Dear Subscribers and Advisors,

I had intended to schedule a reception for the current exhibition this month, but the gallery is not yet ready for an event. The new roof has finally been finished, and the exterior painting is nearly done. Everything slowed down this year due to the rainy summer. That does not mean you should stay away! This past weekend Lyn and Toss Gascoigne visited from Australia. 

Toss (Thomas) began their collection several decades ago when he bought two carloads of books that were being deaccessioned by a church library. Lyn, a photographer and art teacher, appropriates images from the book covers to create new works.

It's always a pleasure welcoming Subscribers and Advisors, particularly when they have traveled halfway around the world to get here. We had plenty of animated conversation about books and art.

I'm trying to figure out when to hold the reception, and will let you know with a "hold the date" e-mail, followed by a printed invitation. I will be in Boston the end of October to install my artworks in an exhibition that opens Nov. 6 in Cambridge, MA, and on to San Francisco for the Guild of Book Workers Standards of Excellence Seminar. 

Meanwhile, cataloging of the exhibition continues. Today's update includes some wonderful covers and some attribution challenges. Thanks to John Lehner, the attribution of the unsigned cover of The Gray Man (Harper, 1896) is to Howard Pyle, based on the unusual lettering style that Pyle also used for other covers.

The creation of spatial depth in a flattened illustrative space is unusual, with the foreground figure behind the swirls that rise from the decorative stylized plants at the bottom of the cover, and the shadowy silhouetted background figures behind the gate in the archway.

The Blue Sky Press is represented by two books in the current catalog, neither of which has a firm attribution for the cover design. The World Above by Martha Foote Crow (1905) features a symmetrical geometric design in white and gold. One of five hundred copies printed on Van Gelder handmade paper.

Mistress Alice Jocelyn, Her Letters (1903) has stamped paper-covered boards with an abstract landscape, and is monogrammed with what appears to be C.S. 

Langworthy & Swift were the principals at Blue Sky Press that year (stated in the colophon and the 1903 NY Times article linked above). So far I have not been able to find Swift's first name, so it would be good to know if "C" was his initial. Or is it a stylized "L" for Langworthy? It doesn't appear to be, but there are stranger typographic eccentricities than that in some monograms. 

The abstract landscape is highly simplified, and reminds me of Florence Lundborg's 1904 cover on Yosemite Legends in the first exhibition (reproduced here so you don't have to get out volume 1). These were clearly in the forefront of Modernism.

Paper covered boards had been used for some of the most precursive cover art since at least 1880 [Aboard the Mavis in the first exhibition, Mr. Bodley Abroad, 1881 in the second]. It is currently undergoing a resurgence of popularity as a "new" way of producing hardcover books.

It wasn't always serious art on the cover. Harry Graham's Misrepresentative Women (Duffield, 1906) had a printed illustration by Dan Sayre Grosbeck on both covers. The problem with paper is its fragility, and finding copies of these books in reasonable condition is difficult. In the picture below it's not the photography that makes the covers look skewed. That's how they are wrapped on the boards.

Cloth dust jackets were not uncommon in this time period, and several examples were in the previous exhibitions. They were paper-backed cloth, often with a gold title on the spine, and occasionally with a full spine stamping. 

Here we have a less usual form of cloth jacket on Clifton Johnson's Along French Byways (Macmillan, 1900) made of unbacked bookcloth stamped with the entire cover and spine design, the only difference being the simplifying of the color scheme. Also in the exhibition is a copy of Johnson's Among English Hedgerows, similarly in a cloth dj stamped with the cover design.

Both covers appear to be the same artist. If you have an idea who it might be, please let me know.

Visitors are always asking how I find all these book covers. Here is an example. In looking for information about the artist Marion L. Peabody, who was featured in volume 2, I discovered a reference to a book cover she did for Dana Estes on their 1905 edition of On Life's Stairway by Frederic Knowles. I finally located a decent copy, which has a gold vignette of a stone stairway going past trees, up and down the hills toward a sun on the horizon—a wonderful metaphoric scene. Here it is with an enlarged detail of the vignette:

In searching for this title I found a bookseller in England who had a copy of the 1901 edition published by L. C. Page, sent an e-mail asking for a photo of it, and was surprised to find that it was an earlier use of a design that was already in the exhibition. But where the book I had (Page, 1902) used the design only on the front cover, in black and gold, on the most beautiful red cloth I have seen, this one had it all in gold on cream cloth, symmetrical on the front and back covers, with a spine design connecting them. I ordered it and now it is in the exhibition.  I don't know who did it, but the influence of Sarah Whitman is apparent.

Another way I find books is from the subscribers and advisors. The current show includes this copy of one of Frank Hazenplug's best known designs, Herbert Stone's edition of Le Gallienne's Prose Fancies. This copy was John Lehner's duplicate.

Other times I have had to wait years for books to turn up on a "want list."  That was the case with the 1897 Blanche McManus Mansfield cover on Richard Mansfield's Blown Away. I have passed on several copies because they were rubbed, soiled and faded. This copy shows some use, but still exhibits the extraordinary design. As with the 1901 design above, also from L. C. Page, a spine design connects flipped identical designs on front and back covers. 

Sometimes I just get lucky. Many of the books in the current exhibition were purchased from a membership library that was "weeding" its collection due to a change in its mission and the sale of its building. The books had been sitting on the shelves for decades, unread, protected with Kraft paper dust jackets, so the condition of the covers is awesome. There are no exterior markings on most of them, as the labels were evidently on the dust jackets (which were gone by the time I saw the books). 

One of the designs in the current cataloging group is particularly striking, and there is something very familiar about it. Will Bradley comes to mind. It has two rows of symmetrical leaves and three rows of asymmetrical fruits. The spine design continues the theme, slightly offset, in a panel. This is the third printing, August, 1908.

WorldCat shows four copies in Austalia and two in the USA. The Harvard copy (second printing, June) has been Googleized, but instead of this cover shows what appears to be a paperback cover, likely a stock image. Perhaps that copy is in a library binding. Ohio State also has a copy of the second printing. 

I also searched online booksellers for this title. Aside from print-on-demand copies, only one copy turned up. That one is listed as the "popular edition" in green cloth ($500.00).  It is hard to understand why a book that went through three printings in three months and also a "popular edition" is so scarce. 

One of the recently cataloged covers now in the cabinet is the 1893 Stone & Kimball edition of Eugene Field's The Holy Cross, first impression, in a binding by Louis J. Rhead. 

One other query on an unsigned design: 

The Moon Metal (Harper, 1900), which I am thinking might be T. W. Ball, and welcome other notions. Hard to find with the flaky white intact, particularly on the title.  There is some rubbing to the silver on the moon, but strangely it makes it look more like the moon. I doubt that was intentional.

The checklist has many other wonderful additions in today's update. Rockwell Kent's Wilderness, a cover by F. Berkeley Smith on How to Swim, featuring a swimmer in rather rough seas, and Will Jordan's cover on The Taskmasters. Also F. R. Kimbrough's 1896 cover for Stone on Julia Magruder's Miss Ayr of Virginia. 

Among the books that are almost impossible to find in any condition is a reference copy of Black Butterfiles (with just a slight defect) in the original W. E. B. Starkweather cover. And more.

As always, go to the Subscriber's Log-in page and enter your passcode. The updated database file and checklist are there.

If you have lost your code or have trouble logging on, let me know and I'll get you back in.