Ornamental 19th Century Book Covers
Posted in Discourse on Sun Jul 29, 07 by Kyle under 19th Century and Books.
I ran across a page that had images of many highly ornamental 19th century book covers this morning and I just had to share it with everyone. There are various styles, some with ornament, some with pictorial engravings. All very gorgeous.
My personal favorites are the ones with “Eastlake” ornament.
Really, this more highly florid version of the style should not be called Eastlake. Although it does fit in with some of the tenants of design that he put forth, for example flatness, and avoidance of the illusion of dimensionally through illusionistic shading, the highly florid and excessiveness of the designs would most likely not have appealed to him.
A more appropriate name might be neo-grec, because of the similarity to ornament used in Greek vase painting, but this term hasn’t gained enough currency to be widely understood.
There are many more interesting covers on the original page. Make sure to check them out and look at the higher resolution versions. I wish that the image quality had been a little higher so we could see more detail on the engravings, but over all that page turned out to be quite the little jewel box.