Telling Books by Their Covers
By Anne Stewart O’Donnell
The typical book offered by the large American publishers of the mid-1880s sported a cover of moisture-resistant colored cloth, with a design die-stamped on it in black or gold. That design, generally concocted by the die-maker himself, might be a riot of type faces, borders, arabesques, and Japanese or Eastlake-style motifs. It might reproduce an illustration from inside the book. Or it might feature an incongruous vignette unrelated to the subject matter—perhaps “a volume of critical essays with a bunch of daisies thrown across the cover,” as designer Alice C. Morse later commented dryly. One thing you could count on, however: whatever the ornament, there was likely to be a lot of it.

That is, until Sarah Wyman Whitman came along.