book-cover designers."

Among the earliest publishers to commission book-cover designs from Morse were the prominent New York City firms Charles Scribner's Sons, Harper and Brothers, G. P. Putnam's Sons, and Dodd, Mead, and Company. In 1893 she was selected by the interior designer Candace Wheeler to present eleven of her book covers in a small exhibition in the library of the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That same year she worked as a designer for the New York Society of Decorative Art, an organization Wheeler had founded in 1877 to help American women artists and artisans obtain training and employment. In addition to book covers, Morse created designs for china painting, embroidery, wood carving, and pyrography, many of which were published in the popular journal Art Amateur in 1897.

It is not known how many book-cover designs Morse produced, and none of her original drawings have been located. She experimented with both historical and modern motifs, creating designs for publications that ranged from novels, poetry, and travel to self-help and pet care. Regardless of subject or style, all her covers are elegant and demonstrate the skill that led her to be a major competitor in the field of artist-designed book covers throughout the 1890s.

The Proper Decoration of Book Covers: The Life and Work of Alice C. Morse from the Collection of Mindell Dubansky may be seen at the Grolier Club until March 7. From April 4 through May 2, it will be on view at the Hope Horn Gallery at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. Dubansky wrote the accompanying catalogue, which also contains essays by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Josephine M. Dunn, a women's labor historian. It is published by the Grolier Club and may be obtained by telephoning the club at 212-838-6690.

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Be sure to check "Before You Go" on the Resources page at www.themagazineantiques.com for travel resources to facilitate and enhance your visits to the exhibitions we highlight here.

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