By Jamie Cumby, Librarian
This summer, Grolier member Caroline Schimmel made a generous and fascinating gift to the Library: a portfolio of commercial book cover designs by an almost completely unknown woman artist named Antoinette Louise Hayes.1 Hayes was an art school graduate who lived independently as a working artist in Boston from 1898 to 1909. These examples of Hayes' work, some apparently finished designs, some working sketches, open up a number of questions about her life and career. They are very striking, executed by an accomplished, formally trained artist, and several bear evidence of dialogue with the publishers. However, aside from this portfolio, there is very little other evidence of her career.
Scholars, librarians, and other antiquarians have done considerable work to demonstrate the instrumental role that women played in the design of publisher's bindings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.2 Many of these studies have focused on the three most successful and influential American woman designers of this period: Margaret Armstrong, Sarah Wyman Whitman, and Alice Cordelia Morse. These three women were responsible for hundreds of commercial book designs, which both reflected and impacted changing trends in visual and decorative art. Hayes represents a very different sort of woman who participated in this golden age of cover design. She is an example of one of the thousands of anonymous young women who pursued, struggled with, and eventually abandoned careers in commercial design in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Women in the Design world at the turn of the 20th century
By the time Hayes began her work, becoming a professional designer was not only an established but a popular career path for American women. Women's opportunities for formal art education and careers in the arts had expanded dramatically by the late 19th century. The first schools of design for women in America opened their doors in the early 1850s to meet the growing demand for "suitable" employment for white, middle class women.3 Contemporary advocates for women in the workforce argued that women were naturally suited to design work because it was less physically taxing than other jobs, and because of a "native readiness of taste".4 These early opportunities for women to seek vocational training in industrial design came to include fine arts education more broadly, as the expansion of arts education in American public schools created greater demands for trained art teachers. By 1880s there were 38 art schools in the United States, most of which were co-educational and nine of which catered exclusively to women students.5 Hayes' alma mater, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, had admitted women from the beginning, and by 1889 women made up 82% of the student body.6
These schools graduated women into an active but not necessarily favorable job market. The vast scale of industrial production created greater and greater need for designs in a number of fields. This increase in output met with changing tastes and artistic values, which meant that designs create one year were not necessarily attractive or saleable in the next. There was a real need for industrial designs in the late 19th century, and a genuine willingness to employ women to create them. In 1894, the year that Hayes enrolled in the Museum School, one account of the career prospects for aspiring woman designers estimated that more than 1,000 women worked as designers in New York alone, with a further 1,000 studying to become designers in New York's art schools.7 However, as this estimated number of students suggests, there were fewer design jobs than there were art school graduates, particularly compared with art teaching jobs. It is also important to note that, though industrial design work may have been plentiful, men still held the highest positions and earned the most money for their work in major firms. Another contemporary guide to careers for women goes so far as to suggest that it would be safer for a woman designer to do independent contract work out of her own home rather than compete with men at a large firm.8
Hayes' chosen field, book design, emerged as a particular focus for women designers with formal training in the late 19th century. Demand was high for new, high-quality cover designs, thanks in large part to emerging trends in decorative arts from the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements, and to a renewed focus on the art and materiality of the book from organizations like the recently-founded Grolier Club.9 Among the earliest, impactful designers to apply Aesthetic movement principles to book covers was a woman: Helena de Kay Gilder, who created the striking peacock feather design for a volume of her husband's poems in 1876. De Kay opened the door to a number of prominent women designers who followed.
The Grolier Club's copy of Helena de Kay Gilder's cover design on Richard Watson Gilder, The New Day: a poem in songs and sonnets (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Company), 1876.
