Posts
Olive Lothrop Grover
[signed with OLG monogram]
The Spirit Guest
by Josephine Rand
Revell,1899
with the dust jacket (missing some pieces), featauring the same design:
Unusual cover material and appearance. An embossed pattern high-finish paper with random-grain pattern. It looks like the ink, which is a split fountain, is stamped into the paper about halfway the depth of the emboss, which seems to have squished the ink to fill the embossment like little micro-cups, making it darker in those spots, and creating a halftone effect. The ink would need to have exactly the right viscosity to achieve this. Revell used this technique on other titles, and also on pebble-grain cloth. An example is the M. A. Lathbury design on Mary Dickenson, From Girlhood to Motherhood, [n.d., c.1899], and Revell used it on a Hazenplug design they recycled for various titles over the years, sometimes using this technique and sometimes printed flat. Detail of the above design is below. Click any image to see it larger.
Mary A. Lathbury
[signed MAL]
From Girlhood to Motherhood
by Mary Lowe Dickinson
Fleming H. Revell Company, n.d. ©1899
The dandelion cover is really lovely, thanks for sharing it!
ReplyDeleteThank you for this posting - I recognized the style immediately! Just last month I purchased an 1898 Fleming H. Revell title, "One of the Two" by Charles M. Sheldon at a used book store in upstate New York. Its cover features a similar floral cover material and appearance designed and signed by A.H.A. It is pictured on the sidebar of my blog.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting cover designs - for the last thirty years I have collected covers designed by Talwin Morris (a friend of Charles Rennie Mackintosh) and these designs are very similar. I had spotted the cover on another site and was trying to find out more about the designer. Talwin worked for Blackie here in the UK from 1893 until his early death in 1911 - so around the same time that these books were published. The font and style if very similar and I wonder if there was any link to Blackie? Interesting also that the dust jacket survived and though I have some early ones none as early as this. The only ones that I have seen have been plain, glassine paper rather than mirroring the actual book design.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this information about this designer - one that I have not come across previously
Kind regards
Jenny