The Art of American Book Covers: 1875-1930

The Book Beautiful, whether manuscript, incunabulum, vellum or leather-bound, was once for the rich or for use in the Church. But in time, every commercial printer could produce a beautiful book and the cover is often what made it sell. Richard Minsky's book shows us the beautiful books ordinary people could buy from American publishers by and before 1900. He profiles the book cover artists, discusses their styles and innovations, and analyzes the effects they produced with their design, working within and exploiting a new medium: the cloth book cover, limited in size and to the effects that could be produced with brass die stamping. As one who has admired this art (and scoured library sales for examples) for many years, I am delighted and thankful that someone has managed to bring this art to a wider public appreciation. One can page through this book in amazement at a series of artful illusions or study and read how the artist achieved her or his effect. For myself, Richard Minsky has reminded me why I have admired and collected these books and reanimated my delight in looking at them!

This is more than just a flawlessly put-together book. Every page with its illustration of a book cover, is a joy to study. The photographs are unadorned except for explanatory text below the cover. There are even facing pages of ARTISTS' MONOGRAMS at the back of the book, along with the addition of a bibliography and a list of online resources. Also a listing of ORIENTAL ART AND ORNAMENT REFERENCES AVAILABLE TO THE ARTISTS. This is a book written by someone who loves books.

Minsky's Art of American Book Covers 1875-1930 is, granted, a very specialized area of book collecting interest. But this book will definitely draw more attention to American trade bookbindings as a fine art. The volume is well written and researched and beautifully produced. Illustrated with hundreds of color illustrations of the magnificent bindings of this period. And with a useful bibliography and two pages of artist's monograms at the end. And how it was published at the amazingly low price is a puzzle. A pleasant one.

An exquisite book and an amazing trip back in history. Page after page of beautiful images that make you ache for a time when we produced less, but did it with passion and style. And if you are not sated by the collection in the book, the author presents a website at the end into which you can fall for hours on end perusing endless categories of American classic book covers.

This is a beautifully designed book showing a collection of excellent craftsmanship and design in book covers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's like a library rare book room that you can visit over and over from your own bookshelves.

I love the art of bookmaking, and this book adds to my knowledge. Minsky is a genius and I hope to meet him someday!

Outstanding, profusely illustrated book. The author and publisher should be proud.

Richard Minsky's The Art of American Book Covers: 1875-1930 is a work that fully merits the term amazing. He covers one of book publishing's most creative periods, when covers took on some of the qualities of sculpture.Minsky is uniquely qualified to guide us through the history of a time when the book as art merged with the book as industrial object. He was a -- some would say the -- founder of the modern book art movement, whose influence inspired countless artists. He revolutionized the concept of the book by detaching it from its purely literary conventions and concentrating on the ways in which books provoke love and hate in the social milieu by their very existence. Using simple office equipment such as the inkjet printer, he also showed how the author/artist could escape the control of the industrial publishing complex and create works that were products of individual thought rather than groupthink.The Art of American Book Covers mainly consists of the covers themselves, which are shown in full color, along with brief biographical and historical information, but Minsky's introduction -- beautifully illustrated with examples -- is a remarkably complete yet succinct history of the period, its artists and its main business and intellectual forces. He writes:"In the 1870s book cover art in the United States entered a Golden Age that lasted more than fifty years. Some of the work is startling for its prescience and can be associated with art movements that occurred decades after the books were produced. Publishers commissioned contemporary painters, architects, and stained glass designers to create covers that would grab the eye of bookstore browsers."Artists experimented with new visual concepts and production processes in an era of rapid technological, social, and aesthetic evolution. These artists were in the forefront not only of book cover design, but of visual culture. In the following pages you will see works by early precursors to Malevich, Marinetti, Kandinsky, Kline, Escher, and other artists. One wonders if the artists had these books in their childhood homes."Identifying the cover artists helped publishers to sell books. Houghton, Mifflin took the lead in America in 1887, featuring Mrs. Henry Whitman's name as the cover designer in their advertising, but showed no images of the covers. Sarah Wyman Whitman created hundreds of covers for Houghton and influenced many other artists. In the decade that followed, other publishers' advertisements and catalogs featured cover artists such as Frank Hazenplug, Will Bradley, and Bruce Rogers, who had become so well known that their names appeared without pictures of the covers."As early as the 1840s, Americans were buying books as decorative objects for their homes as well as works of literature. This was not the same as buying sets of books by the yard to decorate the shelves of a home library. The beautiful covers of individual books were meant to be seen, not hidden on shelves with only their spines exposed."If you love books, you will love this book. It is a landmark in the history of the book and will surely provide great inspiration for any artist, whether working in the field of books or not. Minsky captures a critical moment in industrial design that was characterized by a profound sense of humanism. Far from being ironed out and standardized, book covers were intensely personal, suffused with a kind of joy that survives to this day in the art of the book cover. Modern production may be much slicker, less textured, but book covers remain defiantly creative even as content is muffled in deadening white noise. The Art of American Book Covers is easily one of Minsky's greatest works, a stunning example of critical art history that is free of any kind of curatorial jargon, fundamentally respectful of our intelligence, yet clear, accessible and useful. It belongs in every library.

I ordered this on spec without knowing anything about it but I assumed it would be about American dust jackets - Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, say. That generation of books by Scribner, Knopf etc has mouth watering wrappers. But this book is not about that at all, but about decorated boards, generally on earlier books. I loved it on opening it though. This is an art book and a book about book art. I'm going out right now to become a squillionaire so that I can own all the books illustrated. In years of haunting bookfairs and second hand bookshops I've seen barely any of these books except the Novel in Woodcuts by Lynd Ward, although there are a few familiar English books in their American incarnation, e.g.California illustrated by Sutton Palmer.There's a 1901 cover for Beowulf by Samuel Harden Church - I always wondered who wrote it!The author is a collector himself and there is an interesting scholarly introduction, but it's mostly about the plates. Appropriately, there is no dust jacket, but the upper board is attractive in a rich red colour with a gold leaf type decoration. Don't let the sun near that red cover. Finally, the book is for those gentle souls who care about books as objects, so note that I'm writing about a second printing. Oh, the pain. I believe the first printing has purplish boards and is more expensive. But you can't go wrong for aesthetic bookish pleasure with this printing.

A beautiful book