bauhaus cowboy

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There's Something Going On Here But You Don't Know What It Is, Do You Mister Jones?

2009-07-25T16:20:00.000-07:00

In November 1938, Editors of The Architectural Forum penned this birth announcement for the latest offspring from the Time & Life Building at Rockefeller Center: "In all the controversy that has revolved around the subject of modern architecture, one small fact has often gone unobserved: Modern, as with all architecture today, has its extremists, its moderates, and its conservatives. Far from being a reflection on the movement, however, this lack of unanimity bears testimony to its strength and long standing.

"The chief indication of Modern's vigor vigor is its dynamic, highly controversial quality, and it is not necessary to look far back to see that the revolutionary developments of yesterday are the commonplace of today. And so, presumably for tomorrow.

"Because extremist minority opinion can so quickly become majority fact, because out of the "wildest" theories often come the most vital ideas, and because THE FORUM in name intends to remain a forum in fact, PLUS now appears to add opinion, exploration and new controversy to reporting.

To PLUS and its editors, THE ARCHITECTURAL FORUM offers its best wishes -- and a free hand."

Herbert Matter: PLUS 1. New York: Architectural Forum/ Time Inc., December 1938. Photographically printed self-wrappers.

PLUS (subtitled ORIENTATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE) premiered in December 1938 as a 16-page, two-color saddle-stitched magazine designed by Herbert Matter and assembled by no less than five editors: Wallace K. Harrison, William Lescaze, William Muschenheim, Stamo Papadaki, and James Johnson Sweeney.

Seventy years of hindsight clearly shows that the Forum Editors (including George Nelson and Henry Wright at the time) made a brilliant choice by giving Herbert Matter free reign of the mise-en-page. His mastery of the European Avant-garde visual vocabulary -- including PhotoMontage and Avant-Garde typography -- matched the eclectic editorial content of this short-lived architectural publishing experiment.

The Gang of Five fulfilled their promise to explore all aspects of the plastic arts via established and emerging experts. "Toward a Unity of the Constructive Arts" by Naum Gabo; "Can Expositions Survive?" by Dr. Siegfried Giedion; "The Question of “Truth” by Fernand Leger; "Regionalism in Architecture" by Richard J. Neutra; and "Alexander Calder: Movement as Plastic Element" by James Johnson Sweeney all appeared in the first two issues of PLUS.

Who knows what might have eventually appeared in the slender offshoot of The Forum? The list of collaborators credited in the first issue is truly mind-boggling, including Max Abramovitz, Josef Albers, Walter Curt Behrendt, Marcel Breuer, John Albert Frey, R. Buckminster Fuller, Philip L. Goodwin, Bertrand Goldberg, Harwell Hamilton Harris, George Fred Keck, Albert Kahn, L. Moholy-Nagy, Richard J. Neutra, Peter Pfisterer, Antonin Raymond, R. M. Schindler, Paul Schweikher, Edward Durell Stone, Le Corbusier, Alberto Sartoris, and P. Morton Shand. The Cambridge Post Office must have lost the Walter Gropius invitation.

Herbert Matter: PLUS 2. New York: Architectural Forum/ Time Inc., February 1939. Photographically printed self-wrappers with printed vellum wrapper.

We'll never know what PLUS might have grown into. The cultural soil of North America before World War II wasn't fertile enough to sustain or nurture such a broadminded publishing experiment. Letters to the Forum made it perfectly clear that the nose-to-the-grindstone working professionals were too busy recovering from the Depression and had no time for such nonsense.

