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"The Oriental Transformation of the American Book, 1890-1920"

This paper argues that a convergence of American Orientalism and the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1890s radically transformed the way Americans experienced books in general--and not only those dealing with the Orient. In an effort to understand how these developments worked together to transform the entire field of book production in the 1890s and early 1900s, this paper turns to the rise of a new "Oriental" mode of design in book publishing, particularly in the work of Sarah Wyman Whitman and her circle, which flourished in Boston and New York as a means of cultivating a new, supposedly more organic culture less determined by the machines of modern industrialism. As we shall see, a number of the aesthetic innovations developed during this period are still with us in the late age of print and digital books.