William Brown Macdougall was an accomplished book artist: he designed the illustrations and graphic devices in each of his publications, and he designed their covers too. In this respect he was linked to a broader tradition of Art Nouveau book-art, with most of his contemporaries, notably Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts and Fred Mason, providing a vivid imagery for their books’ interiors and exteriors.
Macdougall’s covers, like those of his peers, were primarily mounted on cloth and embellished with gilt or printed devices. His range of motifs was diverse, ranging from an elegant minimalism to narrative images and flamboyant, floral arabesques. Macdougall’s simplest design is for the front cover of his wife’s (Margaret Armour’s) first book, The Homes and Haunts of Robert Louis Stevenson (1895), in which he figures the title and author’s name in the geometrical, Art Nouveau lettering of the 1890s. His cover design for D. G. Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel (1898), a Celtic floral interlace, is similarly reserved, and both bindings do little to prepare the reader/viewer for the elaborate foliate borders contained within the pages.
Two trade bindings in which Macdougall shows some restraint: Left: The underplayed, variant binding for Armour’s Homes and Haunts of Robert Louis Stevenson; and Right: the interlace design on the card front cover of Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel.
On the other hand, most of Macdougall’s books are unified – with the outer surfaces introducing a visual splendour that prefigures the pages’ richness. For Armour’s Songs of Love and Death (1896), he presents an elegant, stylized rose and stem which links to the interior decorations and to the poems’ imagery; and for the same author’s Thames Sonnets and Semblances (1897) he embellishes the front cover with a sort of helix terminating in stylized roses that invoke the ‘Glasgow Style’ and direct the reader’s eye to the intricate framing of the title-page.
These binding designs are sophisticated, proleptic signs, projecting the books’ contents into the viewers’ space while adding materially to the publications’ visual appeal and allure. Most impressive are the books in which he moves away from understatement and embellishes their front covers with elaborate, intricate interlaces in the style of Art Nouveau which link to his elaborate borders. This approach is especially pronounced on the upper boards for Keats’s Isabella, or The Pot of Basil (1898), a sinuous, organic design which represents a growing plant. Equally effective is the knotted foliate gilt pattern for The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1898), a binding that suggests the luxuriousness of the book’s storytelling and evokes Arabic art.
Macdougall’s more characteristic emphasis on visual excess: Left: The elaborate cloth gilt for Keats’sThe Pot of Basil; and Right: The Rubaiyat.
All of Macdougall’s designs are accomplished pieces of design, and his work adds another dimension to the discourse of trade bindings of the 1890s.
Bibliography
Books with book covers and illustrations by Macdougall
Armour, Margaret (ed). The Eerie Book. London: Shiells, 1898.
Armour, Margaret (trans). The Fall of the Nibelungs. London: Dent, 1897.
Armour, Margaret. The Shadow of Love. London: Duckworth, 1898.
Armour, Margaret. The Homes and Early Haunts of Robert Louis Stevenson. Edinburgh: White, 1895.
Armour, Margaret. Songs of Love and Death. London: Dent, 1896.
Armour, Margaret. Thames Sonnets and Semblances. London: Elkin Mathews, 1897.
The Book of Ruth. With an introduction by Ernest Rhys. London: Dent, 1896.
Keats, John. Isabella, or The Pot of Basil. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1898.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Blessed Damozel. With an introduction by W. M. Rossetti. London: Duckworth, 1898.
Created 15 October 2024