Women in Book Design

Women have long been a part of bookmaking, design, and publishing, dating as far back as handmade illuminated manuscripts, created before the printing press. In the 18th and 19th centuries, women were known to run some very successful book binderies, including Jane Steel, Katherine Waghorn, Jane Aitken, and Lorina Watkins. Most often women took over when their husbands or fathers died. Other women supported their husbands' work by setting type, such as Bertha Goudy, wife of noted book and type designer Frederic Goudy. Women also became very successful book designers following the era of book reform known as the Arts & Crafts period which resulted in the Private Press Movement. The Private Press movement was concerned with making high-quality books that were beautiful expressions of book design and a departure from the low-quality mass-produced books emerging from the industrial age and the Victorian era. Women were gaining entry into the design world as part of the Arts & Crafts movement, schools associated with the movement were cropping up all over Europe and in the United States as well, and women were enrolling in these schools in numbers not seen before. Historians note the high number of women who matriculated from the Glasgow Arts & Crafts school surpassed the number of men. As such it makes sense that we would find women designers in the history of the Private Press movement. Designers such as Margaret Armstrong and Amy Sacker designed book covers and interior pages during the era. Primarily ignored in many histories of art and design is the history of bookbinding. However, this history is also tied to the Arts & Crafts and the Private Press movement, bookbinding was another avenue of paid labor for women.

TIMELINE

10th Century – Ende, Spanish Illuminator of Manuscripts signs her work
18th Century – women begin owning and operating bookbinderies; women and girls were also employed in large numbers folding and stitching pages
1839 – Jane Burden (Morris), born
1859 – Jane Burden (Morris), marries William Morris
1863 – Alice Cordelia Morse, born
1867 – Margaret Armstrong, born
1867 – Amy Sacker, born
1879 – Alice Cordelia Morse attends the Cooper Union (segregated school for girls)
1880-1890 – Designing book covers becomes a professional practice
1885-1889 – Alice Cordelia Morse works for Tiffany & Co. designing stained glass; in 1889 she leaves Tiffany to begin a freelance career designing book covers
1889 – Jane Burden (Morris) designed the cover for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s In Vinculis
1890 – Armstrong’s first book cover design was for Sweet William by Marguerite Bouvet
1890-1940 – Margaret Armstrong's career as a book designer, produced some 270 book designs
1891 – Kelmscott Press founded by William Morris and Emery Walker
1901 – Amy Sacker received awarded a medal for designs at the Pan-American exposition
1893 – Morse chaired the Sub-Committee on Book-Covers, Wood Engraving, and Illustration of the Board of Women Managers for the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition
1897 – Society of Arts & Crafts in Boston founded, active members included Amy Sacker, Sarah Wyman Whitman, Julia DeWolf Addison, and Mary Crease Sears
1910 – Women begin to dominate the modern decorative movement
1914 – Jane Burden (Morris), dies
1918 – Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, announce a hierarchy of art and craft with women and craft at the bottom
1923 – Alice Cordelia Morse donates her book cover designs to the Metropolitan Museum Library
1937 – Bookmaking on the Distaff Side, a book published by women printers
1944 – Margaret Armstrong, dies
1961 – Alice Cordelia Morse, dies
1965 – Amy Sacker, dies

WOMEN IN BOOK DESIGN & BOOKBINDING HISTORY

This should not be considered a complete list of women in book design & bookbinding history, this is just a list of names uncovered for the research of this episode and intended to show that there is a wealth of names that could be included in histories of graphic design. This list focuses on women from the past, there is also a wealth of women designers who have worked more recently in book design, this too could become a future episode.

• Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842-1904)
• Helena de Kay (1848-1916)
• Katherine Adams (1862-1952)
• Alice Cordelia Morse (1863 – 1961)
• Margaret Armstrong (1867–1944)
• Elizabeth Corbet Yeats (1868-1940)
• Bertha Goudy (1869-1935)
• Bertha Stuart (1869-1953)
• Anna Simons (1871-1951)
• Amy Sacker (1872-1965)
• Annie French (1872-1965)
• Emma Redington Lee Thayer (1874-1973)
• Jessie Marion King (1875-1949)
• Anna Sipkena (1877-1933)
• Vanessa Bell (1879-1961)...