Imagine Thurston Howell III reading this:

"I am as much irritated as entertained by M. Fernand Leger's pontifications on truth -- as is usually the case with the "enfant terrible," his truths are but half or quarter truths, having a momentary distorted validity bearing no relativity to that summation or distillation of fact which lurks the real truth . . . ." -- Charles Voorhies, San Francisco

Or this:

"Information given in an architectural magazine should be written be clear-headed people who have something of interest to say to architects and the editors should go back to sensible typography." -- Charles Killiam, Cambridge

Or:

"Your Surrealist section PLUS is probably intended to be an expression of the subconscious minds of its editors. . . . some of us would prefer to read the magazine without that "morning after" sensation that PLUS gives us." -- Arthur Loveless, Seattle

These sentiments were apparently enough to ensure that PLUS lived a short life. A very short life. I don't even know how many issues were published -- I've only seen the first three and have no documentation pointing to further issues. Mainstream America (v. 1939) was painfully unreceptive to the rapidly-emigrating sensibilities of the European Avant-Garde, thus assuring that PLUS quickly ended up like tears in the rain.

Now these slim quartos remain as shining examples of undiluted American optimism for a better future through good design.

Me and Gropius

2009-07-24T14:39:00.000-07:00

It is highly offensive that the only example of Walter Gropius' architectural design in the state of Illinois is in danger of being razed in the name of Progress. The former site of the Michael Reese Hospital on Chicago's South Side occupies the proposed ground zero for the 2016 Olympic Village. How have we come to this?

Chicago has always led the country in efforts to preserve and promote its architectural heritage. That's why it is particularly shocking that the Michael Reese Hospital campus is targeted for redevelopment. The Reese campus was an early example of urban planning and redevelopment whose historical importance cannot be overstated. As of this writing, 8 structures within the campus confines have been identified as having substantial Gropius involvement, with the wide variety of input that his work in North America via The Architects Collaborative is noted. The variety of designs on the Reese campus stands in stark contrast to the rigid purity of Mies's Illinois Institute of Technology Campus, a few block west on 31st Street.

For more information, please visit the Gropius in Chicago Coalition .

The seemingly inevitable fate of the Reese Campus depresses me because of what it says about us and our strained relationship to our shared history. To a certain demographic whose cultural knowledge is tied to ability to use keyword searches, Bauhaus is first and foremost a proto-goth band, and maybe a style of quasi-modern furniture embodied by a squared black leather sofa.

My central thesis as a bookseller is that American culture was forever changed by the immigrants who fled Europe before World War II. All aspects of American culture dear to me -- art, architecture, design, advertising, photography, film -- benefitted from the influx of the European Avant-Garde. And Walter Gropius was the alpha male of this pack. I have a special relationship with the work and legacy of Walter Gropius. He gave my life direction and purpose without the privilege of attending the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

In the summer of 2000 I suffered an overload of influence and unfulfilled ambitions. My career as a Graphic Designer was stalled. My interests centered around antique furniture, motorcycles and book collecting -- an odd smorgasbord of vintage paperbacks, top-shelf crime fiction, Beat Generation literature, PhotoBooks and other miscellanea. It all tasted good but left me hungry. I needed focus. I needed a fresh start. I needed to start from zero. I needed a vacation.

Molly and I travelled to Boston in the Summer of 2000, returning to the city where we had lived for a short time in the early nineties. Our goal was to explore the area culture that somehow always gets avoided when you're a city dweller whose life is dominated by the competition for services. That's how we eventually ended up in the colonial village of Lincoln, a mere stone's throw from Walden Pond, at 68 Baker Bridge Road -- the homestead of Walter and Ise Gropius, a National Historic Landmark administered by the Society for Preservation of New England Antiquities.

Gropius: the name quickens the pulse of even the most jaded modernist. Gropius: the Silver Prince himself. Gropius: Mister Alma Mahler. Gropius: founding director of the Bauhaus -- the German crucible of modernism. Gropius: the visionary architect who emigrated to Massachusetts' sheltering shores 317 years after the first group of pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The Silver Prince's modern, flat-roofed castle -- a beautiful International Style residence -- glistened on the hill. I had no idea what awaited me up that gravel driveway. This was a very big deal for me. But I didn't realize it at the time.

The Gropius House is open to the public and administered through the Society for Preservation of New England Antiquities. Six years after her husband's death in 1969, Ise Gropius offered to donate the house to SPNEA , complete with original Bauhaus furniture and original works of art. "Fortunately, SPNEA chose to disregard the fact that the Gropius House marked a conscious rejection of history in terms of emulation of past styles and was a declaration of a new aesthetic and a brave new world," wrote New York Times architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable in 1984.

