Refined symmetrical layouts
Small generalized vignettes
Outer ruled border now common
Gold stamped central vignettes
Blind stamped panels and borders
Greater variety of bookcloth grains and patterns
Printed striped cloth



       At the end of the 18th-century, an increase in population and mass literacy created a demand for reading materials.  The traditional hand bookbinding methods proved to be too slow and too expensive to meet the modern demand.  As a result, first the iron hand press replaced the wooden in 1798.  From then until 1845, successive inventions in printing and paper making made completely mechanized book production possible.  The binders controlled book production, functioning as suppliers for the larger publishing houses, up until the 1860s.  Then, a huge demand forced large publishing houses to incorporate binding departments into their businesses.

     This exhibition, "Cover as Clue to Content", displays the efforts of early American bookbinders to promote and advertise the intellectual content of the objects they produced in the designs borne by their cloth covers.  This characteristic of using a cover as clue to content, was a major visual phenomenon of book production in the 19th-century.  Cloth covers were first stamped in gold, then in silver and colors in combination with blind stamping, which is the absence of gold or other colored inlay.

     The primary change in 19th-century bookbinding was the evolution of the cloth covered, case bound book, issued in plentiful copies and editions by such publishers as Lippincott, Appleton, Harper and Putnam.  Online, we have a selection the exemplars of these 19th-century books taken from the Redwood Library's collection.  Click here for more textual information.
 
 

1) By a Friend to Youth of Newport, RI.  Rhode-Island Tales and Tales of Old Times.  New York, Mahlon Day & Co., 1839.

2) Hale, S. J.  Flora's interpreter: or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. 2nd ed.  Boston: Marsch, Caper & Lyon, 1832.

3) [Weld, Horatio Hastings].  Pictorial life of George Washington; embracing anecdotes, illustrative of his character.  And embellished with engravings.  For the young people of the nation he founded.  Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, Chestnut Street, 1847.  Gold and blind stamping on brown ribbed grain cloth.  The central vignette is taken from an interior engraving, "Washington Crossing the Alleghany [sic]", and episode from his early surveying career.

4) Pilkington, James.  The artist's guide and his own book, embracing the portion of chemistry applicable to mechanical arts, with abstracts of electricity, galvanism, magnetism, pneumatics, optics, astronomy, and mechanical philosophy...  New-York: Published by Alexander V. Blake, 1841.  Gold and blind stamping on brown ribbed grain cloth.  Bound by Elles and Middlebrook, New York.  The binder is identified in the mid-section of the upper and lower ruled borders of the front and back covers.  The gold stamp of the embowed arm holding a hammer is a robust emblem for the subject matter, suggestive of the strengthening new nation.
 
 



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