Bindings Designs, 1894-1897
"There are several ways of getting a design-- the period in which the story is written sometimes suggests the style of ornament to be used. A love story should be dainty, as a rule. Essays require something dignified and severe. Then I get a hint from a flower, perhaps-- a story of Holland, for example, suggests tulips, and Scotland the thistle."
- Alice C. Morse, The Designing of Book Covers
The Fair Abigail from At the Ghost Hour series, by Paul Heyse (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1894)
Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum
Advertising Poster for Paul Heyse's Ghost Tales, 1894
Morse, Alice Cordelia (1863-1961)
Two-color commercial lithograph, 18 1/4 × 13 7/8 in.
Delaware Art Museum, Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1977
Morse created the cover (not pictured), title page, and interior decorations for this four-volume series, and her "Ingenious Decorations" were highlighted as a feature on the advertising poster. The delicate construction of the books has resulted in very few intact copies, and the copy owned by the Delaware Art Museum is missing its binding entirely. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a copy of Mid-Day Magic with its cover intact.
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Gypsy Breynton, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1894)
Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum
Morse decorated the cover with a jester's stick and a jump rope, perhaps in reference to the eponymous book's mischevious tomboy heroine.
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Our Home Pets: How to Keep Them Well and Happy, by Olive Thorne Miller (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894)
Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum
This is another example of Morse relating the cover design directly to the contents of the book. In an interview with Gilson Willets she states the book “suggested parrots, so I conventionalized them thoroughly and covered the side with them.”
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A Doctor of the Old School, by Ian Maclaren (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1895)
M. G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings, Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum
The stylized thistles and apothecary jars in the design allude to the main character, a doctor in the Scottish village of Drumtochty.
Morse did not start signing her designs until 1894, making identification of her work a challenge. This is the earliest example of a signed Morse binding in the collection of the Delaware Art Museum. Under the center thistle, just above the author's name, you can see a small A and M. Later bindings feature a conjoined AM.
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Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, by Ian Maclaren (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1896)
M. G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings, Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum
Morse used another, more elaborate stylized thistle design for Scottish author Maclaren's book of short stories.
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Lyrics of Lowly Life, by Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1896, 1907 reprint)
M. G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings, Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum
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Dariel: A Romance of Surrey, by R. D. Blackmore (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1897)
M. G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings, Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum
Dubansky describes the design of this cover as a "gold-embossed and green-stamped symmetrical vignette of Celtic-style strapwork and grotesques, a dotted cross at the top and a grotesque head pendant at the bottom." Morse's conjoined "AM" signature is at the bottom right of the vignette.
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