In Our Second Floor Gallery:

January 24 - March 7, 2008

The Proper Decoration of Book Covers:
The Life and Work of Alice C. Morse

From the collection of Mindell Dubansky

In January 2008, The Grolier Club will present The Proper Decoration of Book Covers: The Life and Work of Alice C. Morse, an exhibition drawn from the collection of Grolier member Mindell Dubansky. The exhibition will include over eighty books with covers designed by Morse (1863–1961), as well as literary posters and other ephemeral materials relating to her work. The books on display comprise the only known complete collection Morse’s designs.  The collection was begun in 1997, after Dubansky discovered an uncataloged collection of fifty-eight publishers’ covers by Morse in a storage area of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Drawings and Prints.  The covers were a gift from Morse in 1923 and had been exhibited in the Museum Library at that time. The Grolier Club exhibition marks the first time since 1923 that Morse’s work will be on display to the public, with many designs previously unidentified or unattributed.

Alice Morse was a prolific and versatile designer during the heyday of the American Decorative Arts Movement. Though her fame has waned since the early twentieth century, her work will be familiar to admirers of artist-designed publishers’ bindings of the period 1890-1910. She came to prominence during the late 1880s, when a small group of exceptional American publishers began to commission artist-designers such as Morse, and her contemporaries Sarah Whitman and Margaret Armstrong, to design the covers of case bindings.  

Alice C. Morse was born in Ohio in 1863, but raised in Brooklyn, New York. Morse trained as a designer at the Woman’s Art School at Cooper Union in New York City. Before embarking on book cover design, she studied with the well-known stained glass artist John La Farge, and also worked for several years as a stained glass designer for Louis C. Tiffany. Morse’s earliest attributable cover design is for Seth’s Brother’s Wife, published by Harper’s in 1889, and she remained active until the early years of the 20th century. In 1892-93 Morse served as the Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Book-covers, Wood Engraving, and Illustration of the New York State Board of Women Managers; and she is possibly best known today for her chapter on women illustrators in Art and Handicraft in the Woman’s Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition. In 1898, Morse trained as a teacher at Pratt Institute and soon relocated to Scranton, where she took a position as an arts administrator in the public school system. Morse retired and moved back to New York City in 1923, where she lived until her death in 1961.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue raisonné of the work of Alice C. Morse, giving detailed descriptions of all the covers attributable to her, as well as color illustrations of all examples and variants. The catalogue proper is prefaced by biographical essays by Mindell Dubansky, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen and Josephine Dunn, making it an essential resource for both librarians and collectors. Noted bibliographer and scholar Michael Winship, Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, has said of this book:

"[It] will be an invaluable reference tool and is likely to set a standard for future studies of designer American publishers' bindings – if only we had similar information available for the work of Sarah Wyman Whitman and Margaret Armstrong!"

The Proper Decoration of Book Covers: The Life and Work of Alice C. Morse will be available to visitors at the Club for $35, and may also be ordered from University Press of New England. Click here to order.  

The exhibition will open to the public at the Grolier Club from January 24-March 7, 2008, and will then travel  to the University of Scranton, running April 4-May 2, 2008.