Book designer Alice C. Morse provides an excellent summary of the state of cover design and gestures at women's growing role in the industry in her essay for the volume commemorating the Women's Building at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Invoking the fine bindings in the public exhibitions of the Grolier and Aldine Clubs, she writes
"It was inevitable that the contrast between the beauty of treatment and design seen in the Grolier, Dérome, and kindred styles, and the entire absence of these qualities in the current publications, should be strongly felt. The effect of this influence has been such that publishers have come to realize that a salable book must have an attractive cover."10
Her reasons for why women like Sarah Wyman Whitman, Margaret Armstrong and, indeed, Morse herself had seen such marked success in the field echoes many of her contemporaries, but fails to offer concrete information about the material conditions that made it possible for them to succeed in the field. She says only that "Women seem to have a remarkable faculty for designing. Their intuitive sense of decoration, their feeling for beauty of line and harmony of color, insures them a high degree of success." 11 For Morse, it was only natural that women should be among the most celebrated and sought after book cover designers. However, for every success story like Alice Morse's there were many more women like Antoinette Hayes, who struggled to find stable employment.
Hayes' Life and Career
Antoinette Louise Hayes was born in 1875 to Joseph Kimball Hayes Jr. and Marie Louise Hayes (née Davis). Her father was a lawyer who dealt with bankruptcy cases, and she grew up in a comfortable home in Brookline, Massachusetts. We see a glimpse of her future bookish inclinations in the charity work she did as a teenager. As an 18-year-old she was one of the volunteer "visitors" who staffed the Boston Children's Aid Society's Home Libraries program.12
In the following year, 1894, she enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts as a Decorative Arts student. The Museum School, the most prestigious of Boston's art schools, maintained a robust Design school and had strong connections to artists of the Boston Book Movement. Printing and publishing were the largest industries in Boston at this time, and book design was an especially prominent focus of its design world. Sarah Wyman Whitman was on the governing board for the Museum School while Hayes was a student, and lectured to the affiliated Boston Art Students Association on a number of occasions, including an 1894 lecture on book illustration.13 Some of Hayes' fellow Museum School graduates became serious figures in the Boston Book Movement in their own right, including the prolific Amy Sacker, and Olive Lothrop Grover, who enrolled in the same year as Hayes.14 For her own part, Hayes seems to have been a serious though somewhat inconsistent student. She attended only two thirds of her class and lectures sessions, but did advanced coursework in perspective. She spent four years in total working on her degree, and received her diploma in 1898.15
After graduating, Hayes lived and worked independently from her family at the Grundmann Studios, a converted former skating rink operated by the Boston Art Students Association (after 1901, the Copley Society). This studio space, named after instructor at and former director of the Museum School Otto Grundmann, was at the heart of Boston's community of artists. Though the BASA began as a group for men and women graduates of the Museum School, as the name of their headquarters suggests, its membership soon expanded to include anyone active in the arts in Boston. Its inclusivity was an important point of contrast to other local clubs, which only admitted men. The organization maintained an impressive exhibition program that drew in members of the public, with shows focused on contemporary and historic artists. These shows and other BASA activities, combined with a central location next to Copley Square, made Hayes' home a hub for anyone who was anyone in Boston's art world.16
While a number of men associated with Boston's art scene produced work there, the majority of the studios' three dozen tenants were women. The Grundmann studios functioned as a kind of artists' colony for many middle and upper middle class women, as one of the few socially approved ways for unmarried women to live independently.17 An 1898 article published in the Providence Sunday Journal chronicled the women residents of Grundmann studios, remarking on the respectable but curious phenomenon of the "fin-de-siècle bachelor woman" who "pursues the uneven tenor of her way without a thought of chaperones".18 Hayes was living in studio 17 by 1902, and may well have been one of these "semi-bohemian" women written up in the 1898 piece.
