The Toppan Rare Book Library is inextricably linked to the legacies of members of the Toppan family: Frederick, Clara, and Eliza. Fred, a geologist, met Clara Raab when he and Eliza moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 1941. As a born and raised Wyomingite, Clara had already made a name for herself in Jackson Hole. Even though bank after bank had refused to help fund her business venture, Clara nevertheless opened her own accounting firm in 1945, and she managed the accounts of local bars in Jackson who came to trust and respect her extremely meticulous work. Fred and Clara married in Grand Teton National Park in 1949. The newlyweds moved into the Fish Creek ranch house where Clara developed a friendly relationship with her new mother-in-law, Eliza.

Eliza Pauline Willcox Toppan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 4^th, 1867, to Frederick and Harriet Harvey Willcox. She married Roland Worthington Toppan on June 11, 1900, and the couple moved into their home on Toppan’s Lane in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Their son, Fred, was born in 1902. A decade after Roland died in 1927, Eliza and Fred moved to Los Angeles where they stayed until their relocation to Jackson in the early ‘40s. With each move, Eliza’s books followed in tow.

The extent of Eliza Toppan’s library was only fully realized in the last six months. Her collection of 34 cookbooks was originally loaned to the Toppan Library in 1995, but Eliza owned many more books. In fact, Clara spoke of her mother-in-law as someone who was just “as well read as Fred was.” While Clara knew of Eliza’s cookbooks, she may not have necessarily known just how many more were dispersed on Fred’s bookshelves. Eliza’s library entered the Toppan collection fragmentally, arriving mixed in with Fred’s books between 1979 and 2002.

During her young adulthood, married life, and after, Eliza collected various types of books as her interests and personality developed. One of the first aspects of her library that one admires is its beauty. From the gilt edges and tool work to the illustrated cover designs, many of the volumes are works of art. In most of them, Eliza signed her name. She was a cook, gardener, dressmaker, lover of poetry, mystic and self-improvement advocate, and Christian Scientist. Eliza’s manuals on gardening are the focus here.

With the Industrial Revolution came carefully defined thresholds between men’s and women’s spheres and the growth of the middle- and upper-class, suburban lifestyle. Gardens and gardening are tied up within this social shift. Since cities were coated in layers of soot from factories, color and the sight of anything living were welcome changes of scenery. Gardening and botany were considered acceptable endeavors for women in the domestic sphere. At the same time, historians argue that horticulture manuals often emphasized the economic possibilities that gardening provided, pushing against the “separate sphere” ideology and granting women a chance to operate independently within the public realm at markets and in horticulture societies. Departing from the Victorian aesthetics of the late 19^th century, women gardeners were more interested in the “cottage-style” garden that celebrated hardy, heirloom perennials, required abundant patience, and rejected the bedded out, neat rows of greenhouse annuals.

Eliza Toppan’s collection of gardening texts exhibits these facets of the late 19^th and early 20^th century garden aesthetic. They are written and illustrated by women as practical manuals for the cultivation of a utilitarian garden. Represented the most in the collection is Helena Rutherfurd Ely (1858-1920) with two of her texts, A Woman’s Hardy Garden (1903) and The Practical Flower Garden (1911). The former filled a need in the gardening knowledge base that emphasized women’s preference for the native garden full of hardy perennials. Ely popularized flowers like delphinium and columbine, and a species of dahlia was named after her.

Also present are practical works by professional gardener and horticulturist Mabel Cabot Sedgewick (1873-1937), nature writer and plant activist Mabel Osgood Wright (1859-1934), Helen Ashe Hays, Ida D. Bennett (1860-1925), and Martha Bockee Flint (1841-1900). Flint’s A Garden of Simples (1900) is a guide to growing and using medicinal herbs that covers the history of these plants, how to cultivate them, and how to concoct tinctures and teas to treat various medical conditions.

Eliza’s book collection is underscored by its beauty, and her gardening books are some of the best examples. Frances Theodora Parsons’ (1861-1952) How to Know the Ferns was a wild success when it came out in 1893. It features illustrations by Elsie Louise Shaw and Marion Satterlee and a cover design of green leafy stalks and gold tooled lettering created by Margaret Armstrong (1867-1944) who transformed the male-dominated field of book cover design in the 1890s with her colorful, individualized, and often botanical creations.

Eliza Toppan collected books on subjects and activities that suburban women most often took part in during the early 20^th century, but she also departed from the constraints put on women in her own way by specifically seeking out works by women and following the gardening aesthetic put forward and popularized by them.

Post contributed by Toppan Rare Book Library Archives Specialist Emma Comstock.

References

• Bilston, Sarah. “Queens of the Garden: Victorian Women Gardeners and the Rise of the Gardening Advice Text.” Victorian Literature and Culture 36, no. 1 (2008): 1-19.
• Druse, Ken. “Garden Notebook; Where Victorians Met Their Match.” The New York Times. June 24, 2004.
• “In Full Bloom: Margaret Armstrong’s Decorated Publishers’ Bindings Revisited.” MET Museum.
• Moore, Glenn. “’A Very Housewifely Ambition’: Women Gardeners in Industrializing America.” Australasian Journal of American Studies 20 no. 1 (2001): 18-30.
• “Helena Rutherfurd Ely 1858-1920.” Meadowburn Farm. 2022.