Frances Manola Collection

Frances Manola was a New Jersey calligrapher, book binder, teacher and sculptural artist. She was a significant contributor to the book arts movement of the mid-twentieth to which the field of artists’ books and indeed American rare book librarianship owes a significant debt. Among her other contributions, she was co-founder of the Society of Scribes, the oldest American organization promoting the study, teaching and practice of calligraphy and illumination. With a piece in the Guild of Bookworkers’ 100th Anniversary Exhibition in 2006, Frances, or as she was also known, Fran was an esteemed public face of American calligraphy. She is remembered as an influential and inspiring teacher of calligraphy. And, of equal importance, as a single woman who turned to calligraphy for her livelihood in her fifties, began making sculptural artworks in the form of shadowboxes in her seventies and opened a bindery business when she was nearly eighty, Fran merits recognition as a courageous and independent woman who flouted restrictive gender and age conventions and thereby set an example for successive generations. Last but certainly not least, Fran was an artist who used calligraphy as a medium of self-expression.

Frances Manola was born on August 28, 1916. As a young girl growing up in East Orange, NJ, she was attracted to books, art and writing. Her sister, Jean Stasi, remembers that Fran decorated her bedroom walls with Bible verses. Jean also recalls that Fran used a “large cake of Ivory soap to carve a figure of Mozart, playing his violin. In her twenties, during the Great Depression when one took the job one could get rather than seeking their dream job, Fran trained in engineering and stenography. In her late twenties, in the midst of World War 2, Fran joined the WAVES, in which she served for three years. In 1946, after her honorable discharge as yeoman first class, Fran was finally able to fulfill her dream of going to art school. She took a three-year course at the Academy of Arts, Newark, NJ. (The Academy does not survive), continuing to support herself as a secretary. In 1948, she studied art at the Workshop School of Advertising and Editorial Art in NYC, which included a calligraphy course with Paul Standard, calligrapher and author. Nancy Leavitt writes that “with the help of Edward Johnston’s book, Writing, Illuminating & Lettering, Fran began to develop her own calligraphic hand.” In 1950, just as she was about to settle for one of four engineering jobs that had been offered to her, a job opened up in the Whitney Museum, as Lloyd Goodrich’s secretary.

The Whitney Museum originated in 1931 with a gift from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (January 9, 1875 – April 18, 1942), an American sculptor, art patron and collector. Whitney at first offered her collection of over 700 works of American art to the Met, but, the Met refused it. In view of the preference for European Modernism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art, Whitney decided to found her own museum. In 1935 the Whitney Museum of American Art appointed Lloyd Goodrich to be its Research Curator. Goodrich was an art historian known for his work on Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Edward Hopper. Growing up in Nutley, New Jersey, Goodrich had also been a childhood friend of the painter, Reginald Marsh. In 1948, the museum made Goodrich Associate Director, shortly before he hired Fran to be his secretary, and then in 1958, Director. As secretary, Fran worked closely with Goodrich on exhibitions of artwork by Eakins and Homer, and earned extra income, by providing the Museum with signs and lettering.

Fran moved into midtown Manhattan soon after joining the Whitney. During the fifties, she studied printing at the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), joined the Guild of Book Workers and began a six year course of bookbinding with Laura Young. Obviously, while she remained interested in other aspects of art, such as paper sculpture, and silk screening, Fran’s dominant interest was in aspects of book-making.

After leaving the Whitney in May, 1962, Fran worked for about a year as Executive Secretary for Rutgers Church. Once again confronted by the need for employment, Fran turned back to the calligraphic exercises she had learned from Paul Standard, and began teaching herself how to be a professional calligrapher and how to teach calligraphy. By the late nineteen sixties, Fran had become adept at calligraphy as well as bookbinding, two skill-sets with very little overlap. Fran explained that she developed her skills within a regimen keyed to the weather. Summers were too hot to letter, so she “bound in the summer and lettered in the winter.”

In 1973, Fran traveled to England to study gilding with Wendy Gould (Selby) and David Graham. When Donald Jackson (official scribe and calligrapher to the Crown Office of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) came to the US to teach, in 1974, Fran took his first workshop in New York. Jackson deserves credit for teaching Fran to think more creatively about calligraphy. Also under Jackson's encouragement, Fran and the other scribes in the workshop formed the Society of Scribes, a group that patterned themselves after the English Society of Scribes and Illuminators, founded in the United Kingdom in 1921 by former students of Edward Johnston.

In 1984 Fran left New York City to live with her mother in New Providence, New Jersey, but continued to direct her efforts toward creativity and calligraphy. She moved into heretofore undiscovered calligraphic territory in 1989 when she began combine letters into three-dimensional artworks reminiscent of Joseph Cornell, which she would continue to produce for the next ten years. During this period, in 1992 Fran made headlines in the Star Ledger when at age 78 she opened up The Attic Bindery in New Providence.

Moving to New Providence meant stepping away from society, a fact that she regretted. But Fran remained connected during the nineties through the articles she published from 1990–1997, as the calligraphy correspondent for the Guild of Bookworkers (GBW) Newsletter. One can find samples of her lively and perceptive articles Online at the GBW website. Fran was made an honorary member of the Guild in 1997 and in 1998, Fran was a featured artist at the New Jersey Book Arts Symposium, along with Denise Mullen, Lore Lindenfeld and Susan Happersett. Fran remained a much-loved figure in calligraphy circles into the twenty-first century. In the Guild of Bookworkers 100th anniversary exhibition, she was represented by an illuminated manuscript rendering in Irish Half Uncial script of William Wordsworth’s “Our Birth is But a Sleep.” In 2009 Fran suffered a stroke that sharply curtailed her activities but did not extinguish her spirit.

Fran died on March 10, 2013. In a subsequent letter to Fran’s sister, Jean Stasi, Donald Jackson—one of Fran’s three great calligraphic influences, along with Paul Standard and Edward Johnston—reflected on their friendship, on Fran’s readiness to laugh and how much he enjoyed “stories of her outrageously precocious cats who thought quill pens were brought especially from England for them to play with!” He concluded the letter with what we will characterize as a calligraphic line: “She was a doer and a maker and never stopped learning and seeking to learn about her craft.”

(Biographical note adapted from an oral presentation by Michael Joseph given at opening of Fran Manola: A Scribe's Life, John Cotton Dana Library, Rutgers-Newark, February 27-May 30, 2014.)