Strangely, perhaps, Lewis makes no mention of one of the better known American
cover artists from the early days of modern 
cover design, Sarah
Wyman Whitman . Sarah Whitman designed several hundred covers for the
Boston publisher, Houghton, Mifflin, beginning in the early 1880s. Her designs
incorporated elements of Morris as well as of Art Nouveau. Shown here is
a design for Oliver Wendell Holmes's Dorothy Q Together With A Ballad
Of The Boston Tea Party & Grandmother's Story Of Bunker Hill Battle:
With Illustrations by Howard Pyle, published by Houghton, Mifflin in 1893.
The cover is charcoal grey cloth, and the lettering and decoration are blocked
in silver.
Anybody Need Ideas For A Thesis?
Relative to the material on typography, layout and illustration, though, there isn't a lot of information on the subject of cover design from this period. As Lewis himself noted, "The history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century illustrated cover is still to be written".
One of the main problems in researching such a hypothetical work, though,
would be to identify cover artists. In the case of books and magazines,
the illustrators are often explicitly credited in the text; or at least
have legibly signed their work and can thus, albeit with some effort on
the part of the researcher, be identified. The identity of cover artists,
though, is much more problematic. Unless the artist has unobtrusively introduced
initials into the design, there is almost no way to make an attribution.
Hence, even in Lewis's well researched and well documented book, there is
very little about the cover artists in this roughly 1890 - 1925 period.
The web is almost equally uninformative (though there is an excellent site-in-progress
on German
bookbindings at the University of Wisconsin).
Evidently, there is an opportunity here for anyone taken with the subject
to do a bit of primary research. Nobody seems to know very much about these
covers, and, to judge by the prices of many of them, nobody is really collecting
them - at least, some are collected for their literary or historical interest,
but very few people seem to be collecting them for their artistic interest
or as relics of this extraordinarily rich period of bookbinding history.
Which takes us back to the source - the books themselves. The following
is a sampling, shown in roughly chronological order, from our shelf of forgotten
early 20th century English-language hardcovers. Note that there is nothing
particular or special about these covers individually, except in that they
illustrate some of the features of covers of the time. There are doubtless
far better examples around.
A Kentucky Cardinal and Aftermath, by James Lane Allen (1849 -
1925), pub Macmillan, NY, 1900 (originally published 1894 and 1895, Harper
& Brothers). The elaborate gilt-blocked foliage pattern does seem to
have something of the Medieval Morris about it; and there is more than a
hint of the "fine binding" so beloved of the arts & craft
school, of small presses and their often rather self-congratulatory proprietors.
It looks like a typical binding of the 1890s, which became less and less
common as the more flashy, trashy and more vital art-nouveau-influenced
covers took hold. Come to think of it, is there a hint of this future, echoing
faintly the celebrated Beardsley decadence of the 'nineties, in the prevalence
of the charactertistic art nouveau S-shape; and in the slight cockiness
of those crowing gilt cardinals (At least one presumes they are cardinals,
however parrot-like they really look). Inside are one hundred illustrations
by Hugh Thomson (1860 - 1920, a Northern Irish illustrator active from around
1890), but the cover artist is anonymous.
Castle Craneycrow, by George Barr McCutcheon (1866 - 1928), published by Grosset & Dunlap, copyright 1902 (Herbert & Stone). The cover is a sort of yellow ochre color with lettering blocked in dark green. The charming picture has white blocked in, with red and green seemingly printed on. There is, sadly, no credit given to the artist. George Barr McCutcheon was evidently an enormously successful popular novelist in his day. A collection of McCurtcheonabilia is held at the Yale University Beinecke Library.
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