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Dorothy Sturgis Harding (1891-1978), bookplate designer, was the daughter of Richard Clipston Sturgis (1860-1951), noted Boston architect and designer of many New England buildings, including the American Antiquarian Society. Mrs. Harding studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1910. She resided with her husband, Lester William Harding, in Winchester, New Hampshire, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she worked as a draftsman at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard from 1942 to 1957. She was a member of various art and bookplate societies.

The collection contains primarily the business correspondence of Dorothy Sturgis Harding for the period 1921 to 1976. Many letters include rough notes or copies of Mrs. Harding’s responses. The letters written by clients concern the ordering, cost, and details of the design of bookplates; those written by colleagues and collectors refer to exhibits of Mrs. Harding’s bookplate prints and other subjects of mutual interest. Those correspondents included Rockwell Kent, 1940-1960; Dan Burne Jones, 1938-1976; Oliver Clement Sheean, 1940-1947; and Elisha Brown Bird, 1832-1940. The latter occasionally commented on the political and economic policies of the Roosevelt administrations.

There are also letters from institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York, whose directors employed Mrs. Harding to illustrate bulletins and design bookplates. Several correspondents, such as Carlyle Solomon Baer and Audrey Spencer Arellanes, represented bookplate societies. Baer’s extensive correspondence, 1932-1969, concerns primarily the publication of the Yearbook of the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers, as well as his commentaries on contemporary designers and engravers. Audrey Spencer Arellanes assumed the work upon Baer’s death in 1969. There are also many letters from printing and publishing companies, e.g., John Peterson and Son of Boston, Forbes Lithograph Manufacturing Company of Boston, and the Bond Wheelwright Company of Freeport, Me., with whom Mrs. Harding contracted to print her bookplate designs. Mrs. Harding illustrated several books for the latter company from 1959-1961. Also represented throughout the correspondence are details of the frequent exhibitions of her prints by the Junior League of America and the Print Club of Philadelphia.

Among the more than one hundred people for whom she designed bookplates and Christmas cards, and, in several cases, with whom she established a friendly correspondence, were Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell and his wife Lady Ann Elizabeth Caldwell Grenfell, 1927-1937; Eleanor Roosevelt, 1933-1959; and William Norton Bullard and his wife Mary Reynolds Bullard, 1927-1945. Mrs. Harding also corresponded with Norman Rockwell, 1960-1971.

The collections also contains photocopies of letters, 1908-1909, written by Samuel Langhorne Clemens to Mrs. Harding when she was a young girl and one of the author’s “angel-fish” (i.e., group of children with whom he established a warm friendship). Mrs. Harding had attempted to have the letter published by the Atlantic Monthly, accompanied by a memoir of her friendship with Clemens. This material and correspondence with the Atlantic Monthly are included in the collection. In addition, there is correspondence, 1973, with Frederick Anderson, editor of the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California at Berkeley, and Abigail White Howells, concerning Mrs. Hardings’ memoirs of Clemens.

Among the miscellaneous papers is correspondence with Arthur Graham Carey, editor of the Catholic Art Quarterly, concerning Mrs. Harding’s assistance with publications; newsclippings, poetry, and a checklist of her bookplates.