Thanks to SPNEA's foresight, visitors can explore the house and grounds, view a modern art collection worthy of a major museum (and an unsurpassed collection of original Bauhaus workshop furniture), and experience the residential environment of one of our greatest architects, circa 1965. Quite a bargain for ten dollars.

Our tour group gathered around the free-standing International Style garage that SPNEA had carefully converted into a visitors center. The architecturally renovated garage was suitably austere, displaying a sparse, tasteful selection of books and postcards. No t-shirts, ashtrays or other tourist detritus cluttered the clean, well-lighted space.

Our tour group consisted of Molly and me; a quiet, middle-aged Oriental couple; and a group of young architecture groupies. These young turks are easily as rabid as their rock-n-roll brethren, both subscribing to rigidly defined dress codes. Instead of tight jeans and halter tops, architecture groupies sport khakis, crisp buttoned-down Oxfords, topsiders, and eclectic black plastic eyewear to signify their fealty to the European god Corbu. Susan the tour guide cheerfully announced the tour's beginning, promptly at 11 am.

Gropius had founded the Bauhaus in 1919 to reconcile the disparity between the craftsman tradition and machine age mass-production. "Art and Technology -- a new unity!" was his rallying cry as Gropius gathered the cream of the European Avant Garde to his cause -- visionaries with names like Wassily, Oskar, Laszlo and Farkas.

The Bauhaus was a state school funded by the German government, and its ascendency closely paralleled the rise of National Socialism. Hitler's censure of modernism contributed to the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933. Soon thereafter, Gropius became one of the estimated 60,000 artists who fled Germany.

Susan briefed us on Gropius' background as we tramped up the driveway towards the house. Along the way, she peppered her speech with anecdotes relating to the property, such as why the garage is situated so far away from the house.

During the design process, Mrs. James Storrow had advised Gropius to build his garage down by the road, so he would only have to shovel out a footpath to the garage during heavy snows. Gropius wisely heeded her advice, since Mrs. Storrow was more than a well-wishing neighbor offering helpful rural insights. She actually financed the construction of the house and donated a parcel of land to the Gropius family. More on Mrs. Storrow in a moment.

After leaving Berlin in 1933, Gropius settled his family in London. The next three years took their financial toll as the English steadfastly refused to jump on the modern bandwagon. With commissions few and far between, Gropius put out feelers for opportunities in America, the country widely perceived by European expatriates as the final frontier. Those inquiries sent shock waves through America's ivy towers in 1936.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: WALTER GROPIUS FAREWELL DINNER MENU COVER. London: March 9th, 1937 [printed in three-color offset by Lund Humphries on Flake White Parchment].

By the mid-thirties, Harvard Architecture Dean Joseph Hudnutt found himself painted into an academic corner. Harvard, like almost every other American college, was being strangled by the musty Beaux-Arts tradition. The forward-thinking Hudnutt had seen the writing on the walls, and read the journals proclaiming the dawn of a new age in the European architectural tradition -- modernism -- as represented by Gropius' idea of "starting from zero."

Any school that clung to the Beaux-Arts tradition would find itself bypassed, as the best and brightest chose to study with the European masters then amassing on the far shores of the Atlantic, gingerly testing the waters before emigrating to the United States. If American architecture students were going to start from zero, Hudnutt wanted them to do it in Cambridge instead of New Haven. Hudnutt got his superstar when Gropius accepted the offer to become Harvard's director of Architectural Graduate Studies; Gropius got a pulpit from which to preach his modern sermons; and American architectural studies got a long-delayed boot in its ass.

Gropius arrived in the United States eager to promote the modern ideology incubated and formalized at the Bauhaus. Never one to miss a chance to issue a manifesto, he decided his first American statement would be a house -- a house to shelter his family and present his International Styling to the backward-looking tribes of New England.

