The Teddyfication of the White House, 1909

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was an avid naturalist, dedicated to protecting both wildlife and natural resources. In keeping with the time, he liked to decorate his homes with mounted specimens of the animals he hunted and killed.

When Roosevelt was elected president and moved into the White House, he hired the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White to oversee the modernization and redecorating of the residence. Many changes were made, including the removal of two small fireplaces the State Dining Room. In their place, a massive stone fireplace was added with an enormous moose head over the mantel. This trophy and the other changes Roosevelt made became the subject of many editorials and cartoons.

When Roosevelt decided not to run in 1908, he gave his full support to William Howard Taft (1857-1930) who easily won the election. This cartoon shows Taft entering the White House and standing in shock at the additional renovations that he found.

Albert Levering (1869-1929), The Teddyfication of the White House, 1909. Pen and ink drawing. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2006.02605.

White House State Dining Room after renovation.

Albert Levering’s cartoon “The Teddyfication of the White House,” published as the centerfold in Puck v. 65, no. 1669 (February 24, 1909).

Scoop

La Liberté de la presse, 1797. Engraving. (c) Lyon MICG

The Musée de l’imprimerie et de la communication graphique (Lyon’s Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication) has a new exhibition documenting 400 years of history of the press. http://www.imprimerie.lyon.fr/imprimerie/sections/fr/expositions

Seven years ago, Bernard Gelin, a local bibliophile, donated a collection of around 30,000 newspapers from France and other countries. Only the French papers have been catalogued so far but this represents a remarkable 5,473 titles. Highlights include the very first French newspapers, rich coverage of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the Paris Commune, and the First World War.

Drawing on this newly acquired collection, Scoop: A Graphic History of the Press documents the history of paper newspapers in France, from the smallest (La Dépèche) to the largest (Le Grand Journal, Paris). Open to the public until January 21, 2016, the show focuses on the historical design, layout, and printing of the paper page, with special attention to illustrations as they were printed first from wood engravings and then, from photographs.

The exhibition catalogue should be on Princeton Library shelves soon. For more information about the remarkable gift, the museum has posted this interview with the donor:

The Answer to the Folding Puzzle

Last month, I posted a folding valentine https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2015/09/18/my-dear-this-heart-which-you-behold-a-puzzle/ and asked if anyone knew the answer to the folding sequence. When done correctly, ours ends up with a small paper heart.

Our sincere thanks to Nancy Rosin, President of The Ephemera Society of America and President of the National Valentine Collectors Association, who posted the answer here: http://www.victoriantreasury.com/library/2007-01_Puzzle_Purses/. This website not only gives you the answer to the folding puzzle but offers another example of a valentine that can be printed and folded for your enjoyment. Give it a try and join me in thanking Ms. Rosin for her help.

Dorothy Day and Fritz Eichenberg

Part One: Searching

Dorothy Day (1897-1980), founder and director of the Catholic Worker, met the Quaker artist Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990) in 1949 at a conference on religion and publishing. Day asked the artist if he would donate some images to her publication and he agreed without hesitation.

In fact, over the next thirty years, Eichenberg allowed her to use anything he had drawn or printed anytime she pleased. And she did. His most famous wood engraving “The Peaceable Kingdom” (1950) was reprinted in The Catholic Worker ten times between 1953 and 1989.

When Day wrote an autobiography, The Long Loneliness, she asked Eichenberg to provide the illustrations. The wood engravings posted here serve as frontispieces to each of the book’s three sections.

In his oral history for the Archives of American Art, recorded between May 14 and December 7, 1979, Eichenberg spoke about his friend:

Part Two: Natural Happiness

“Dorothy Day was, from a personal point of view, perhaps the most important influence in my life. But, let’s say from an artistic point of view or from the point of view of an illustrator, she was not of any great influence. Because what I did for her was more or less addressed, as she often said, to those people who could not read—to the illiterate. She said she had seen clippings of my work in the hovels of coal miners and so on, people in all parts of the world; people who could not read the Catholic Worker but they understood my very simple images of saints and portraits of people important in the Catholic Worker movement.”

“I met her at a conference on religious publishing in Pendle Hill which is a Quaker study center in Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia – Wallingford. . . . That was around 1940, I would say. I was sitting next to her and I just fell in love with her as a person. She’s really great. She makes you feel at ease and I could talk to her like to an old friend. In the course of the round table there, we talked about the Catholic Worker – publishing, you know. She knew I had illustrated books and she said, “You know, I have trouble finding Catholic artists to work for me because we have no money.” That didn’t sound so good to me! She should find a lot of artists to work for her but she can’t. So she said, “Would you work for me?” And I said immediately, “Yes.” And so the next week she called me up and we got together. I gave talks there very often.”

Part Three: Love is the Measure

“And I told Dorothy from the very beginning, whenever she wants the use of my work, she can use [it]. She doesn’t even have to ask me. But she does ask me. And now . . . with copyright you have to be a little more careful. I just threw my bread upon the water and see it coming back to me somehow in the form of real satisfaction that my work touched people. Sometimes she asked me to illustrate a certain event that happened in the life of the Catholic Worker.”

Dorothy Day (1897-1980), The Long Loneliness; the Autobiography of Dorothy Day, illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg (New York: Harper, [1952]). Firestone Library (F) BX4668.D3 A33 1952

Printing on the Handpress & Beyond

The 40th annual American Printing History Association (APHA) conference concludes this evening with the presentation of the 2015 Frederic W. Goudy Award to Jerry Kelly followed by the Goudy Distinguished Lecture in typography.

Established in 1969 by a gift from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Goudy Award pays tribute to the friendship between Melbert B. Cary, Jr. and Frederic Goudy by honoring distinguished figures in type design and its related fields.

Over the last few days APHA’s 2015 conference: “Printing on the Handpress & Beyond,” has been reexamining the history and practice of operating some of our earliest printing machines—flat-bed handpresses in predominant use from the 15th to 19th centuries.

The keynote address entitled “Gutenberg’s World: How Printing Arose in 15th Century Mainz,” was given by novelist Alix Christie and the plenary address “A Hands-On Approach to Printing History: Lessons Learned in the Construction of a Common Press,” was delivered by Dr. Jeffrey Groves. https://printinghistory.org/2015-conference/

Seen below, Groves discussed his recent sabbatical spent building a replica of Isaiah Thomas’s eighteenth-century common press. It was his hope to understand more fully the technological and practical shift from wood to iron in early nineteenth-century press construction. Groves also shared some of his research in the material transition represented by the Columbian press, an iron press patented in the United States in 1813.

Events and tours were held in and around the Cary Collection in Rochester, New York, one of the country’s premier libraries on graphic communication history and practices.

The original collection of 2,300 volumes was assembled by the New York City businessman Melbert B. Cary, Jr. during the 1920s and 1930s. Cary was director of Continental Type Founders Association (a type-importing agency), a former president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and proprietor of the private Press of the Woolly Whale. In 1969, the Cary Collection was presented to RIT by the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust as a memorial to Mr. Cary, together with funds to support the use and growth of the collection. Today the library houses some 40,000 volumes and a growing number of manuscripts and correspondence collections.

One of the highlights of the weekend was the printing of a keepsake on the newly acquired Kelmscott/Goudy Albion No. 6551 printing press. Owned by such luminaries as William Morris, Frederic Goudy, Spencer Kellogg, Melbert B. Cary, and J. Ben Lieberman, the press has a new home in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection, an acquisition made possible by the generous support of the Brooks Bower family.

http://library.rit.edu/cary/

Manhattan 1854

For the July 4, 1854, Jubilee Edition of Brother Jonathan, Charles Parsons (1821-1910) drew a bird’s-eye-view of Manhattan nearly 3 feet tall by 4 feet across. Two years later, he drew a somewhat smaller version of the same view and lithographed it for Nathaniel Currier, which is the print in most institutional collections.

Frank Leslie (1821-1880) was given the task of engraving Parsons’s extraordinarily large scene for the newspaper’s double page spread. Using his newly perfected method of dividing a scene into many small blocks and reassembling them once they are engraved, Leslie was able to accomplish this assignment to perfection. The success of this and other oversize plates gave him the confidence, and the professional following, to establish Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in December of the following year.

Frank Leslie (1821-1880) after Charles Parsons (1821-1910), Bird’s-Eye View of New York City, 1854. Wood engraving. In Brother Jonathan, July 4, 1854, Jubilee Edition. Rare Books in process

East River, Staten Island Ferry. Today’s South Street Seaport

Castle Clinton and the west side boat basin

City Hall and Trinity Church

Portraits from the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-1922

Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Warren G. Harding (1865-1923), President of the United States of America, one of the American representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. “Signed Directly on copper from the life Walter Tittle Aug. 19 1920”. Graphic Arts Collection.

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/naval-conference
The Washington Naval Conference (also called the Washington Arms Conference or the Washington Disarmament Conference), was chaired by President Warren G. Harding in Washington D.C. from November 12, 1921 to February 6. 1922. Delegates included representatives from the United States, Japan, China, France, Britain, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Portugal. As a result of these talks, three major treaties were signed: Four-Power Treaty, Five-Power Treaty (more commonly known as the Washington Naval Treaty), the Nine-Power Treaty, and a number of smaller agreements. The link above offers more information.

The American artist Walter Tittle was commissioned to create portraits of the delegates, sketched with a needle directly onto copper plates. The final portfolio included twenty-five drypoints: Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of State; Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge; Sir Auckland Campbell Geddes; Earl David Beatty; Sir Robert Laird Borden; Admiral Baron Kato, Premier of Japan; Prince Togugawa; Signor Carlo Schanzer; Admiral de Bon; Marquis Visconti Venosta; M. Albert Sarraut; Hon. David Lloyd George; Sir Maurice Pascal Alers Hankey; Sir Alfred Ernle Montacute Chatfield; Viscount Lee of Fareham; Lord Riddell of Walton Heath; Earl of Cavan; M. René Viviani, Premier of France; M. Fournier Sarlovèze; Marshall Foch; Dr. Sao-ke Alfred Sze; Hon. Elihu Root; W. Hon. John W. Garrett; Arthur Balfour; and Aristide Briand. A few are posted here.

Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Prince Tokugawa, President of the House of Peers in Japan, one of the Japanese representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle Washington, Dec. 1921”. Graphic Arts Collection.

Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, one of the American representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle” in pencil. Graphic Arts Collection.

Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of the Earl of Balfour, K. G., one of the British representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle Washington Dec. 1921”. Graphic Arts Collection.

Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of State, one of the American representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle Washington, 1922”. Graphic Arts Collection

Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Aristide Briand, Premier of France, one of the French representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle Washington, 1921”. Graphic Arts Collection.

Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Albert Sarraut, Minister for the French Colonies, one of the French representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed in pencil “Walter Tittle”. Graphic Arts Collection.

Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Admiral Ferdinand H. H. de Bon, one of the French representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed in pencil “Walter Tittle”. Graphic Arts Collection.

Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Admiral Baron Kato, Premier of Japan, one of the Japanese representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle Washington, Dec. 1921”. Graphic Arts Collection.

See also: Hugh Latimer, Naval Disarmament, a Brief Record from the Washington Conference to Date (London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1930). Firestone Library JZ5625 .L385 1930

A Momentous Gathering — But Limited Success. That Was Then: October 1921 by John S. Weeren: https://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2015/10/21/that-was-then/

The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records

It is hard to know where multi-media editions should be kept in a university setting. After consultation with colleagues, the Graphic Arts Collection has acquired The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records vol. 1 and 2. Released jointly from John Fahey’s Revenant and Jack White’s Third Man Records, the material was co-produced by the leading scholar on Paramount, Alex van der Tuuk. Volume one (below left) covers 1917 to 1927 and volume two (below right) chronicles 1928 to 1932.

Each ‘cabinet of wonders’ includes 800 newly remastered digital tracks representing over 170 artists; more than 300 fully restored original advertisement from the 1920s-30s; six vinyl records with hand-engraved labels; and two limited edition books including an encyclopedia of artists and tracks as well as a narrative history of Paramount. Volume one is housed in an oak cabinet with a custom-designed USB drive embedded inside and volume two is a stainless steel case also with an embedded drive. Both hold a music & image player app that enables the user personal management of all tracks and advertisements.

Quoted from the prospectus: “Paramount Records was formed in 1917 with little fanfare and few prospects its founders ran a Wisconsin furniture company and knew nothing of the record business. Its mission was modest: produce records as cheaply as possible with whatever talent was available. This was not a winning formula, and by the end of 1921 Paramount was on the threshold of bankruptcy.

In 1922 Paramount’s white owners embarked on a radical new business plan: selling the music of black artists to black audiences (a market that became known as “Race Records”). This move, paired with equal parts dumb luck, chicanery, a willingness to try anything, and the fortuitous hiring of Mayo Williams (the first black executive at a white-owned recording company), paid dramatic dividends.

Williams, a Chicago South-sider, early NFL player, bootlegger, impresario, and Brown University graduate, would become a key early champion of those two uniquely American art forms, jazz and blues, while maintaining a not entirely benevolent orientation toward the artists themselves (“screw the artist before he can screw you” being one of his mottoes). Via Williams, Paramount scouted talent, ran the offices of its recording operations, and recorded most of its early records in Chicago, unintentionally playing a documentarian’s role as it captured the very sounds of the Great Migration in the Midwest.

By 1927, Paramount was the most important label in the Race Records field, selling hundreds of thousands of records. And by the time it ceased operations in 1932, it had compiled a dizzying roster of performers still unrivaled to this day by any other assemblage of talent ever housed under one roof spanning early jazz titans (Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, Coleman Hawkins), vaudevillian songsters (Papa Charlie Jackson, The Hokum Boys), the first solo guitar bluesmen (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake), theater blues divas (Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters), gospel (Norfolk Jubilee Quartette, Famous Blue Jay Singers of Birmingham), masters of Mississippi blues (Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, Tommy Johnson), and others.”

Salem, Mass.

Beginning in 1848, the four Smith brothers (Benjamin, Francis, David, and George) produced a portfolio of forty lithographic city views printed by Boston and New York artists. The best of their stable was John William Hill (1812-1879), who went to work for the Smiths in 1850.

Over the next five years Hill completed watercolor views of Philadelphia, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Salem, and many other locations. These were drawn onto stone by artists at the Endicott lithography firm, including D.W. Moody, Charles Parsons, J.H. Colen, and Napoleon Sarony.

In the late 1850s, Hill fell under the spell of John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. He left the commercial field of city birds-eye views for the pursuit of aesthetic landscapes and still lifes.

J. H. Colen after John William Hill (1812-1879), Salem, Mass., 1854. Lithograph. Published by Smith Brothers, 59 Beekman Street, New York. Graphic Arts Collection. Gift of Leonard L. Milberg, Class of 1953.

How Wood Engravings Were Made

After his first year publishing Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper successfully, Leslie printed a long and detailed description of how the illustrations for his paper were accomplished. This is something several other American papers had failed to perfect and so, everyone took notice.

This post includes a long section of that text, along with the illustrations that accompanied the August 2, 1856 article. Note especially the physical cutting out of the whites in each matrix.

These illustrations were cut by the Irish/American wood engraver John William Orr (1815-1887), who was much in demand as a book and magazine illustrator and engraver.

A complete transcription can be found here: how illustarted newpapers are made
“. . . Immediately one or more artists are dispatched to the point of interest, and by long experience hasty sketches are made that are to be elaborated when put on the wood, which is the next stage of their advancement. The wood used is that known as “boxwood,” so much a favorite as a shrub in our gardens, but which in Turkey expands by slow growth into a tree with a trunk of a few inches in diameter.

This valuable product is nearly as hard as flint, and can be cut with great precision. From the diminutive size natural to its growth, it is only possible to produce pieces large enough for the purposes of an illustrative paper by joining innumerable small bits together and fastening them by screws on the back of the block, as will be seen by the engraving.

The art required to perform this apparently simple mechanical process cannot be understood except by those directly engaged in the business, or by those who have to use the wood to print from after it is engraved. The block of wood having been selected, and the “travelling artists” having supplied the subject, other artists again are employed in putting the design on the block, which when done is one of the most beautiful works of art without color that can be imagined.

The hour of publication is near at hand, and here we have a two-page picture to be engraved, which cannot be completed by a single hand under several days of hard labor. What is to be done?

The screws which hold the small parts of the wood together are unloosened, and the block is divided into ten or twenty parts. Upon each there is but the fragment of the drawing; one has a little bit of sky, another a group of children cut in two in the middle . . .

Ten or fifteen engravers now seize these fragmentary pieces, and work night and day; not a moment is lost; they silently and industriously pursue their work, and the surfaces of the several blocks are cut away save where they are marked by the image of the artist’s pencil, and we have left the surface which makes the impression on our paper known as a wood engraving.

“The engravers’ tools are very few in number, and very simple in construction. They are called:

1. Flat tool; 2, 3, 4 and 5, gravers; 6 and 7, tint tools; 8, sand-bag and stand on which the block is laid; 9, scraper; 10, chisel—and cost comparatively but a small sum; yet with these simple tools the engraver, with an incomprehensible certainty to the spectator, runs through the complicated outlines of the innumerable forms with make up the pictures of our weekly edition, displaying a skill of handling to our notions as wonderful as the touch of the artist himself.

…The highest mechanical ingenuity is brought into requisition to create a “cylinder press,” one of which will quietly perform the labor of many hands; and do it with a neatness and dispatch impossible to be obtained in any other way. In forms put upon the press filled with engravings is used what is termed an “overlay,” the construction of which requires much experience.

An impression is taken of each engraving on thick paper, and then, they are laid upon a table, and by a sharp knife all the white parts of the picture are removed; when this is done, the dissected picture is put upon the cylinder of the press in such a way as to make unusual pressure upon the engraving, or especial parts of it, while being printed. It is in this way that such brilliant effects are often produced. Were this otherwise, the pictures would come up with the same even tone, so peculiar and so beautiful to solid columns of type.”

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