For many years, it was hard to discern that there were two separate Starmers at work, since the covers had similar attributes and they all had the same Starmer signature.Īccording to collector Marion Short, it was piano roll and sheet music collector Mike Montgomery who first discovered the identity of at least one of the Starmer brothers through an invoice obtained from the daughter-in-law of publisher Jerome H. The brothers were set up fairly soon as draftsmen and artists. The rest of the Starmer family and Julietta followed in June 1904. He returned to New York shortly thereafter to continue his work. James returned to England for a time, followed by William in 1900, who went back to marry Julietta Dawson. The brothers and their father eventually relocated from England to New York City, William in 1898 and Frederick in 1899. In the 1891 England census, the family was shown living at the same address in Leeds that they were in a decade prior, and 19-year-old William was listed as a litho-artist or lithographer. The artists were both born and raised in Leeds, Yorkshire England, William in 1872 and Frederick in 1878, to boot maker James Starmer and Ann Elizabeth Starmer. Thanks up front should go to Marion Short who with her husband Roy uncovered or collected information on many of these artists when compiling her five books on Collectible Sheet Music Cover Art, all of which are highly recommended acquisitions for any collector's library. Some of the most prolific are featured here. Some even created a catalog of stock illustrations, any of which could be used for a variety of pieces. Some publishers retained the services of an in-house designer or artist, but the top illustrators worked as independent contractors for whoever would buy their art. Working within their own realm of personal talent, be it realistic portraits or eye-catching graphical content, many of them thrived throughout the ragtime era. A new field emerged from the need for what was, in essence, perpetual advertising - that of the career cover-art illustrator. Some of the older firms resisted for some time, either continuing to use text-based covers or relying on commercial stock art in a monochrome format, but most of them either languished or caught on to the reality of marketing in a new century. In the 1890s, the introduction of photographic printing and offset presses, which were a modification of the lithography process, put fancy color covers within affordable reach of all commercial publishers. Publishers established in the 1890s and 1900s saw the need for catchy covers immediately, particularly to accompany the emerging ragtime genre.
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