Join the Delaware Art Museum’s Librarian and Archivist Rachael DiEleuterio and book collector Daphne Sawyer to learn about the Museum’s 4000+ volume collection of Decorative Book Bindings published from the 1830s to the 1930s. “Decorative” or “Publishers” Bindings refers to the elaborately embellished book bindings that were manufactured in quantity for publishers from the mid-19th to the early-20th centuries. The Museum’s collection was assembled solely for the outsides of the books, not the text inside!
The M. G. Sawyer Collection includes bindings collected by Mary Sawyer designed by leading artists in the field of American book illustration and design in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, including Howard Pyle, Maxfield Parrish, Sarah Whitman, Alice Morse, and Will Bradley. More recently, Mary’s daughter, Daphne Sawyer, has broadened the scope of the collection, strengthening the links to the Museum’s Pre-Raphaelite collection. The Sawyer collection is part of the Museum’s Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives which houses over 40,000 volumes. It is a non-circulating research collection which is open to the public by appointment.
Image: Bicycling for Ladies, by Maria E. Ward (New York: Brentano’s, 1896). M. G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings, Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum.