A Guide to the Printed Work of Jessie M. King

Citation

Simpson, M.C.T. (2007), "A Guide to the Printed Work of Jessie M. King", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 9, pp. 853-854. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710831428

Jessie Marion King burst on the international scene as a graphic artist when, aged only 23 and still a student at Glasgow School of Art, she was recommended by the School's director, Fra Newbery, to provide cover designs for a German publisher. Awarded a gold medal at the first International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art at Turin in 1902, she was thereafter in great demand for book illustrations and binding designs, her diaphanous figures and gossamer‐like lines, and her lettering, instantly recognisable. By 1914, her style was already changing to one with bolder linearity and use of stronger colours, and was still keenly sought by publishers, but by the mid‐1920s fashions had changed, and although she continued to be prolific in other artistic fields, her book work trailed off after 1930. Today her work is extremely popular, with everything produced by her avidly collected, and prices rising accordingly.

Colin White is a brave man. Already having produced a biography of King, he sets out in this publication to record all her graphic design work for printed material. Anyone who studies early 20th century book production knows how publishers were cavalier with series titles and numbering, with binding colours, with intellectual attribution, with dates and edition statements, with advance publication details. White has had a mammoth task, and collectors and admirers of King should be thankful to him for negotiating the minefield and trying to bring order to chaos. He calls his work a “Guide”, not a “Bibliography”, as he is the first to admit that discoveries are being made all the time.

His first section (A) is on unique and stand‐alone books with King input, the second (B), the biggest, is a chronological list of her commercially produced graphic art. Section C only has one entry, for her written work. Section D is on ephemera, such as posters, prospectuses and programmes. Section E is on bookplates, section F on greetings cards, section G on works containing illustrations of her work, not commissioned from King for these particular publications. There follows an appendix by Dr A.D. Portno on the particular bibliographical problems of the series produced by Globus Verlag, the German publisher who gave King her first commercial opportunity, followed by a 53 page appendix by White on similar problems with a series of binding designs produced for Routledge. Lastly, there is a list of “recommended reading” of works on King, and an index of book titles. There are eight pages of black and white photographs in the book, but the book also contains a CD giving 330 images in full colour, mostly of her work, but also ancillary material like photographs of King, and comparative covers.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of things wrong with this publication, many of which a good copy‐editor would have rectified: there are many pages in section B containing typographical slips – punctuation marks in the wrong place, erratic capitalization, type size changing in mid‐line, misspellings. More seriously, there is also inconsistent citation style. With section A, the present location of most of these unique works is not given, and in fact one or two are not unique at all, and should have been incorporated into section B as binding variants. The title of section C on p. 88 is completely wrong (and why have a section with one entry anyway?), and a 250‐page work (D40) appears in the ephemera section, just because it happens to be an exhibition catalogue. I question the relevance of much of section G: why record here a work which illustrates a buckle or other non‐printed artwork (e.g. G123, G124, G139) designed by King? Are G18 and G25 not the same book, cited very differently? It would have been much better to restrict section G to examples during King's life, or combine it with the “recommended reading” section.

Dr Portno's appendix is dated July 1906, while Appendix 2 is very confusing: I accept it is a complex story, but the layout does not help, nor do White's numberings, which are sometimes too close to the numbering system of the main sections of the Guide. My wife wanted to check details of one publication: using the index she found that the page reference was wrong. All the illustrations on one page are given the same reference number (B53), and, far more annoying, there are no references at all in the text to particular CD images. Working from the CD back to the Guide is also awkward. It is not clear what detail within an entry is being illustrated: White introduces “a”, “b” and “c” referencing on occasion, a convention not used in the book itself. This is all to be deeply regretted. The author has done a huge amount of work, for which readers should be immensely grateful, but all the flaws leave a sense of unease.