Unearthing A Bookworm's Work
Information is a tool, but love of reading is a way of life. And like any love, it has a physical dimension. There is more to it than simply ingesting print. It begins with pleasure in the look, feel, and weight of a book. Some would argue that in our digital age, book arts matter more than ever before. Nowhere do they matter more than at the Grolier Club, founded in 1884 to promote the art of book production.
Modern bookbinding techniques were perfected to a fine art toward the end of the 19th century. During the zenith of the American Decorative Arts Movement, something of an aesthetic crusade, women rose to the fore of book cover design. Alice Cordelia Morse (1863–1961) was a front-runner among the first generation of artists — displacing the customary dye-makers and engravers — to design commercially produced books. This Grolier Club exhibition on the life and work of Morse owes itself to the passion and detective work of Grolier member Mindell Dubansky, preservation librarian in the Metropolitan Museum's Thomas J. Watson Library. She discovered Morse's designs 10 years ago in a storage room of the Met's Department of Prints and Drawings.
Ms. Dubansky, herself a collector of 19th-century publishers' bindings, came upon an uncataloged collection of 58 covers in an old print box. Some had been removed from bound books; others, such as proof covers, had never been bound. All had been gifted to the museum by Morse in 1923 and exhibited in the library.
The cache prompted further research into the sparse details of Morse's life and led to the discovery of additional covers that had not been attributed to her. As a result of Ms. Dubansky's perseverance, more than 80 splendid cover designs plus many binding variations and adaptations have been identified as hers. This Grolier Club exhibition marks the first time since 1923 that Morse's work has been on display to the public.
Born in Ohio, Alice C. Morse was raised in Brooklyn at a time of emerging, reformer-driven opportunities for women in the postbellum era. Ambitious to support herself, Morse trained as a designer at the Woman's Art School at Cooper Union. Dedicated to training the working class in marketable skills, it was one of the few art schools in New York open to women at the time.
Commercial firms competed for Cooper Union's graduates. Publishing houses sought students as illustrators, engravers, and book cover designers. Tiffany & Company, spurred by Louis Tiffany's confidence in women's design sense — politically correct for its time — hired many female students in glass decoration and interior design. It was the heyday of the American decorative artist as both an individual creator and a force in a growing marketplace.
Before committing to a career in book cover design, Morse studied with John La Farge, a poet in stained glass no less than in painting. She also worked for several years as a glass designer for Tiffany. Her ability to interpret nature motifs and historical ornament is due, in no small part, to her experience at Tiffany & Co. She herself likened book design to stained glass: "I think book covers resemble glass more than, say, wall-paper or silk in that you have a complete design in a given space whereas wall-paper and silks repeat indefinitely."
Fertile affinity between the two mediums is evident on every cover. Several of her early designs for Dodd, Mead & Company recall the floral wreaths La Farge translated so successfully from gossamer oils into the leaded confines of stained glass.
The green plain-weave cloth cover of "A Rose of a Hundred Leaves" bears a paper onlay in the shape of a wreath of pink and green roses. Gold-stamped and edged with four tied ribbons, it represents Morse's conviction that cover design should accord with the book's subject. This was a love story; daintiness must reign.
There are considerable differences between historic and modern bookbinding procedures. Morse had a particular genius for interpreting older techniques in a manner suitable for modern commercial book design. One lovely cover follows another, each one an invitation to treasure the contents of the book.
The full sheepskin cover of "Writing to Rosina" is blind-stamped (an impression made in the leather with an engraved brass stamp) with an intricate pattern of open-winged butterflies. The wings form a cartouche at the top to hold the title; it is an exquisite example of Morse's facility in retaining the feeling of a hand-tooled book.
One of Morse's best known designs is the green, fine-ribbed cloth front cover for "Turrets, Towers and Temples," a collection of essays on historic buildings. The all-over Gothic-style foliate design is a tribute to the book as an embodiment of mind.
The show is accompanied by an illustrated catalog with valuable essays by Ms. Dubansky, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, and Josephine Dunn, and includes useful discussion of the role of the Aesthetic and Decorative Arts Movements in underscoring the material and visual qualities that bind readers to books in the first place.
This exhibition, art history at its best, imparts a keener understanding of why the book arts matter.
Until March 7 (47 E. 60th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-838-6690).