Unfortunately, three years in London had left him nearly destitute. Nonetheless, Gropius modified some of his existing blueprints and -- with hat in hand -- went to visit loan officers for the Federal Housing Administration.

Word immediately spread through the drawing rooms of Back Bay that the FHA had not been the least bit impressed with the dapper, precise little German and his plans to build -- of all things -- a flat-roofed house! While Boston shared the same latitude as Rome, the fierce New England winters dissuaded further comparisons. Without FHA financing, Gropius found himself in a predicament. Enter Mrs. James J. Storrow.

Eager to help his renowned peer, Boston architect Henry Shepley brought the German's plight to Storrow's attention. A prominent civic leader and arts patron from the upscale suburban village of Lincoln, Storrow had the means to help Gropius. She believed the emigrant's modern notions of building should be given a chance to succeed or fail on their own merits. Mrs. Storrow made Gropius a historically significant offer: she would underwrite $18,000 for construction of a modern house on a four-acre parcel of her Lincoln estate. Upon completion, Gropius would rent the house from her. Gropius eventually bought the land and house from the Storrow family after her death. Our tour group silently acknowledged Mrs. Storrow's munificence while we gathered under the angular, jutting entranceway to the house. Susan distributed protective shoe covers before we entered.

As we donned the white cotton shoe covers, I admired the simple choice of building materials in front of me. Philip Johnson's appropriately titled Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Mies Van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in Illinois, are both fun to visit but you wouldn't want to live in either of them. The Gropius house is a lot of things, but soulless isn’t one of them.

Gropius proclaimed his house would "fulfill regional conditions rather than international precepts." To accomplish this lofty goal, the Gropius family travelled the New England countryside, acquainting themselves with the regional vernacular architecture. The numerous white clapboard barns that contrasted with the thick woodlands of central Massachusetts impressed Gropius. He also admired the handicraft of New England carpenters and their mastery of balloon-frame construction. He noted readily available fieldstones had provided perfect foundations for New England homes for centuries. Gropius decided to incorporate regional building idioms and materials into his house, eventually choosing white painted wood, balloon framing, brick chimney, screened porch, fieldstone foundation and retaining walls. He even chose white clapboard to sheathe his house but placed the boards vertically for a definitive modern statement.

These materials looked warm and inviting. I placed my hands on the vertical white clapboards as our group entered the house single-file through the front door. Susan noted my tactile urges and reminded us that no touching was allowed inside.

The House is quite intimately scaled. Had Gropius been an early acolyte of the smaller-is-better school of thinking? Apparently not: he needed space for a home office, servants’ quarters, multiple bed and bathrooms -- all within Mrs. Storrow's budget, which was generous, yet hardly extravagant for a 2,300-square-foot house.

A vocal advocate of mass-production, Gropius put Mrs. Storrow's money where his mouth was: he specified all building materials from domestic supply houses and catalogues. The house was designed with all four bathrooms and the kitchen serviced by a central plumbing core. Sensing a publicity windfall, the General Electric Corporation donated an electric dishwasher and garbage disposal, both novel kitchen devices in 1937.

Ise Gropius remembered being thankful for the labor-saving devices: "When the maids walked into the highly paid munitions factory jobs in 1941, I was one of the few housewives well-equipped to cope with the new situation."

The intimate scale assisted Gropius' desire to showcase the collection of original Bauhaus furniture he had brought to American. He enjoyed the luxury of scaling each room to highlight furniture produced in the Bauhaus metal and carpentry workshops in Weimar and Dessau. This is a great trick for folks such as myself who tend to buy furniture for the long term.

Visitors can view original Marcel Breuer designs, from the lightweight tubular steel furniture conceived in the Dessau workshop to his later plywood designs. The furniture glistened with that wonderful patina of age, looking to the uninitiated like thrift-shop bargains, while studied eyes absorbed the subtle details of carefully visible screws and canvas stitching. Needless to say, the architecture groupies were all over the furniture like a pack of wild dogs. This same furniture was classified as "obsolete" by the IRS under inheritance tax laws in 1969. Any first-rate museum would covet this rare collection.

I was so taken by the furniture that I nearly missed a Xanti Schawinsky painting in the entranceway. In addition to house, grounds, and furniture, Ise Gropius also bequeathed her family's modern artwork collection to SPNEA. Guess what kind of collection the director of the Bauhaus could accumulate? Who has two thumbs and an all-star faculty including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Oskar Schlemmer, Herbert Bayer, Johannes Itten, etc? THAT guy!

Torturous restraint was necessary to keep from touching the warm, inviting surfaces that beckoned at every turn while our group moved slowly through the house. Susan acknowledged the tactile urge by encouraging us to wrap ourselves around the curved handrail gracefully winding up the circular staircase. This rail is the sole piece of hardware not factory-specified: a Boston pipe-fitter bent the railing to Gropius' specifications. It provides a unique ergonomic tool for ascending to the second-floor bedrooms and out onto the partially shaded deck with a wall painted light pink -- an unexpected color suggested by Bauhaus compatriot and frequent house guest Lyonel Feininger.

Once on the deck, I looked heavenward to that holy idiom of the International Style, the flat roof. Did it leak? Had snowdrifts ever damaged it? Gropius allowed no unsightly gutters to mar his clean facade, so he devised a drainage pipe that dropped through the house into a dry well. He correctly theorized the house's core temperature would prevent the pipe from ever freezing. After 60-plus Massachusetts winters, it never has.

As our tour concluded, Susan pointed across the way to a similar house designed by Marcel Breuer soon after the Gropius House was built. Apparently, Mrs. Storrow was so satisfied with the Gropius house that she allocated more home spaces from her estate for Harvard professors Breuer, Walter Bognar and James Ford. These houses were publicized by modernist cheerleader and all-around bon vivant George Nelson in 1952 as "part of one of the most interesting collections of modern houses in the country." These Lincoln houses served as ground zero for inspiring multiple generations of architects to expand the precepts of the International Style, adapting them to the postwar American building boom.

After visiting the Gropius House in 1939, Lewis Mumford inscribed the guestbook: "Hail to the most indigenous, the most regional example of the New England home, the New England of a New World!"

Mumford was right about the New World part. Unfortunately. American builders have simplified and vulgarized the modern concepts taught by Gropius and his peers, freely interchanging economy for integrity. These vulgarities now line the major arteries of America and are primarily responsible for the poor reputation that the International Style holds in the minds of most Americans. Remember the Michael Reese Hospital?

But back in 1938 the Gropius House served notice that the precepts of the European modern movement could successfully adapt to New England's social and cultural climate. Accordingly to Ada Louise Huxtable, the Gropius house was "the revolutionary architectural shot heard across the country,"

I echoed that sentiment as we walked back to our car. Molly agreed, but thought it shameful that the Bauhaus is primarily remembered as a style instead of an institution. "Those men honestly believed they could change the world," she said, "Now Bauhaus is used to hawk cheap leather furniture on late-night television." She was right. Gropius would roll over in his grave to hear people refer to the Bauhaus as a Style. I thought it was a style all right -- a lifestyle. Art and Technology -- a New Unity; those words stayed with me.

The Oriental couple's car was parked next to ours, and the husband shyly asked if I would take a picture of him and his wife in front of the house. I snapped the picture while the architectural groupies tramped around the grounds, viewing the house from every conceivable angle. I returned their camera, and asked them what they thought of the tour. They both smiled. He said "Gropius belongs to the whole world." I couldn't have said it better myself.

The Gropius House packaged the whole wide world into a neat little box. An American box -- nestled in the New England countryside!

On the drive back into Boston, the dominoes of my life started falling into place, a cascading clatter alongside us on the Cambridge Pike. All of my previously disparate interests started to connect and intertwine: Danny Lyon was practicing the New Vision on his own terms; the Beat authors also; even the hard-boiled Fawcett Gold Medal stable were starting from zero. I had a vision of Charles Willeford smoking a cigar and playing ping-pong with Gropius on the screened-in back porch, with Ise vainly trying to catch the falling ashes in a tiny ceramic ashtray.

