AMY SACKER

In the late nineteenth century, book design in America was evolving, as single-color, embossed covers gave way to more colorful designs reflecting the aesthetics of the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements. One region of the country where women book designers and other female artists were particularly prolific was the Boston area, where the Museum of Fine Arts offered classes and training, and where designers like Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842-1904) and others worked. It is in this setting that Amy Maria Sacker developed her considerable skills, designing book covers for several local publishers, including Joseph Knight, Estes & Lauriat and its successor, L. C. Page & Co. She created an advertising poster for Knight about 1895. She also designed numerous covers for Little, Brown, Houghton Mifflin, and other publishers, beginning about 1900.

Her covers show several distinct styles, from elegant floral and ornate heraldic designs to the so-called "poster style" covers, exemplified by her work on several Louisa May Alcott works. As Priscilla Juvelis has said on her web site, "She was one of the first to make extensive use of figurative compositions on book covers, in contrast to the floral motifs and other abstract decorative designs of Armstrong and Whitman."

BIOGRAPHY

Amy Sacker was born in Boston in the early 1870's. (Most sources say 1876, but that must be too late. A 1965 obituary in the Boston Herald lists her age as 92. Census records from 1900 appear to list her as being 28. She was probably born in January, 1872 or 1873.) In 1889, she became a student at the school run by the Museum of Fine Arts, where she first studied under C. Howard Walker (1857-1936), a well-respected architect, designer and teacher. She also worked with Joseph Lindon Smith (1863-1950). She entered several exhibitions at the school in the 1890's, winning prizes for her work. In 1912, she served as a judge in a Boston art show alongside her mentors Walker and Smith.

Through her association with the Society of Arts & Crafts, she worked with a number of other female book designers, including Sara Wyman Whitman and Marion Peabody. Throughout her life, she exhibited her work, including a show of portraits in 1949, when she was 77.

Reflecting her many artistic talents, Sacker taught a number of different courses at the Cowles School of Design: metal and fabric design, bookbinding, book illustration and cover design. She later opened her own academy, Miss Amy Sacker's School of Design, to teach young people these skills. (Her obituary states she opened that school in 1894, at the age of 21 (!), although another source mentions 1901, which corresponds to a 50th anniversary celebration held in her honor in 1951.) She remained affiliated with the school until the mid-1940's, when she began to devote more time to the Red Cross. A measure of the renown of her school can be seen in wedding announcements in the New York Times in the 1930's which mention that the bride was a graduate of the Amy Sacker School. Susan Morse Hilles (1905-2002), art expert, art collector, board member, and benefactor of many institutions was a student as Sacker's school from 1926 to 1929.

Her many skills in the area of decorative arts are revealed by the fact that in 1907, a Boston exhibition by the Society of Arts and Crafts lists her as having contributed work to the basketry section !

In terms of her artistic production, both of illustrations and cover designs, one of the aspects I find most interesting involves the frequent re-use of some of her designs. While it makes sense for L. C. Page to use a matching binding design for the "Court Memoir Series" (example above left, published in 1899 and 1900), the publisher also used other Sacker designs for a variety of apparently unrelated titles. One design in particular seems to have served many purposes: that for Famous Actors of the Day (1899) reappeared on numerous books, in different colors, over the next 10 to 12 years.

Her title-page design for The Silent Maid (1903) resurfaces several times, including a color version in Seven Christmas Candles (1909). More curious, however, is her design for the "Contents" page of Jackanapes, which later became the uncredited, unsigned cover design for Charles Kingley's Westward Ho! Another curiosity: her design for Louisa May Alcott's My Girls (1903) was later appropriated for a book entitled Their Canoe Trip !! Further research into the legal and contractual arrangements between designers or illustrators and their publishers is clearly needed to understand these patterns of re-use.

Recently I have discovered that some of her designs done for the Little, Brown editions of Louisa May Alcott's works were reproduced by Sampson, Low, Marston & Co in London. Here are some examples. Other foreign publishers who have issued works with Sacker designs include Musson Book Co. and George N. Morang in Toronto, Canada, and Macqueen in London.

Another interesting, albeit minor, element of her creative career is the evolution of her signing her work. Click here to see the various forms of her signature and her monogram.