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

Staff Pick of the Week

For my Staff Pick, I would love to show you Word for Word by Minneapolis book artist Jody Williams. This book was published under her imprint Flying Paper Press in a limited edition of 100 copies in 2001.  

Jody Williams (1956-2023) was a Minnesota-based book artist and teacher who focused on small artist books and collages. She taught at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and gave workshops across the US and Europe. Her books often concern temporality and space, and are universally precise.  

Our head of Special Collections often talks about the concept of play in relation to books and book artists. Word for Word is a wonderful embodiment of that concept.   

The book arts are as much concerned with form as with text, and this book combines the two into a tongue-in-cheek whole. With a Scrabble-like tile allowing the reader to pull out the rest of the book from its box, the game is incorporated from the very beginning. This book laughs at word play and sets the scene in a rigorous game of scrabble. Placing pictograph tiles alongside the more classic letter tiles, Williams plays with the game itself, pointing out the value of different words (or lack thereof).  

This book made me giggle when I first read it, and I hope it also brings some delight to your day!  

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– Elizabeth, Special Collections Graduate Intern