By the time we reached Cambridge, Molly had christened me "the Bauhaus Cowboy." I smiled at that. The corral gate was swinging open. I thought of William Holden's Pike Bishop growling, "Let's go." We would ride at dawn.

SummerTimeLand

2009-06-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

In SummerTimeLand you have vine-ripened, perfect watermelons and endless rows of soft-shell crabs on ice. It's a great place to visit, but it takes a certain type of person to live here. Asbestos-based blood helps.

It doesn't take a Native Texan to know what's in store when the mercury heads north of 100 degrees in June. Summer heat down here is a fact of life, but temperatures over 105 before August do not bode well. 109 at Austin Bergstrom International Airport is beyond ridiculous -- it's giant-squid scary.

The five months of Summer drive my book hunting activities indoors; instead of driving around checking my traps, I dig through my storage boxes looking for neglected uncataloged gems from days past.

I have a closet whose alchemy resembles a wine cellar -- long-stored items emerge from the darkness, finally reaching their prime, releasing a sweet bouquet and the perfect mixture of tannins. There's also a good percentage that ends up as vinegar.

Who's On First?

2009-06-14T09:16:00.000-07:00

While indulging in the Austin tradition of live music and adult beverages at a venerable spot well-known for excellence in both categories, I was queried about my occupation by a fellow patron. My instinctive response in these circumstances is to keep it as simple as possible: "I sell rare books . . ." immediately followed by ". . . on the Internet." This is a good conversational gambit, since I leave it up to my interrogator whether or not more attention is warranted. I'm comfortable leaving it at that, since bars aren't the best place to talk shop. This time was different. "First editions? I can dig it," came the immediate response. Human nature. There's no getting around it.

". . . Humans are wired to rank things," said Dr. William Pollack, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Caring about who is best comes from a function that originally has to do with survival," he said. "You would want the person who represented you in your tribe to be the best at it -- because without them being the best, or winning, you might starve to death or be attacked. That part is neurologically set in. We are ranking and ordered animals." [Alan Schwarz: "'The Greatest': What a Concept" The New York Times, June 14, 2009] Or anything Tom Wolfe produced under the new Journalism label.

The First Edition is the foundation on which the Rare Book field rests. This isn't likely to change, since the immutable law of the First Edition is like gravity, immune to technological advances. Like the Dude, it abides.

The siren call of the First Edition led me to collect books in the first place: Kerouac, Burroughs, Willeford, etc. The physical work collecting and harvesting these editions was great, but intellectually it left something to be desired. Other than the colophon and the design of the jacket rear panel, is there any difference between a First Edition of ON THE ROAD and the second (or third) edition published in September 1957? I've got copies in front of me and physically there ain't no difference. But here's the thing that drove me crazy back in the day -- the First Edition generates an "aura." That Aura is as tangible as the slowly fading magenta on the Dust jacket spine.

Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" used the word "aura" to refer to the sense of awe and reverence one presumably experienced in the presence of unique works of art. According to Benjamin, this aura inheres not in the object itself but rather in external attributes such as its known line of ownership, its restricted exhibition, its publicized authenticity, or its cultural value. Aura is thus indicative of art's traditional association with primitive, feudal, or bourgeois structures of power and its further association with magic and (religious or secular) ritual. With the advent of art's mechanical reproducibility, and the development of forms of art (such as film) in which there is no actual original, the experience of art could be freed from place and ritual and instead brought under the gaze and control of a mass audience, leading to a shattering of the aura. "For the first time in world history," Benjamin wrote, "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual."

Since I am a lot more comfortable discussing my beloved San Antonio Spurs than Walter Benjamin in a bar, I took the easy way out. "I sell Design Books, so First Editions really don't hold much sway," I replied. I further explained that Design Books tend to exist primarily in singular editions, so the distinction is pretty much moot. At that point the talk veered toward architecture and how the glut of high-rise construction in the West Campus area was forever destroying the fabric of the neighborhood. Then we rocked out and everybody went home.

