Project Website for A Database of Designers
One of my favorite types of books I’ve worked with in my career as a conservator are the decorated cloth bindings from the late 19th century known as Publishers’ Bindings. This project began as my own effort to create an inventory of these bindings that were in Arizona State University Library’s circulating collection. Then it grew into something more, as my method of identifying them had to shift from directly browsing the stacks, to finding ways to make educated guesses at what bindings in our offsite storage still remained to be identified.
I also wanted to create a better resource for identifying the dozens of monograms used the artists who designed these decorated covers. Several good resources already existed at the time (notably Richard Minsky’s books and blog), with lists of monograms and their designers. However, the problem I encountered was that no single resource contained the same group of names. Many designers were not represented at all, particularly those with a less-prolific output of work. The images of the monograms offered in both the printed and digital sources were often quite small (which is understandable, as they can be absolutely tiny on the actual bindings) and as a result, hard to parse visually. Where possible, I wanted to contribute better quality images of artist monograms, particularly when I had physical access to these bindings myself and could take higher resolution photographs of the monograms found on their covers.
Secondarily, I wanted to draft a more comprehensive bibliography of books designed by each of these identified (or yet to be identified) designers who left their mark behind in cloth and gold. This labor was made much less laborious thanks to the enormous efforts over the last decade or two by digital repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and various University Libraries. For many of the more well-known designers (Armstrong, Whitman, Morse, et al), there already existed well-researched and comprehensive bibliographies. So I took whatever print resources I could get my hands on (thanks, Interlibrary Loan!) and added to them what I found across the digital repositories and in the collection at ASU Library.
This project also pushed me to grow my skills at administering an Omeka-S site. I also learned how to harness the power of the Internet Archive API to automatically ingest both bibliographic and image data from the source into my dataset.
Because of the truly enormous amount of books produced during this period, my project can never be a complete inventory for any one designer, but it can hopefully be a useful tool for others trying to attribute publishers’ bindings in their own collection.