The Bell of Bowling Green
Illustrated by Walter H. Everett
New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1908
Cover by Charles Buckles Falls

The King's Highway Dodd, Mead & Co, 1897 Cover: Blanche McManus Mansfield

This is our first exhibition of publishers' bindings that focuses on books by one author. Her high output during the period from from the 1880s to 1918 gives us a marvelous set of publishers' bindings that represent the transition of cover art from Eastlake post-Victorian styling to Arts and Crafts, Japonisme, Art Nouveau and Poster style.      Cover artists include Amy Richards, Blanche McManus Mansfield, Thomas Watson Ball, William Snelling Hadaway, Harry B. Matthews, Alice Cordelia Morse, and Theodore B. Hapgood.      In addition to the published editions, the exhibition includes an original manuscript of one of the books. 250 pages of it are typescript with ink corrections, and the remainder of the 476 pages are ink, in Amelia Barr's handwriting. This gives a fascinating glimpse into the author's process, and a comparison with the printed book reveals further changes made between this manuscript and its publication.     The exhibition also includes newspaper and magazine articles, serializations, and short strories, which provide a window into the history of publishing at that time. Seeing Thyra Varrick in a 1903 illustrated magazine serialization among advertisements for corsets and household supplies takes this romance set in 18th century Scotland and, for us, places it in the material culture of turn-of-the-century America. The Man Between as a 1906 New York newspaper illustrated Sunday literary supplement is a very different reading experience than either a magazine or a book.

Prisoners of Conscience The Century Company, 1897 Cover: William Snelling Hadaway

The format of this edition is different from previous catalogs. A 6" x 9" book, instead of having just the bibliographic information, each entry has a relevant excerpt from Amelia Barr's autobiography. The book includes the story of her life, with excerpts from her own narrative.      The Internet has many articles about her, and much of the online information is contradictory. Even simple facts like how many children she had, or how many books she wrote, are misinformed. It is easy to see how some of this confusion arose. At the conclusion of her autobiography (1913) she included a list of 61 published books. Some of the dates and publishers do not match what is in the exhibition, or in library catalogs. Many books were issued in several editions, by different publishers, which may account for some discrepancies, and there may be "lost" editions. Two of the books in her list I found no other record of. Eleven more were published after her memoir. Our list of her books has 71 entries.      Amelia Barr kept no list of her thousands of contributions to magazines and papers of articles and poems, and wrote, "Nor can I even pretend to remember the very numerous essays, and social and domestic papers which were almost constantly contributed; I have forgotten the very names of this vast collection of work and I never kept any record of it. Indeed, only some chance copy has escaped the oblivion to which I gave up the rest. They kept money in my purse; that was all I asked of them. I do not even possess a full set of the sixty novels I have written. I may have twenty or thirty, not more certainly."      There are more than 100 books in this exhibition, which is limited to American editions of her work (U.S.A. and Canada), with 64 different covers and many variants. It does not include every title of those that were issued in identical bindings as uniform sets.

There will not be separate limited and deluxe editions of this title.