Miss Margaret Armstrong (1867-1944)
Margaret Armstrong was the most productive and accomplished American book designer of the 1890s and early 1900s. Her eclectic style, combining classical and art nouveau elements with Colonial, Native American and other motifs, resists easy characterization. Perhaps for this reason, as well as her gender, her rightful reputation as a seminal American graphic artist has long been eclipsed by such contemporaries as Will Bradley.
Margaret Armstrong was the scion of an old and artistic family, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant (Governor of New Amsterdam) on her mother’s side. As a young girl, she lived in Florence, where her father, diplomat and stained-glass designer Maitland Armstrong, practiced his craft. In the 1870s Margaret moved with her family to 58 West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, the heart of the City’s bohemian artistic community. Friends and neighbors included artists like Edwin Austin Abbey, Winslow Homer and William Merit Chase, and architect Stanford White. Armstrong lived and worked in this house for the most of her life.
Margaret began her graphic arts career at the tender age of 16, designing menus and other small publications for local establishments. Her sister Helen was a frequent collaborator on these projects; eventually the sisters would work together on book commissions, Margaret doing the binding design and Helen doing most of the interior decorations. Their first commercial book design was for Margaurite Bouvet’s Sweet William (A. C. McClurg, 1889).
1893 saw the 25-year-old Armstrong’s coming of age as a book designer. She designed the cover for Harper’s edition of George DuMaurier’s novel Trilby (Harper & Brothers, 1894), which introduced the durable character of Svengali. The book was a bestseller, putting Armstrong’s work in every parlor and night stand in the land. Her cover design, in gilt on cream cloth, is cleverly allegorical, featuring a heart (the pure heart of the innocent heroine) ensnared in a spider web (the intrigues of the evil Svengali.). Despite the provocative subtext, the design is softened by the typically-Victorian swirling drapery and ribbon motifs that characterized many of Armstrong’s early designs. This ability to span genres, referencing traditional motifs while incorporating more edgy modern elements, was the root of Armstrong’s commercial appeal. This same year, Armstrong won an award for her cover designs at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Just as Sarah Wyman Whitman was the go-to designer for the Boston literati, Miss Armstrong dominated the burgeoning New York trade publishers, particularly Harper Brothers, G. P. Putnam, and Charles Scribner's Sons. By 1895, she had developed a distinctive alphabet of her own, which she would use in most of her bindings over the next 15 years. As consistent as a typeface, it is also charmingly handmade-looking (And indeed it was, since the letters were engraved on the printing block rather than typeset.). The alphabet’s most easily recognizable element is the capital R, with its extravagantly elongated descender. Armstrong also began using her distinctive monogram, the overlapping capitals “MA”, at this time (Her earlier bindings are unsigned.).
Armstrong designed multiple bindings for several authors, including George Washington Cable, Paul Leicester Ford and Frank Stockton, so that her work is intimately associated with theirs. She also designed distinctive sets of complimentary bindings for the authors Henry Van Dyke and Myrtle Reed. These bindings feature identical cloth and format, but are not “uniform”, since each has a unique cover design. The Reed series is bound in a lavender cloth that hints at the purple prose inside. The bindings for Van Dyke’s spiritual and natural history essays are bound in indigo blue cloth that feature intricate, symmetrical naturalistic designs in the Art Nouveau style. A more handsome set of books is hard to imagine. Fortunately, these books are abundant and inexpensive, though difficult to find in top condition. Late in her career, Armstrong created an impressive series of bindings for the works of Henry Thoreau, published by Thomas Crowell. Their symmetrical designs continue to show the influence of Art Nouveau, but the precisely-de tailed depiction's of New England flora display the artist’s burgeoning botanical knowledge.
In one of publishing’s great second acts, Margaret Armstrong survived the eclipse of the decorative binding by the printed dust jacket (beginning circa 1910). She indulged her love of nature by exploring the West, researching plants for her seminal handbook, Western Wildflowers (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1915), which remained in print for decades. It is said that she and her companions were the first party of women to reach the bottom of the Grand Canyon. After a long gestation, Armstrong published two biographies of prominent Victorians: Fanny Kemble (Macmillan, 1938), and Trewlany (MacMillan Company, 1940), both of which became quite popular. She also wrote three detective novels, including Murder in Stained Glass (Random House, 1939), The Man With No Face (Random House, 1940) and The Blue Santo Murder Mystery (Random House, 1941). Interestingly, Lee Thayer, a partner in the Decorative Designers firm and Miss Armstrong’s primary competition in the binding trade, also created a second career for herself as a mystery novelist.
As might be expected from such a prolific worker, not all of Armstrong’s book designs are inspired. There are several designs, however, on which she clearly invested all of her considerable skill and imagination. Some of these high points include Browning’s Pippa Passes (Dodd, Mead,1900), Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Candle-Lightin' Time (Dodd Mead, 1901), Edith Wharton’s Italian Backgrounds (Scribner’s, 1905), and Gene Stratton Porter’s Song of the Cardinal (Bobbs-Merrill, 1912). A personal favorite is her design for How to Know the Ferns (Scribner’s, 1899), which went through several printings after its initial publication. The binding features the naturalistic silhouettes of fern fronds, clearly taken directly from life, imperfections and all. The effect is strikingly modern, and hints at Armstrong’s deep respect for the intrinsic beauty of nature.
Handsome Books usually stocks copies of all of these high points, as well as the rest Margaret Armstrong’s oeuvre. Typically, we have over 200 different MA bindings in stock, including many uncommon ones, such as her unsigned early bindings. Even now, new bindings by Margaret Armstrong are being discovered. Although a collector of Armstrong bindings will have a lot of competition, it is a rewarding specialty. No other designer has such a broad variety of individual artistry, or such a catholic range literary collaboration.
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