| Armstrong's Catalogue |

We offer a collection of more than 300 items of the works of Margaret Neilson Armstrong, the preeminent designer of trade bindings in the United States.
Born in 1867, Armstrong was a member
of an old New York family.

One of her mother's ancestors was Peter Stuyvesant, and her father's family had been in New York since the mid-1700s. Her sister, Helen, with whom Armstrong sometimes collaborated on designs, was born in 1869 in Florence.

The family had briefly lived in Italy where Margaret's father, Maitland, studied art. In her youth, Armstrong studied painting and also received instruction from a governess.

The family returned to New York in the 1870s and moved to 58 West 10th Street when Armstrong was in her early twenties. Their neighbors at the time included artists Winslow Homer and William Merit Chase. Architect Stanford White was a family friend who helped Maitland make improvements to the residence. Armstrong would live and work in the house and a small adjoining studio for the rest of her life.

According to her brother, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Armstrong began her art career in 1883 at the age of 16. She created menus and other small pieces for local establishments. Helen soon followed in her footsteps, and the two began designing original Christmas cards for the family. In Those Days, Hamilton wrote that "Margaret was the better at design, Helen at figures." Armstrong's first book design, in 1890, was for the Chicago publisher A. C. McClurg.

During her long career, Armstrong designed for a variety of publishing houses, although she worked most frequently for Charles Scribner's Sons and G. P. Putnam. In 1893, the twenty-five-year-old designer won an award for her book covers, which had been exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. And the following year, the Grolier Club published a catalog of book artists that described her as a "designer of great versatility and eminent skill" whose "skill in adapting, combining, and creating designs which are almost flawless in excellence has made her book covers famous."

Many of Armstrong's book covers were groundbreaking, especially in the integration of type and image. She developed her own type alphabet, which can be seen in most of her designs from 1895 to 1910. The most readily identifiable aspect of her original typography is a capital R that has an exaggeratedly curving descender. In their invaluable reference Margaret Armstrong and American Trade Bindings, Charles Gullans and John Espey call Armstrong's handling of typography "eccentric, pleasing, and as recognizable as handwriting." It was during this period that the designer also began to incorporate her monogram (MA) into many covers and illustrations.

Armstrong's designs, which often include stylized floral motifs, were undoubtedly influenced by popular Art Nouveau styles of the day. In Artists of the Book in Boston, 1890-1910, Nancy Finlay also points out the specific influences of artists John La Farge, Elihu Vedder (another family friend), Walter Crane, and Kate Greenaway. Armstrong's covers often display a combination of bright, richly colored cloth and contrasting ink. Although her designs were popular and even copied in her day, Armstrong didn't always rely upon a standard formula. Her design for the 1903 Hans Brinker, for example, is quite unusual for her.

Armstrong's popularity led her to design multiple covers for some publishers. This sometimes enabled her to create a particular look for the repeated work of an individual author. Some of her most recognizable designs, including those for the books of Washington Irving, Frances Hodgson Burnett, George Washington Cable, Myrtle Reed, and Henry van Dyke, are examples of such designs. During Armstrong's most prolific period, from 1894 through 1896, she was busy designing covers (and sometimes interior illustrations) for a total of 78 different titles! Her success, which led her to design books by Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, inspired many other women designers to join the field.

By the 1910s, dust jackets had become a popular and less expensive alternative to decorated cloth covers. At this time, Armstrong devoted her energies to type design, editing books by her father and brother, and designing covers for her own books. While compiling her Field Book of Western Wild Flowers, Armstrong and her traveling companions even became the first women tourists to visit the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Although the publishing industry was greatly changed, Armstrong continued to work into her sixties. One of her best-known and most popular later works as a writer was the 1938 biography, Fanny Kemble. In 1954, her sister, Helen, published an account of their childhood, Early in the Morning. In her later years, Armstrong often spent time in Santa Fe, but she was back home in New York when she died in 1944 at the age of seventy-six.

Today, Armstrong's books are included in the collections of UCLA and the Huntington Library. Her designs became scarce and rose sharply in value after UCLA's catalog of her titles was first published in 1968. They have continued to grow in popularity since the 1980s and are widely sought by private collectors. This collection includes examples of work from all periods of Armstrong's career, including books written by Armstrong, those designed in collaboration with her sister, and those mentioned in the above text. It also includes Armstrong's exceptionally fine bindings of works by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Brownings, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

The price for the collection is $25,000.00

To view the Armstrong catalogue, click here.