A Database of Designers: Identifying the Artists of Publishers Bindings, 1890s-1920

Welcome!

I am a book conservator who absolutely adores the decorated book covers known as Publishers' Bindings - and 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 way to identify the monograms used by those designers who created the decorated covers on these books.  Several good resources already existed at the time (notably Richard Minsky's books and blog), with lists of monograms and their designers, but no single one contained the same group of names, and many designers were not represented at all. The images of the monograms offered in both the printed and digital sources were also quite small (which is understandable, as they can be absolutely tiny on the actual bindings) and often hard to parse. So 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.

Because of the enormous amount of books produced during this period, this 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. Or at least confirming that yes, we still have NO idea who that designer was, even if we can read their monogram clear as day!

Thanks to the incredible number of digitized books from this period that are available in both the HathiTrust and the Internet Archive, it is now easier than ever before to explore the corpus of decorated cloth publishers bindings. Other digital collections of publishers' bindings have also been very useful in creating this website. Please see below for a list of resources and sources for both the images and attribution information found on this site.

Online Resources and Digital Collections

Books and Journals

Archival Collections