Georgina Bowers designed the bindings of several of her books, matching their exteriors with the vibrant imagery of her cartoons and illustrations. In this sense she worked within a well-known comic convention: Richard Doyle, Alfred Crowquill, John Leech and George Cruikshank all created covers for their own publications, projecting their humour into the reader’s space, and Bowers, like her contemporaries, wanted the entertainment to begin before the book was opened.
Her strategy was partly a matter of reproducing an image or series of images from within, an approach particularly used on the boards of A Month in the Midlands (1868), which reproduced the pictorial title-page, and Hollybush Hall (1871, presenting a number of vignettes). She also added some other design elements.
Two of Bowers’s bindings Left: A Month in the Midlands, and Right: Hollybush Hall.
Bowers’s characteristic device is the gilt roundel embellished with a device. On the front cover of The Little Child’s Fable Book (1868) the composition is made up of five descending tondi, each containing a scene from the illustrations, and with the five words of the title placed in a gilt label above each of them; designed to allure, it makes an appeal to the child’s visual imagination. In A Month in the Midlands and Hollybush Hall, on the other hand, the effect is more restrained: in the first, three gilt vignettes showing a fox’s face identify the book’s theme of fox hunting, and in the second the roundels, placed on a diagonal sash, contain the artist’s initials. In both cases the gilt’s visual impact is intensified by placing the devices on a red ground.
Two more bindings Left: Hunting in Hard Times, and Right: Notes from a Hunting Box (Not) in the Shires.
For other bindings Bowers provides gilt versions of her illustrations, notably on the front covers of the novels, Fair Diana (1884) and Loose Rein (1887): bound in red cloth, the effect is again one of luxuriousness and allure. Hunting in Hard Times is typically flamboyant, but her most impressive binding, however, is her design for the large folio, Notes from a Hunting Box (1873). This is a bold geometrical arrangement, with vignettes placed around a central title-panel; the title is presented in mixed lettering, including Bowers’s favoured rustic writing, and her own handwriting – which appears throughout her books – being used to identify her authorship. The alternation between red and green compartments adds a further element of comic jauntiness.
Bibliography of Book Covers Designed by Bowers
D'Avigdor, Elim Henry. Fair Diana. London: Bradbury, Agnew, 1884.
D'Avigdor, Elim Henry. A Loose Rein. London: Bradbury, Agnew, 1887.
Bowers, Georgina. Hollybush Hall, or, Open house in an Open Country. London: Bradbury, Evans, 1871.
Bowers, Georgina. Hunting in Hard Times. London: Chapman & Hall, 1889.
The Little Child’s Fable Book. London: Griffith & Farran, 1868.
Bowers, Georgina. A Month in the Midlands. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1868.
Bowers, Georgina. Notes from a Hunting Box (Not) in the Shires . London: Bradbury & Agnew, 1873
Created 1 April 2024