Past Displays at the Powell Library
A New Nation: The Early United States as Reflected in Books and Objects
Little Did They Know: Undersized Books and Objects
Guiding the Needle: 19th-Century Handbooks and Patterns
July 18–November 8, 2025
Industrial advances of the 19th century disrupted the routine needleworking skills most girls acquired at a young age. Books and magazines of the period illustrate furniture and fashion designs for the home sewer in addition to clothing, trimming, home decor, and embellished storage for needleworking tools and materials. Advancements in printing enabled colorful examples of finished projects and reproductions of guides and patterns.
The publications on display include beautifully bound handbooks, rare examples of fabric swatches, hand-colored fashion plates, and beadwork. These books from the Kitty King Powell Library’s rare-book collection provide insight into how needleworking skills were acquired and the material culture that developed from home needlework.
Friendship Albums and Folk Art: Examples in the Kitty King Powell Library and Bayou Bend Collections
April 4–July 12, 2025
Nineteenth-century friendship albums provided an opportunity for young women and men to share messages, poetry, and endearments, but the blank pages also tempted the artistically inclined to demonstrate their talents. The albums first became popular in America in the early 1800s and evolved over the following decades from handmade or blank books to commercially produced volumes with lithographic decorations. Even so, examples of original art by owners and contributors persisted throughout the century, and folk-art treasures can be found alongside the inscribed messages, with their social and cultural history.
This display focuses on the drawings, watercolors, calligraphic art, and other examples of folk art in the friendship and autograph albums of the Kitty King Powell Library’s rare book collection.
Online
The virtual edition of Friendship Albums and Folk Art: Examples in the Kitty King Powell Library and Bayou Bend Collections is available 24/7.
Geographic Expressions: Maps in the Kitty King Powell Library and Bayou Bend Collection
December 6, 2024–March 27, 2025
Early mapmakers needed special skills and understanding to transform a three-dimensional world into two-dimensional representations that could be comprehended and utilized. The results both guided and recorded exploration, as well as assisted government, business, and travel. Maps date back to at least the 6th century BC and continued to evolve over time, with major improvements in accuracy developing in the 17th and 18th centuries. By the early 19th century in America, maps in books were becoming more affordable and could be found in general reference works and textbooks. With their significance and beauty, maps became decorative objects in their own right, while also being incorporated into the design of various decorative arts, including ceramics and furniture.
This display includes maps from the Kitty King Powell Library and Bayou Bend Collections that demonstrate some of the ways that people in the 19th century used and appreciated the aesthetics, symbolic power, and practical applications of these views of the world.
The Good Child’s Library: 19th-Century American Children’s Publications
June 21–November 23, 2024
Taking its title from a planned series of children’s books by the Boston publisher E. O. Libby & Co., this display focuses on children’s books published in America in the 19th century from the Hirsch and Powell Libraries. Some of these books may be familiar to readers today—Mother Goose and Three Blind Mice are still around in updated forms—while others are unique to the 1800s, such as a book instructing children on the whaling industry.
As book publication became more affordable due to the industrial innovations of the 19th century, more people could afford to own books than ever before. Children’s books became popular gifts, as indicated by the inscriptions found in many of the books seen here from parents, relatives, and friends. Most of these books are educational—some expressly, such as the battledore for teaching the alphabet, and others less overtly, though even fiction for young people heavily emphasized the cultural values of the day.
Online
The virtual edition of The Good Child’s Library: 19th-Century American Children’s Publications from the Hirsch and Powell Rare Collections is available 24/7.
American Scenery: Bayou Bend Ceramics and Their Source Images from the Powell Library Rare Books Collection
February 23–June 12, 2024
A multitude of picturesque scenic images embellished 19th-century English ceramics, appealing to a wide range of consumers. Rather than original designs, the sources for those images were usually prints published in books. American Scenery features four ceramic objects from the Bayou Bend Collection and their source images in rare books from the Powell Library.
After the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, vast markets for English ceramics opened up in North America, Europe, and India. Complete dinner sets or decorative pieces featured pictorial subjects copied from books, including natural scenery, towns, and buildings. Americans were eager to acquire ceramics displaying scenes of their own country, and books containing prints of American scenes provided fertile sources for English artists to copy. The artists making the copies inevitably made changes to their sources in the process, sometimes with only minor cropping or adjustments to fit the various shapes and sizes of the ceramic objects, but in other cases even adding or deleting elements for a picturesque effect.
