page_title: Sarah W. Whitman
section_title: Book design and illustration
hierarchical_section_title: Sarah W. Whitman / Book design and illustration
caption_attribution_description: File name:	06_04_000251Title:	WHITMAN(1886) The making of picturesDate issued:	1886Genre:	Book coversNotes:	Whitman, Sarah (Author)Collection:	Sarah Wyman Whitman BindingsLocation:	Boston Public Library, Special CollectionsRights:	No known copyright restrictions.
context_page_description: Sarah de St. Prix Wyman Whitman was an American stained glass artist, painter, and book cover designer. Successful at a time when few women had professional art careers, she founded her own firm, Lily Glass Works. Her stained glass windows are found in churches and colleges throughout the northeastern United States. As a member of the board of the Harvard University "Annex," she helped to found Radcliffe College.
context_section_description: Whitman is considered one of the most prominent book-cover designers of her day, often ranked with Margaret Neilson Armstrong and Alice Cordelia Morse. "Whitman helped to establish the medium, long the domain of die-cutters and binders, as a suitable specialty for artists, thus ushering in a new era in American design."  
  Over the course of two decades beginning around 1884, she designed the illustrations and covers of over 200 books, occasionally including some version of her own 'flaming heart' logo. She was the first professional woman artist to work regularly for Houghton Mifflin and was one of their principal designers. She designed books by authors such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Celia Thaxter, and especially her friend Sarah Orne Jewett.
  Although her aesthetic drew heavily on the Arts and Crafts Movement, her designs were almost radical in their minimalism, leaving substantially more negative space than was typical. Her spare designs featured elegant linear drawings or silhouettes (usually of plants) and sometimes an asymmetrical composition. Colors tended towards a muted palette of greens, golds, and deep reds. Her designs helped to spark a trend towards a more minimal aesthetic for book covers.
  Whitman considered that the designer's challenge was to create an aesthetically satisfying experience within the constraints imposed by the economics of book publishing. As she put it: 
  "You have got to think how to apply elements of design to these cheaply sold books; to put the touch of art on this thing that is going to be produced at a level price, which allows for no handwork, the decoration to be cut with a die, the books to go out by the thousand and to be sold at a low price. . . What I feel is that under these conditions, the more necessary it is to design covers well because they are really like aesthetic tracts. They go everywhere."
  A large collection of books she designed was donated to Bowdoin College in Maine.
caption: Cover design by Whitman for her own book The Making of Pictures (Boston: Interstate Publishing, 1886).
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