Celebrating Leota Woy during Women's History Month

The beautiful bookplate designed by Leota Woy for the Los Angeles County Library can be found throughout the library's Californiana collection. It wasn't until recently looking closely at the bookplate that I noticed Woy's signature in the bottom right corner. Who was Leota Woy?

Leota Woy (1867-1962) was a prolific designer of bookplates in the early twentieth century, she was also a collector and lectured on bookplates all over Southern California. No doubt she received her commissions via word of mouth but she also advertised her services in the Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood Bowl magazine. Woy's talents were celebrated by bookplate expert Clare Ryan Talbot in her 1936 Historic California in Bookplates.

Born in Indiana, Woy landed in Denver in her early 20s (many of her bookplate designs for Denver organizations and individuals can be found in the Los Angeles Public Library Bookplate Collection). One 1913 article I found on Miss Woy said she traveled the United States selling her postcard designs. Ten years later she was being touted as the originator of the rhyming greeting card according to the Anaheim Bulletin. By the early 1920s, Woy was a member of the burgeoning Laguna Beach art colony where she additionally became the first custodian of the Orange County Public Library branch at Laguna, and a curator of the Laguna Art Museum during the summers of 1921 and 1922.

In addition to the Los Angeles County Library Californiana bookplate (part of a Federal Arts Project in 1937), here are Woy designed bookplates for the Southern California Woman's Press Club, and actor John Gilbert among many others. Don't miss her signature on her personal bookplate--it's spelled out in the flow of an overturned inkwell. (Seen here from the Bookplate Collection at the Los Angeles Public Library.)