1890년대 미국의 포스터와 책표지 디자인-<하퍼즈>와 <인랜드 프린터>를 중심으로-

American Posters and Book Cover Design in the 1890s-Focused on Harper's and The Inland Printer

The poster in America was considered merely a means of advertising until the late 1880s, and was not thought to have any intrinsic value. During the 1890s, the poster in America came into its own as a medium of artistic expression, and it was recognized anew as an medium of advertising. The production and circulation of posters became active, and it won the popularity of poster collectors. But the American poster renaissance flourished for a few brief years in the 1890s. In this thesis, I paid attention that the art poster in America was mainly a product of the publishing trade, and that it's rise and fall was connected with the circumstances of the publishing business. In chapterII, I discussed the growth of publishing business and the phenomenon of poster craze, and tried to figure out the characteristic of American poster design in 1890s. The American poster boom was formally initiated in Spring 1893, when Edward Penfield published the first of his monthly designs advertising Harper's Magazine. Penfield created a native American tradition of realism in the series of Harper's posters, his figures are realistic though anonymous, and are drawn without distortion or grotesquery, and details are reduced to essentials but not eliminated. In chapterIII, I discussed the change in book cover design in the 1890s. The rapid evolution of book and magazine covers was largely a reaction to the poster craze. Most magazines were issued with the same standard covers month after month at that time. In 1894, when William Bradley was asked to design a standard cover for the Inland Printer, he convinced the publishers to change the cover with every issue instead of designing one permanent cover. With the poster craze at its height, posters became big business, but still they were not very successful as advertisements. Because collectors of the 1890s were more interested in acquiring posters than in buying books. Significantly, this was also the moment when poster like designs began to appear on the covers of books and mass magazines. Publishers took notice of an idea. If the eye-catching design was on the cover itself rather than on a separate poster, the customer who wished to acquire the design would be obliged to buy the magazine. So there was no distinction stylistically between the posters of the 1890s and the magazine covers of the early 1900s. At the same time, the artistic poster was beginning to decline. While the most typical advertisements of the 1890s were the book and magazine posters of Bradley and Penfield, after 1900 advertisements for manufacturers' products played an increasingly prominent role. They would never again assume the leading role that they had played in the 1890s.