THE PROPER DECORATION OF BOOK COVERS:
THE LIFE AND WORK OF ALICE C. MORSE
An exhibition curated by SLS Alumna Mindell Dubansky
Grolier Club, NYC: January 23 to March 7, 2008
University of Scranton: April 4 to May 2, 2008
In January 2008, The Grolier Club will exhibit The Proper Decoration of Book Covers: The Life and Work of Alice C. Morse, from the collection of Grolier member, Mindell Dubansky. The exhibition will include examples of over eighty books with covers designed by Morse (1863–1961), as well as literary posters, and ephemeral materials relating to her. 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 they had been exhibited in the Museum Library at that time. The upcoming exhibitions will be the first time since 1923 that Morse’s work will be on display to the public and the first time that many of her designs will be able to be attributed to her.
Alice Morse was a prolific and versatile designer of the American Decorative Arts Movement. Though her fame has waned since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, her work has remained familiar to those attuned to the beauty of the artist-designed publishers’ bindings of the 1890s. During the late 1880s, a small group of exceptional American publishers began to commission artist-designers like Morse and her contemporaries Sarah Whitman and Margaret Armstrong, to design the covers of case bindings, rather than leaving the decoration to craftsmen, as had been previously done.
Alice C. Morse was born in Ohio around 1862. Shortly after, her family moved to Brooklyn , New York. Morse trained as a designer at the Woman’s Art School at Cooper Union in New York City. Before going into book cover design, she studied with the well-known stained glass artist, John La Farge, and worked for several years as a stained glass designer for Louis C. Tiffany. Morse’s earliest attributable book cover is for Seth’s Brother’s Wife, published by Harper’s in 1889. She remained active until the early years of the 20th century. From 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 most 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.
An illustrated book will accompany this exhibition. It will contain illustrated examples of each design as well as biographical essays by Mindell Dubansky, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen and Josephine Dunn. This invaluable reference work will assist librarians and collectors to identify Morse’s work in their libraries and to inspire new collectors to acquire her charming designs. The book will be available by January 23, 2008.
