Thank you for visiting the online gallery. This was our first exhibition featuring the work of a single cover artist of the Golden Age of publishers' bindings. It features more than 80 cover designs created by Thomas Watson Ball, or attributed to him, and additional variants, for a total over 100 volumes on exhibit and reproduced in color in the catalog. You can now order the catalog of this exhibition.

In the previous four exhibitions on this subject, we showed a total of 1,500 designs by over 140 known designers and many anonymous ones.

The CATALOG of the Third Exhibition is available. The exhibition was acquired by The Boston Athenaeum in its entirety.

The Second Exhibition, with 300 designs, ended November 20, 2008. That entire collection was acquired by The Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington. The fully illustrated catalog of the second exhibition is available in Limited and Deluxe editions and on CD-ROM.

The First Exhibition ended in August 2005, and that entire collection was acquired by the University of Alabama. A beautiful and comprehensive illustrated catalog was produced that included high resolution images of all 500 designs in the collection plus many variants, as well as bibliographic information. Essays by Richard Minsky on the aesthetic and historical aspects of this art form provide several methodologies for collecting these works, and demonstrate that artists were doing work on book covers that was prototypical of art movements that arose decades later.  

The Limited Edition and CD-ROM versions of the first three exhibition catalogs may now be ordered online.