The Printer's Art: A Selection of American Fine Printing 1899-1989

Introduction:

This exhibit is the fourth at Georgetown since 1981 to be devoted to some aspect of fine printing in the United States. Previous displays have surveyed the development of an American style in fine printing, explored the sometimes beautiful and always interesting byways of printed ephemera, and commemorated the remarkable achievements of Peter Beilenson and his Peter Pauper Press, Walpole Printing Office, and Press of the Blue-behinded Ape.

On this occasion we hope to help clarify an issue often either ignored or obscured: the place of fine printing in an academic library. Some institutions devote a substantial portion of their rare book and special collections budgets to collecting in the filed of the book arts and in particular in assembling sizable collections of the work of well-known presses. Some, like Georgetown, rely almost exclusively on the benefactions of donors to develop collections in this area. In a small number of cases the book arts collections in academic libraries support active programs of research and scholarship; in far larger number, however, they do not.

When pressure is felt on the budgets of academic libraries, collections devoted to the book arts and to fine printing must compete for acquisitions and management funding with all those other collections which are not absolutely central to the basic educational mission of the university. Especially now, when emphasis on electronic information media is mushrooming, the right-to-life of collections whose emphasis is on the beauty or dignity or tranquility or wit of their presentation in print may often be in doubt.

What is often overlooked in the quest for information is the effect that its presentation makes on the seeker. Access to one or more electronic databases may provide specific information; a student assigned a novel may find the text in a trade paperback; cocktail tables everywhere are mines where may be found opulent photographic records of the world, its inhabitants, and their manifold possessions. Yet none of these alternatives provide in the fullest sense the effect of the well-designed and well-printed book, where the author's text comes to the reader's eyes filtered through and interpreted by the imagination and skills of the designer or illustrator or printer or publisher -- or all of them together.

Fine printing is nothing if not a rejection of the minimal, for it is an art. In its most exalted form it marries excellence of materials, intelligence and mastery of design, and the highest standards of craftsmanship, creating objects that have the same kind of imaginative appeal and cultural resonance as any others produced by the fine arts. Yet it is an art that functions as a medium for communicating a further work of art: the text that occasions the production of the printed piece. To this extent it is subject to an infinite gradation of constraints. Time, money, materials, and purpose may all place limits on the level at which the art is attempted.

Items in the Exhibition: