Sunwise Turn giftwrapping and bookbinding papers — and the announcement of my independent research blog!
(Note: anyone is of course free to use the information presented here, but I would appreciate a link back to the blog or a message. My email is eulogycontact@hotmail.com — thank you!)
First of all, let this stand as a signpost announcing my plan to offer some short pieces of writing related to my ongoing research into a planned/proposed multi-volume biography and art-book chronicling the life and circles of Mary Mowbray-Clarke (1874–1962), an artist, bookshop owner, teacher, writer, landscape architect and maven of the avant-garde. I’ve been researching (and writing/compiling) this book for over five years, and as such I am bursting at the seams with a seemingly endless amount of tangential material or information that could be shared in shorter blocks outside of the context of a thousand page tome. My utterly shocking discovery of a large amount of Mary’s papers and ephemera which were left to decay in the woods is another story for another day, but it was the impetus for my research, which has become — I don’t think this is an exaggeration — a lifestyle for me at this point.
Just for a bit of background so that this post will be comprehensible to someone who may stumble across it by chance, the Sunwise Turn bookshop was a hugely important counter-cultural hub of early twentieth century Modernism. (“Modernism,” by the way, doesn’t mean current or contemporary, but was a philosophical set of ideals and aesthetics that many scholars agree faded away by the mid twentieth century. Confusing, isn’t it?) Sunwise Turn was based in New York and operated from 1916–1927. Mary’s business partner in the shop, Madge Jenison, sold her shares in 1919 but wrote an engaging and witty account of the shop in 1923 called “Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling.” The book went through several reprints and is still popular, having just been independently reissued in an “expanded and annotated” edition. This incidentally includes an image sourced from a glass plate negative I discovered in the course of my research, which I dutifully uploaded to the wikipedia entry for Madge Jenison. The same glass plate was used for the cover of another book, “Women in the Literary Landscape,” a publication centered on the Women’s National Book Association, of which Jenison was a founding member. Here is a photo of Mary in the same pose and setting:
An incredible treat this weekend to have gotten a chance to see a large selection of the gift-wrapping tissue and bookbinding endpapers used at Sunwise Turn. These were salvaged, as they were in the process of being thrown away, by my pal Jonathan O’Hea, antiques dealer and independent art-researcher. He discovered them in the estate collection of the son of Carroll French, one of Mary’s South Mountain Road artist-neighbors and bookshop acquaintances.
These papers are a massive boost to my book because, first of all, they’re just so shockingly gorgeous. Now I have the perfect endpaper designs for the book itself! Additionally, they serve to illustrate what the Sunwise Turn’s legendary Christmas giftwrapping actually looked like. The “fire-cracker paper” mentioned by Madge Jenison in her 1923 book about the shop can finally be seen other than in the mind’s eye!
Research corroborates and fills in several interesting details — there’s a 1920 sales ledger for paper bought from “Japan Paper Company” which is most definitely the source of most of this paper, which can be seen by comparing these samples with extant catalogues. There’s Mary Mowbray-Clarke’s 80th. birthday celebration guest-book, which she bound in a blue and black paper matching one of the patterns fond in this cache — albeit with a different color scheme. Binding her 1954 guest-book just like the old Sunwise packages was a creative call-back whose context would’ve been lost until now. There’s also a scrap of this paper which was found on eBay, in a hand-decorated frame, signed by Mignonne Ryther (1893–1975), who, along with her sister Martha (1896–1981), was active in the early days of Sunwise Turn.
The paper in this instance seems to have been used as a placeholder to fill the frame, which was decorated by her. Adding the signature to the paper instead of to the reverse of the frame was an inventive way of signing her work. There is a 1920 book, Ananda Coomaraswamy’s “Twenty-eight Drawings,” limited to an edition of just 222 copies, which was hand-bound at Sunwise and features a pale green iteration of the “fire-cracker” paper. All so fascinating and revelatory!
From Madge Jenison’s Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling (1923):
“The colors in the room began it. Quite innocently we worked out, too, some special ways of wrapping packages for presents, which became so popular that they were a curse upon us, and I perhaps shall never be able to see a piece of red fire-cracker paper flutter off a table without experiencing slight nausea.” (pp. 43–44)
“The sale of thousands of books strayed into our shop because we wrapped them in curiously brilliant packages. We did it because we liked doing it. Some artists who worked on the designs made them so deliriously lovely that it was difficult to make up one’s mind ever to open them. A sick man to whom five were sent in New Mexico sent them all back to his wife in Boston to see before they were unwrapped. Sometimes when you asked an artist to wrap a book he was very languid in his assent; and then he would get interested. It was a new medium. Late at night in the Christmas season we would draw the big table out and wrap packages, never two the same — whole sets of Dunsany — whole sets of Tagore.” (p. 85)
In Harold Loeb’s memoir, The Way it Was (1959) he recounts Alfred Stieglitz’s attitude toward Sunwise Turn. Stieglitz described Mary Mowbray-Clarke and Madge Jenison as “bloodless females who suffocate the slightest suspicion of beauty beneath torrents of gush.” Loeb stuck up for them: “I was impelled to defend my partners: ‘Before dismissing them, you might come to one of our poetry evenings, or look at Burchfield’s water-colors, or at the books that go out…’ He retorted by ridiculing the shop’s Christmas packages. Each volume sold during the previous holiday season had been swathed in multicolored Japanese paper.” (p. 37)
It’s such a thrill to be suffocated under these torrents of beauty one hundred years after the fact! Stay tuned and subscribe for future installments of my serialized research adventures!
A few more torrents as a send-off before the next research missive. All from collection of Jonathan O’Hea:
