“Lending Day” at the Princeton Print Club was an semi-annual ritual on campus throughout the 1940s and well into the 1950s. As a reporter for the Princeton Alumni Weekly noted, these young men are “continuing a six-year custom that has caught the fancy of the undergraduate body.” Each fall and spring, the Princeton Print Club staged its lending day and in 1946 “a record crowd queued up outside 36 University Place to choose from the group of 400 contemporary American originals made available. Each man was entitled to select one framed print to decorate his room for the remainder of the term. No charge or deposit fee is required, and in the six years since the program was instituted not a single print has been lost.”

   

The Club sponsored exhibition, lectures, and demonstrations. Above, Harry Shokler, president of the National Serigraph Society, demonstrated the correct technique to a group of students and faculty (and wives?). Below, John Taylor Arms showed the group how to make an etching.
Once or twice a week evening seminars were held at 36 University Place, where exhibitions were also mounted by the student members. Note the book binding over the fireplace.

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The 75th anniversary of the Princeton Print Club is coming soon. Do you remember the organization or did your father participate? We are collecting reminiscences and comments either below or at jmellby@princeton.edu. Thank you.

Eight years ago this space was filled floor to ceiling with graphic arts materials (really, to the ceiling). Today, everything was moved out and rehoused in a new, clean, and secure storage space, albeit temporary. Congratulations to all who helped!

Firestone Library, B floor today

New graphic arts collection storage

Now it’s just a question of matching up the scraps and washing the gloves. Thank you to the wonderful staff members who helped with all the preparations and the moving of this collection.

Striking a pose
Thank you to the art museum staff for their help
Mr. McCosh quietly waiting his turn
Switching the reproduction for the real thing
Triptych; Howard Russell Butler, Class of 1877 (1856-1934), Eclipse, 1918.
Wishing for a bigger elevator

For the History study room, we have the abstract painter and sculptor Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923-2002), who is widely regarded as the founding father of Canadian contemporary art. The artist spent most of his career in France, where he befriended some of the last century’s most influential artists, including writer Samuel Beckett, surrealist André Breton and sculptor Alberto Giacometti.

A new place to study among the alumni

We started the day like this…

…and ended the day like this. Posing with nine iconic Princeton portraits is the architect Frederick Fisher, principal of Frederick Fisher and Partners of Los Angeles, who was hired to create inspiring, aesthetically beautiful spaces within Firestone Library. He certainly succeeded today.

More such spaces will be appearing throughout the week.

Dolly Madison
Laurence Hutton with a playbill for a production of Antigone (Sophocles)

Over the next month, works of art will be sited at various locations on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and A floors of the renovated Firestone Library. You will see images of the paintings moving around on the walls and along the corridors of our building. This way, we can work out the positions and sightlines before we bring in the actual oil paintings and sculpture. Take a look the next time you are at Firestone.
Soon, Edgar Allen Poe and his raven will be moving here, on the 2nd floor.
The sculpture needs special attention. New bases are being designed and built. Experts are examining each work to determine the correct placement and hardware needed to keep the work safe and secure.

More to come!

Yesterday, December 6, 2013, an Albion Press no. 6551 made by Hopkinson & Cope and used by William Morris (1834-1896) was sold at Christies for $233,000. The buyer was the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Cary Graphic Arts Collection. Happily, Princeton’s Graphic Arts Collection is already the proud owner of its own Albion, currently on view inside the temporary Graphic Arts rooms in Firestone Library.

The press sold in New York on Friday was purchased by Morris in 1894 for £52.10s and became one of the three full-sized Albions he was to own at the Kelmscott Press. According to Christies, “Morris chose this Albion for the formidable task of printing the Kelmscott Chaucer and had the press reinforced with iron bands to keep the staple from cracking under the extra pressure required to print the heavy forms of this monumental book. After Morris’ death, the Albion was owned first by C.R. Ashbee’s Essex House Press, and then subsequently by the Old Bourne and Pear Tree Presses, before it was purchased by Bertha and Frederic Goudy in 1924. The Goudys brought the Albion to America where it joined the typecasters and other foundry equipment of the Village Press and their Press of the Woolly Whale. In 1960, Elizabeth and Ben Lieberman acquired the press after it had resided with several additional printers.”

Princeton’s Albion has equally interesting provenance, as the last working press owned and used by the great American printer Carl Purington Rollins (1880-1960). Made in England in 1840, Rollins used the press in his New Haven shop until it was packed and shipped south by the Friends of the Princeton University Library, in honor of Graphic Arts curator Elmer Adler’s retirement. Pictured above is Rollins with one of several Albions in his shop.

One of the greatest graphic designers (working with only one eye) Rollins joined the staff of the Yale University Press in 1918 and was appointed Printer to the University in 1920. At Yale he designed and printed all university publications and ephemera. Rollins also taught a course in bibliography and established the Bibliographical Press in the University library for student use.

At the same time, he established a private press, At the Sign of the Chorobates, and with our Albion printed numerous award winning publications. In 1940, Rollins received the highest award of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He retired in 1948 and the last sheet he printed on his beautiful Albion press was the broadside announcing the Adler gift to Princeton.

The American Printing History Association’s 38th Annual Conference concludes today. One of the highlights of the presentations yesterday at the Grolier Club in New York City was the paper by Dr. Elizabeth Upper, Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library 2012-13.

The day began with her presentation entitled “Rediscovering Color in German Graphic Art, 1487–1600,” and left many quickly rewriting their papers as the day moved on. Her work will certainly change the way we think of color in early printed books from now on. Dr. Upper has posted some of her work here: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=2730

‘Detail of Hans Baldung Grien (attr.), Title Border with Wrestling Putti, colour woodcut from two blocks (red and black). Title page of Juan López, De libertate ecclesiastica (Strasbourg: Johann Schott, 1511). – See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/black-white-and-red-all-over#sthash.u4f9v0VG.dpuf

The Annunciation, colour woodcut from two impressions (black and red), in The Primer in Latin and Englishe [1555]. CUL, Young 263, fol. A1r. (c) Cambridge University Library.

Dr. Upper has several new books coming, including Vivid Prints: Colour Printmaking and the Transformation of Visual Information in Early Modern Germany, 1476-ca. 1600 and Printing Colour: Histories, Techniques, Functions and Reception, Vol. I: 1400-1700.

Those attending the College Art Association conference next February in Chicago will have another chance to hear Dr. Upper speak in the United States, with a paper entitled: “Early Modern Decals: Printing Intarsia in the German-Speaking Lands, c.1550-c.1650,” for the session Objectifying Prints: Hybrid Media 1450-1800.