I am always pleased to receive bookplate articles for inclusion in the blog. In this case I am doubly pleased
because Mark Schumacher has done extensive research about Amy M. Sacker over a long period of time.
You can visit his remarkable Amy Sacker website here:
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because Mark Schumacher has done extensive research about Amy M. Sacker over a long period of time.
You can visit his remarkable Amy Sacker website here:
The “second lives” of two
Amy Sacker bookplates
Amy Sacker (1872-1965) created about two dozen known bookplates during her career [see http://www.amysacker.net/documents/sackerbookplates.htm]. Two of the bookplates that appeared in the 1903 publication by Boston bookseller Charles Goodspeed, “The Book Plates of Amy Sacker”, actually had a second usage in a different setting. The Boston artist modified her work and employed it to serve a new, quite different purpose.
Her bookplate for Waldo K. Chase [figure 1]
became the colorful cover design for the December, 1903, issue of the Boston monthly, The Literary World, [figure 2]. While the background was reworked into a more festive, Christmas-time look, the figure and the pose, while reversed, remain fundamentally the same. Amy has also moved the monogram from under Waldo’s foot to a pile of earlier issues of the magazine lying on the floor.
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A second bookplate from this same collection (and done in a similar bold style) was created for Harold Murdock [figure 3], showing a young man in Renaissance attire standing at a desk.
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This same fellow had already appeared, dressed quite differently, in a more modern look, as the title character of Edward William Thomson’s The Young Boss (1896) [Figure 4]. Whether Sacker had created the bookplate prior to that date, and reworked for the cover, or vice versa, is not known.
There is another “bookplate connection” involving Sacker’s work, though it is not one of her bookplates. The central design for the cover of Robert Stephens’ Philip Winwood [figure 5] was “appropriated” by the New York engravers Ames and Rollinson, about 1900, to create a bookplate for Frank Earle Hayward [figure 6]
Mr. Hayward had considerable connections to the revolutionary era-- he was a member of the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, and apparently of the Order of Washington, where he was the Deputy Vice-Commander-General for the state of New York . He was also a member of the Bibliophile Society of Boston.
I find the re-use generally of Amy Sacker's designs fascinating, especially when they seem to head "off course. Here is an example.
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My joke is that, unless they are sitting there reading "Fodor's Columbia River", they are going to be in deep trouble.
My joke is that, unless they are sitting there reading "Fodor's Columbia River", they are going to be in deep trouble.
This is the link to a few book covers with little connection to their titles"
with my [mildly] witty comments at times
Here is the link to the "front page" of my Sacker bookplate section: