Bowdoin College Receives Collection of Book Cover Art Designed by Sarah Wyman Whitman

Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, has acquired a library of bookbindings designed by artist Sarah Wyman Whitman. An interior decorator, author, poet, teacher. and the founding member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, Whitman began to design book covers in the 1880s for Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin. She had 380 book covers to her credit including works by Henry David Thoreau, Sarah Jewett and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The book collection donated to Bowdoin College contains 328 books, comprising 85 percent of Whitman’s known designs. The Bowdoin archives contains several other collections of book cover art.

In addition, Whitman was a prominent designer of stained glass windows. One of her designs is a stained glass window in Memorial Hall on the Bowdoin campus.

Whitman died in 1904.