Barnes & Noble 2012 Desk Diaries

Lovers of American publishers' bindings might want to look at the Barnes & Noble 2012 Desk Diary. They asked me to write an introduction and provide images for every month and every week. The diaries are not yet in the stores, but if you go to the BN website by clicking all three versions linked below, and when you get there, click where it says "more" under the photo in the left column, each has photos of several different pages in the diary. 



 
 2012 Barnes & Noble Softcover Desk Diary (blue)


2012 Barnes & Noble Softcover Desk Diary (red)



2012 Barnes & Noble Hardcover Desk Diary

Maurice B. Prendergast

 

Maurice B. Prendergast

Friendship & Folly 

by Maria Pool

L. C. Page, 1898
 

Maurice B. Prendergast

Muriella or Le Selve

by Ouida (Louise de la Ramée)

L. C. Page, 1901

White cloth was glued to the cover before stamping the pictorial cover of Muriella. This solved the problem caused by the whites that were available for stamping at that time, which flaked off easily. 
 

Olive Lothrop Grover and an unusual stamping effect

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

Ethel Belle Appel

Ethel Belle Appel

Some Women's Ways

by Mary Angela Dickens

R. F. Fenno, 1896

Ethel Belle Appel

The Descendant

by Ellen Glasgow

Harper & Brothers, 1897

Herman Scheffauer

One of the stranger American literary figures was Herman Scheffauer (1878-1927), the San Francisco poet and protégé of Ambrose Bierce who moved to Germany and became a propagandist during WWI, was indicted in abstentia for treason by a Federal Grand Jury in 1919, and committed suicide eight years later, jumping out the window after murdering a woman in his apartment.

He is of interest to us because, according to a query response from  Thomas A Goldwasser Rare Books, Scheffauer is the HS of the monogram on the Shapes of Clay cover. That information led me to acquire a copy of Scheffauer's The Masque of the Elements (London: Dent; NY: Dutton, 1912). Although unsigned, it has so many elements in common with the Shapes of Clay cover art that it appears to be the same hand, refined by a decade.

John Ship, Mariner

Cover art by George Wharton Edwards, with GWE monogram.

John Ship, Mariner
by Knarf Elivas [pseud. Frank (Mackenzie) Savile]
New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company,  ©1898