Selling One’s Wares: A Selection of Trade Catalogues, Price Books, and Advertising from the Powell Library Rare Book Collection
October 18, 2023–February 17, 2024
Objects at Bayou Bend are often thought of primarily in terms of artistry and cultural history, but usually, they were also consumer goods. Long before the Industrial Revolution transformed the way consumers thought about and accessed material goods, anyone with a product to sell had to find ways to market that product. Selling One’s Wares focuses on the varied and changing means of doing so in England and America in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The earliest examples in this display of rare materials date back to the 1780s and include a price book, which allowed cabinetmakers to standardize prices. As printing grew more affordable, trade catalogs for retailers and consumers became common. Advertising, too, became more prevalent as the 19th century progressed, and the examples on display serve as early predecessors to today's ads.
Curtains and Cornices: The Art of Decorating Windows as Illustrated in the Powell Library Rare Book Collection
June 16–October 14, 2023
In early America, window coverings were a rarity and were usually very simple, until about 1800 when imported fabrics became more available and affordable. This change emerged in part because of the mechanization of textile production in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. British publications, inspired by French examples, helped to bring more-elaborate drapery designs to America.
The new styles included layered window curtains that could be looped back to the side, and valances—shorter draped fabrics—suspended from carved cornices at the top. Opportunities for decorative embellishments abounded with borders of contrasting color or trimmings of fringe and tassels, all of which could match or complement other upholstery in the room. Cabinetmakers recognized the importance of such draperies to an integrated interior, so they included examples in their published pattern books. Highlights of these exuberant window embellishments can be seen in design publications of the 18th and early 19th century from the Powell Library’s collection.
Nature Encased, Pressed, and on Display: 19th-Century Natural History in the Libraries Collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
February 17–June 10, 2023
Shirley Hibberd, a prolific English writer on the subject of natural history in the 19th century, whose publications proved influential in America as well, believed that the study of nature and its inclusion in the home (in aquariums, fern cases, window gardens, birdcages, and such) was a means of both endorsing and enacting the correct morals of the late 19th century. He went so far as to state, “It would be an anomaly to find a student of nature addicted to the vices that cast so many dark shadows on our social life....”
Despite Victorian ideologies that positioned women as belonging to the private or domestic sphere, out of public life, women and girls were encouraged to engage in the study and display of natural specimens.
The MFAH libraries house numerous examples of the wave of interest in natural history that overtook England and America in the latter half of the 19th century, including examples of seaweed and floral collections of amateur naturalists, instructive books, and a trade catalogue for those interested in bringing nature inside their homes.
The Art of Clouds: Marbled Papers in the Powell Library Rare Book Collection
October 14, 2022–February 11, 2023
Marbled papers feature swirling patterns that suggest the natural beauty and mystery of clouds or water. Yet the patterns are actually formed through complex methods of floating paints on liquid in a tray and then gently laying paper on the paint. The practice, which goes back at least as far as 14th-century China, flourished in the 15th and 16th centuries in Turkey where it was called ebru, which translates as “the art of clouds.”
By the 17th century, the French established the use of marbled paper in bookbinding, and the method quickly spread to Britain and America. The tradition continues today in fine binding around the world.
The examples in this display date from the 18th and 19th centuries and demonstrate the range of patterns and colors used to adorn books of the period. These bindings, and the marbled paper used within them, are handmade custom work, rather than the standardized machine-made publishers’ bindings that transformed the practice of bookbinding in the 19th century.
Each page is unique, but the patterns—formed in the floating paints with comb-like tools of different sizes—bear names that are descriptive and sometimes exotic, such as “Antique Modern,” “Fantasy,” “Feather,” and “French Curl.”
Pictorial and Ornamental Publishers’ Bindings: Decorated Book Covers from the Powell Library Collection
June 21–October 12, 2022
Industrialization and automation in printing and bookbinding radically transformed the publishing trade in America, leading to the golden age of publishers’ cloth bindings from about 1880 to 1920. Publishers recognized the commercial opportunities attractive book covers could generate, and with the help of artistic designers, the market flourished with beautiful, colorful, and affordable books. As artifacts, these cloth-bound books reflect the cultural shifts and art movements of the rapid industrial development and evolution of commercial binderies.
The main styles of cover design during this period tended to be ornamental or pictorial, the latter resembling decorative posters. Many designers incorporated their monogram or other symbol as a signature within the design. Thanks to these signatures and the visually distinctive styles some artists developed, the careers of such book-cover designers can be traced through their surviving work today. The Powell Library collection contains many examples from this period, and those on display include covers designed by the most successful and sought-after artists in the field, as well as examples by undocumented designers.