Staff Pick of the Week
Here are the cover and title page from our latest acquisition, The Muses Up To Date by Henrietta Dexter Field (1863-1904) and Roswell Martin Field (1851-1919), published in Chicago by Way and Williams in 1897. This adds a fourth title to our holdings of Way and Williams imprints. We are interested in the publishing company because of its connection to the early British and American fine press movement. The firm was founded in 1895 by Chauncey L. Williams and W. Irving Way, and although the business lasted only three years it produced 66 titles (only 62 more to go!). Way and Williams are notable for the quality of their production and their use of Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau designs. They were the only American publishers authorized to print a Kelmscott Press title, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Hand and Soul, arranged after Irving Way visited William Morris in 1895.
Despite the pretense to Arts & Crafts aesthetics, the letterpress printing is fairly pedestrian, printed for Way and Williams by the Blakely Printing Company of Chicago. The cover and title page, however, are attributed to the noted American artist Alice Kellogg Tyler (1862-1900), although the title page bears the monogram HF, which seems to indicate it was designed by Henrietta Field.
Roswell Martin Field and his wife Henrietta Dexter were the brother and sister-in-law of the more well-known American writer and humorist Eugene Field (1850-1895), and this book is dedicated to his memory. The Field brothers were the sons of the American politician and lawyer for Dred Scott, also named Roswell Martin Field (1807-1869).
Like Eugene Field, Henrietta (known as Etta) and Roswell (known as Rose) were interested in writing for children, and in this book they try to answer their own question:
The attempt to write a series of plays for children presents at once the somewhat embarrassing question, who are children and what would they consider peculiarly appropriate in the line of plays?
Their answer: plays with a lot of action and intrigue. The original plays presented in this volume are The Muses Up-To Date, Cinderella, Trouble in the Garden, The Modern Cinderella, The Wooing of Penelope, and A Lesson from Fairy Land.
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–MAX, Head of Special Collections
