Books

The Arts and Crafts book was a revival of Renaissance printing initiated by English pre-Raphaelites William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones at Kelmscott Press in 1891. Hand-tooled leather covers, metal clasps, fine handmade paper, antique typography, and historically informed illustrations were features of this art form. American illustrator Howard Pyle popularized Arts and Crafts book design in the United States, and introduced it to his student, Violet Oakley. Oakley’s first publication in this mode was a commission from Bryn Mawr College for the program for the school’s May Day Festival in 1900. Designed like an early printed book, “Ye Order of Ye Merrie May Games…” had an Elizabethan cover design that imitated a woodblock print and a text that reproduced Oakley’s calligraphy in black and red with ornamental capitals. The Book of the Words: Westchester County Historical Pageant: 1614, 1846, her program for the Westchester County Historical Pageant in Bronxville, New York, in 1909, had a similar theme and style. Oakley, who was master of the pageant, wrote and illustrated the program in black and white with pictorial and decorative headpieces, tailpieces, and ornamental capitals.

In 1922, Oakley published The Holy Experiment: A Message to the World from Pennsylvania, a limited-edition deluxe folio of her mural series in the Pennsylvania State Capitol. Bound in gilded leather with brass clasps, the text was a reproduction of Oakley’s black-and-red calligraphy illustrated with color plates of her murals in the Governor’s Grand Executive Reception Room and Senate Chamber. To disseminate William Penn’s principles of nonviolence, racial equality, and international government as widely as possible, she appended an “International Supplement” with the text translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese.

Oakley completed the publication of her mural commissions at the Pennsylvania State Capitol with Law Triumphant: A Portfolio in Two Parts Containing the Opening of the Book of the Law and the Miracle of Geneva in 1933. Produced during the Great Depression, the gilded, leather-bound folio was slightly smaller and less elaborate than The Holy Experiment. The first section included Oakley’s history of the law with color plates of her murals in the Supreme Court Chamber. The second section featured the journal Oakley wrote in Geneva while attending the League of Nations and color plates of the portraits she drew of the delegates.

To commemorate the tercentenary of Penn’s birth, Oakley designed a hardback book that combined parts of her earlier folios. The Holy Experiment: Our Heritage from William Penn, 1644–1944 was illustrated with Oakley’s black-and-white line drawings of her murals in the three chambers of the Pennsylvania State Capitol and the text was updated to include the progress of international government and disarmament up to the atomic age. The blue, cloth-covered volume was printed in 1950 by Cogslea Studio Publications, a private company she established in the 1930s.

Oakley wrote and illustrated two biographical books of famous individuals who shared her interests and values. Both were in the form of theatrical plays, as if she intended them to be performed. Samuel F. B. Morse: A Dramatic Outline of the Father of Telegraphy and the Founder of the National Academy of Design originated in lectures Oakley gave in her studio at Cogslea for Morse’s granddaughter, Leila Livingston Morse, on April 11, 1939, and at the opening reception of the Past and Present exhibition at the National Academy of Design on June 27 of the following year. The text portrays Morse as a new Leonardo whose work was a “marriage of science and art.” Oakley designed the blue, cloth-covered book with black-and-red type and nine illustrations in sanguine and ink on deckle-edged paper. A product of Cogslea Studio Publications, it was printed at the Eldon Press in a limited edition of 500 copies and sold by subscription. Oakley, who was then a National Academician, dedicated the book to her grandfathers, William Swain and George Oakley, who were both contemporaries of Samuel Morse and Associates of the Academy.

She employed a similar format in Cathedral of Compassion: A Dramatic Outline of the Life of Jane Addams, 1860–1935.  Designed with black text and illustrated with fifteen small line drawings, the limited-edition book was printed at the Eldon Press with a white cloth cover embossed in red. The frontispiece was a reproduction of a sanguine portrait Oakley had made of Jane Addams in 1934 in Chicago. Published in 1955 in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom at The Hague in 1915, Oakley’s biography traces Addams’s development as a peace activist and ultimately the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

In the 1930s, Oakley designed two Christian Science books. Christ My Refuge: One of Seven Hymns by Mary Baker Eddy, an illuminated version of the hymn’s text in Oakley’s medievalizing style, was published in an elegant limited edition under the auspices of the Christian Science Church in 1939. She prepared illustrations and a layout for an unpublished book identified by the inscription on the cover as “Appointed to Be Read in Churches,” an expression denoting the authorized version of the Bible to be used by a religious sect. Oakley’s drawing of a man and woman next to each other at a podium in the position of readers suggests the book was intended for a Christian Science service. Although the text is missing, the black-and-white illustrations appear to correspond to biblical verses.

The Canticle of the Fountain was a planned book based on a scene in Dante’s Paradiso. Oakley incorporated Dante’s vision of Eve’s redemption at the feet of the Virgin Mary in the Tenth Heaven in the Divine Comedy Stained Glass Window in 1912. Twenty-five years later, in Rome, she created a fountain design with the same image. The text of The Canticle of the Fountain was excerpted from Cantos XXX-XXXIII of the Paradiso and illustrated with a nocturnal scene of the proposed fountain under a starry sky.