And behold my birthday surprise from George! Three lovely books, all with Byrdcliffe bookplates.
First up, a first edition of How to Make Rugs, by Candace Wheeler.
Candace Wheeler was the dean of American interior design, a partner of Louis Comfort Tiffany, in Tiffany and Wheeler, whose most prestigious assignments included the Veterans’ Room of the Seventh Regiment Armory, the Madison Square Theatre, the Union League Club, and the drawing room of the Cornelius Vanderbilt II house. She was also a staunch supporter of women’s economic independence, championing female interior designers and craftspeople, Wheeler was also a co-founder, with her husband and brother, of Onteora, one of the earliest artists colonies in the Catskills. The colony was attractive to single female artists and writers, who used it to showcase their skills and advanced themselves professionally. Along with Mary Choate, Wheeler also founded the New York Exchange for Women’s Work, where women could sell any product that they could manufacture at home, including baked goods and household linens. The exchanges spread across the United States, and there was still a Women’s Exchange on Montague Street when I was growing up in the 1970s.
Next, in celebration of the publication of The Horseman’s Word, come two books on horse-keeping. The first is the 1880 edition of Horses and Riding by George Nevile, Esq. MA. The second is a late edition (1893) of Henry W. Herbert’s Hints to Horse-keepers, which was left incomplete on the occasion of Herbert’s dramatic death. Or as the preface to the 1863 edition puts it, “when that strange and fatal mood overshadowed his life, and terminated his earthly labors.” I suppose that’s one way of describing a man inviting all his friends to dinner after his wife left him, and abruptly racing into the other room to shoot himself in the head before the meal had ended.
But wait! There’s more. Herbert (who was arguably more famous under the pen name he adopted as a sportswriter, Frank Forester) was a genuine remittance man, the grandson of the 1st Earl of Carnavon, sent down from Caius College in Cambridge and exiled to America over a matter of debt. Considerable debt. Or, as the anonymous author of the preface to the 1863 edition would have it:
Our author’s acquirements at Cambridge were not all of a scholastic nature; foe he there contracted such habits of life, that before he attained the age of twenty-five; he had thrice been “whitewashed” for insolvency; had been sentenced to outlawry for debt.
And that was only the beginning. He moved to New York City, where he taught Greek and Latin at a private school, while he commenced his dual careers as a writer. Edgar Allan Poe felt that he was “not unapt to fall into pompous grandiloquence” and sometimes was “woefully turgid.”
If his second marriage drove him to suicide, his first was at least equally picturesque. In 1839, he accompanied a literary friend to Bangor, to act as groomsman for his friend’s marriage to Miss Barker, only to have the lady decide, “with the variableness of a woman… [to make] a bridegroom of the groomsman, and cast an enduring shadow over the life of her former suitor.” Even if the failed romance did not go quite so far as suicide, one can assume it did nothing to contribute to Herbert’s popularity in writing circles.
But the best surprise of all lay behind the covers of the two books on horsemanship: A second Byrdcliffe bookplate! And at the risk of inciting controversy (as you do in the volatile world of book collecting), IMHO this one is much nicer.
It has the Byrdcliffe fleur-de-lis, as well as Ralph Whitehead’s initials, but it also has an elegant little Pan playing his pipes in one corner, and an owl flying overhead, not to mention beautiful, organic foliage connecting them. The imagery seems to be a conventional enough expression of the combination of art and nature that the Whiteheads sought at Byrdcliffe: both Pan with his flute and the owl serving as conventional symbols of wisdom arising from nature. Still, however charming the conceit, the decoration feels fussy in comparison to the clean lines of the better known Byrdcliffe bookplate, leading one to wonder whether the latter is the result of a professional artist, while the new bookplate represents yet another of Jane Whitehead’s attempts at creating art that is both useful and beautiful.
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