Women’s History Month is far too short to celebrate all the important women who have helped shape our modern book culture. Authors, of course, but I’m thinking especially of women printers, publishers, typographers, illustrators, graphic designers, librarians, booksellers, collectors, scholars, and others whose talents and tastes helped define the world of books today. They are legion, and they deserve to be better known.
I’ll stick to the era I know best, the 1920s. It was a time of unprecedented interest in the Book Beautiful, in the visual and material qualities of printed books. The protagonist of my historical mysteries, Julia Kydd, is caught up in the movement. She loves thoughtfully designed and hand-crafted limited edition books. She’s a skilled fine printer herself.
In Relative Fortunes, Julia spends a merry evening partying with other book enthusiasts. There she meets Beatrice Warde, a real woman who would become a major figure in twentieth-century book culture. They’re nearly the same age and seem destined to become good friends, until Julia’s looming poverty or (worse?) marriage intervenes. I’m sure their paths would have crossed again in Passing Fancies, were Beatrice not moving by then to England.
Beatrice was just 22 when she married the enigmatic typographer Frederic Warde (who spelled his name Frederique for a time, prompting his wife to teasingly nickname him Q). Their shared passion for bookmaking and especially letterforms sent the couple traveling to England in 1925, in tacit competition to become the American protégé of the great British typographic authority Stanley Morison. In short order, Beatrice won. Frederic’s mercurial temperament and (justified) suspicions about his wife’s attachments to Morison and calligrapher/artist Eric Gill soon sent him storming back to the United States.
Beatrice lived in England until her death in 1969. While still in her twenties, she made a name for herself with a remarkable feat of typographic scholarship that uncovered the true origins of typefaces long attributed to Claude Garamond. The name her sleuthing established, though, was “Paul Beaujon”: a male pseudonym she assumed for the usual reason—to be taken seriously.
Fortunately, Warde soon had no need of such disguise. She went on to enjoy a long and illustrious career as publicity manager of the Monotype Corporation. Acclaimed for her charismatic speaking and writing talents, she gave stirring voice to her generation’s reverence for the printed word as the very cornerstone of modern civilization. Lofty stuff!
When fictional Julia and real-life Beatrice meet at that rousing party in 1924, both fledgling bookwomen are still more enthusiastic than accomplished. Regardless, their ambitions deserve to be taken seriously. Here’s a raised glass to them both.