As early as 1902, Hayes was beginning to make a name for herself. She was one of seven other designers of commercial book covers featured in the Art Institute of Chicago's first annual "Designs for Decorations and Examples of Art Crafts Having Distinct Artistic Merit" exhibition. The show featured a mixture of major and minor figures in the world of decorative arts. Hayes and other young, relatively unknown artists exhibited their work alongside Louis Comfort Tiffany's pottery, book cover designs by Theodore Brown Hapgood Jr, and books printed by Daniel Berkeley Updike.19 The jury selected two of Hayes' works for the show: Designs for book cover and book plate" and "Cribbage board, burned and painted wood".20 While the cribbage board may seem out of place next to her cover designs, celebrated contemporary bookbinder F.J. Pfister applied and promoted pyrography for fine bindings, suggesting that it was an inexpensive alternative to bookbinding dies for complicated projects.21 Hayes may not necessarily have applied the same methods to her commercial book designs, but it shows her interest in other design techniques and in hand crafts more broadly.
As promising as her inclusion in the juried Art Institute exhibition may have been, it seems she was not able to parlay this early success into a lengthy or prominent career. There are scarcely any mentions of her name outside of the Art Institute show, she does not appear on any lists of book cover designers compiled by current researchers, nor does she appear in other resources like the Union List of Artist Names.22
The next record of her activity that I have been able to trace is her marriage in 1909. She married Bostonian lawyer Roger Clapp on 2 June 1909, and left the Grundmann Studios for a new home back in her native Brookline. Thus far, I have found no evidence of any professional artistic activity under her married name, and it is likely that she retired from her artistic career after her marriage. The couple had at least one child, Ruth, born 21 June 1911. Ruth Clapp inherited her mother's designs after Hayes' death in 1942, evidenced by the envelope that held the portfolio when it came to our Library.
The envelope in which the portfolio was held before arriving at the Club
The Portfolio
The portfolio contains 18 examples of designs for 12 different projects, many executed on samples of book cloth. Hayes employed a number of different styles for these designs, often evoking the work of other contemporary book cover designers. Her designs weave together a number of popular art nouveau and arts and crafts idioms, and many of these examples bear a strong resemblance to Sarah Wyman Whitman's work. Other design influences include Margaret Armstrong, covers designed under the auspices of the Decorative Designers firm, some of Aubrey Beardsley's floral cover designs, and, in two rather striking cases, Thomas Watson Ball's pictorial designs.23
The consistent through-line in each design is Hayes' ALH monogram inside a diamond-shaped lozenge, which appears near the lower margin of each example. Cover designers began signing their work with unique monograms in the 1890s, concurrent with the growing value that the public and the publishing industry placed on well-designed covers. Designers helped sell books, and the most celebrated designers and their publishers were careful to include distinctive monograms to identify their work and elevate the value of the books that bore it.24 That Hayes was careful to create her own monogram suggests that she saw a place for herself in the pantheon of professional cover designers,
A close-up of the ALH monogram
The only publisher's name to appear in Hayes' designs was Ginn & Company, a Boston-area textbook publishing house. The firm was not necessarily known for the bindings it commissioned, but its steady output would nevertheless have created a good amount of work for local Boston designers. Ginn & Co. largely shied away from elaborate designer bindings in favor of simple, inexpensive designs. Summarizing Ginn & Company's design sensibility, F. D. Nichols of Ginn & Co.'s advertising and illustration departments wrote "the ideal for a cover of a school-book is neither the extreme of severe simplicity nor the other extreme of the over-ornate." He also noted the different types of designs appropriate for different subjects and ages (i.e. "the plainest" covers for mathematical books, or descriptive cover illustrations for young children).25 Designing for Ginn & Company would not have afforded the same kind of artistic license that prominent designers like Sarah Wyman Whitman or Margaret Armstrong enjoyed in their work for Houghton Mifflin, Harper, or Scribner, but even this staid textbook publisher was conscious of the value of a well-designed cover.
Despite the number of Ginn and Company designs she created, it seems that Hayes worked as a freelancer. One interesting design sample, executed on blue book cloth, offers stand-in text for Title, Author, and Publisher. It may be that she shopped this basic design to different buyers, in hopes that its generic pattern would be suitable for any number of books.
Many of Hayes' designs appear to have been their final versions, prepared after a period of discussion and review with a publisher. According Hayes' contemporary, the book designer Amy Richards, it was common practice for a designer to begin with a color sketch on paper, followed by a working drawing in black and white. The initial sketch would have been informed by a preliminary conversation with the publisher about color scheme and material as well as by, ideally, reading the book in question. Only after the working drawing was accepted would the designer execute a finished design on book cloth. For these final designs, designers would not source the cloth themselves, but typically requested samples of binding material from the publishers they worked with. This was to both parties' mutual advantage, as it allowed for finished designs that would closely resemble the die-stamped product.26
Several designs in the portfolio show evidence of this iterative design process. For three designs, Hayes preserved the working drawings as well as the final, full-color renderings on book cloth samples.
The working sketch for "Lois La Chapelle" bears the pencil note "'On approval' Apr 13'"
Another sketch for which there is no accompanying "final" design, a black and white rendering of a cover for Robert Louis Stevenson's Poems, shows annotations indicating choices for cloth color and stamping colors.
The portfolio also includes three different full-color renderings of distinct designs for "The Jones First Reader" for Ginn & Company, all on different shades of book cloth rather than paper. Taken as a group, these designs suggest the kind of dialogue we might expect from a designer and a publisher; there is an expensive option in multiple colors and a clear deliberation about color schemes that can be seen in the finished and unfinished samples of the simpler and less expensive option. Ginn & Company's design philosophy, which inclined towards simplicity and monochrome, suggests an explanation for why Hayes prioritized the all-green design. In the same essay about the Ginn & Co design philosophy cited above, Nichols suggests that "it often happens that the finest covers of all are in one color, perfectly harmonized and blended with the shade of cloth in which the book is bound".27 However, we might expect these kinds of basic decisions to have already been worked out in successive sketches on paper. Adding to the mystery around these designs is the fact that Ginn and Company never actually used any of the them.
There was only one edition of The Jones First Reader, published by Ginn and Company in 1903. It was the first installment in a series aimed at students in the first thorough eighth grades, though only five were ever published.28 Each reader employed the same cover design, a Renaissance-style architectural design in navy blue and red on tan book cloth, bearing the interlocking D monogram of the Decorative Designers firm.
The Grolier Club's copy of L. H. Jones, The Jones First Reader (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1903). Note the interlocking D monogram in the center of the lower margin.
The search for published copies
Though Hayes was careful to include her own distinctive monogram on each design collected in this portfolio, we have yet to trace a known publishers' binding back to her. Caroline Schimmel has located 3 contemporary copies of Ginn & Co. imprints for which Hayes submitted a cover design, the above-mentioned Jones First Reader, and the 1898 and 1900 editions of Macaulay's Essay on Milton, but none of these editions feature Hayes' designs. I have been similarly unlucky in tracing the designs without a Ginn & Co. imprint. Indeed, for the enigmatic "Lois La Chapelle" design, I have found no evidence of either an author or a title with that name. It is possible that this portfolio represents only designs that were never accepted by publishers, and the final, accepted designs may have remained in the publisher's possession.
Hayes seems to have been one of the unlucky aspiring women designers who found the job market less favorable than they might have hoped. While many of the women enrolled in American art schools in the late 19th century did not plan on pursuing careers, a lack of success does not necessarily indicate a lack of ambition. It is still possible that Hayes was a middle class hobbyist occupying herself before marriage rather than someone with genuine career ambitions, but her actions suggest otherwise. Though scant, the traces of her life and career indicate that she was serious in her work. She submitted her work to at least one juried art show, she created a distinctive monogram to brand her work, and her surviving designs show evidence of active dialogue with publishing firms. However, as contemporary guides to women's professional options warned, it was difficult to break into the industry, even in fields like book design where some of the most celebrated designers were women.
As we begin to revive Antoinette Louise Hayes' story and reconstruct her body of work, I would like to close with a call to action. We would like to identify as many published examples of Hayes' designs as we possibly can. If you encounter any published examples of the cover designs represented in this portfolio, or if you see her ALH monogram, please contact us, either via email (jcumby@grolierclub.org) or in the comments of this post.
Notes
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