Afterwards I thought about my simplistic, slightly misanthropic response and vowed to do better next time. The spectre of the First Edition does that to me, alighting like a jeering masturbating raven on my shoulder, making me defensive about my vocation, like a slowly drowning Southerner extolling the virtue of Nathan Bedford Forrester. I don't traffic in First Editions, I sell Design Books, darn it.

Elaine Lustig Cohen once dismissed the whole First Edition subculture with a wave of her hand, bracelets softly clinking, underscoring her point -- "THOSE people don't care about books." Ouch.

Are we kidding ourselves? By and large, First Edition culture doesn't intrude too far into the Design Book field (PhotoBooks excepted of course), but my ON THE ROAD comparison makes me want to take the Pepsi Challenge. Let's do it.

Here's a first edition:

Walter Gropius: THE NEW ARCHITECTURE AND THE BAUHAUS. London/New York: Faber and Faber/the Museum of Modern Art [n.d. circa 1936]. Octavo. Cream cloth stamped in red. 80 pp. 16 plates. Dust jacket design by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The first U.S. edition features an introduction by Joseph Hudnutt, while the true first (U. K.) edition is introduced by Frank Pick.

The dust jacket features an example of Moholy-Nagy's "Rhodoid" technique: photographing a composition through glass or other transparent material to catch the shadow cast on the background. Very cool indeed. This book looks and feels like a true artifact of the age, properly English and suitably Avant-garde.

Here's a second edition:

Walter Gropius: THE NEW ARCHITECTURE AND THE BAUHAUS. Newton, MA: Charles Branford [Faber and Faber], 1956. Octavo. Black cloth stamped in white. 80 pp. 16 plates. Dust jacket is a fairly mediocre, one-color variant of the original 1935 Moholy-Nagy design. "In the style of" seems the best sobriquet for describing this jacket. Third impression, (first American edition thus), bound from Faber sheets, including the English Preface by Frank Pick. This edition has a trimmed Branford label pasted over the Faber information on the title page.

This edition feels Americanized, with the monochromatic jacket and the binary severity of the decorated cloth. The MoMA first edition wins on style points, that's for sure. The collector naturally prefers the earlier edition, but both have their particular merits. The variant of the later printing is certainly interesting in its own right. Completists take note.

But at the end of the day, either of these editions holds a candle to my 1935 English First Edition. And not because it's the TRUE first edition. Not at all. Virtually the same as the above-referenced 1936 MoMA edition, my copy was inscribed to Julian Huxley in February 1937, the month before Gropius left England to head Hudnutt's Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Trust me on this -- this book has an Aura.

Eye Of The Beholder

2009-06-07T11:38:00.000-07:00

Terence Riley noted that the early tastemakers at MoMA understood their job was to separate "the wheat from the chaff." Few people rose to that challenge with more vigor than the young Philip Johnson, the first head of the Department of Architecture and Design, circa 1932.

After Johnson's 1928 visit to the Bauhaus Dessau his role as a proselytizer for the new architecture was set. "We were proud to be avant-gardists; we wore our enthusiasm as a badge of honor that distinguished us as culturally superior to those around us." Johnson said.

From this plateau of cultural superiority, Johnson and his MoMA collaborators Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock labeled this architecture "The International Style" in the MODERN ARCHITECTURE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION catalog [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932].

But by 1940, Johnson had moved on to learn a vocation at the Harvard Graduate School of Design under Gropius and Breuer. In his absence, the Mandarins of MoMA couldn't always control the debate, but they kept a stranglehold on the terminology.

After Johnson's departure, John McAndrew headed the Department of Architecture. McAndrew and his staff identified and cataloged 297 examples of Modern Architecture in Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont, and published their efforts in August 1940 as GUIDE TO MODERN ARCHITECTURE - NORTHEAST STATES [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1940].

I bought a copy of McAndrew's GUIDE in Cherry Springs, NY during my last book hunting trip. This was the first copy I had actually ever found; for a book published in an edition of 10,000 copies, it is surprisingly uncommon. I paid $4.00 for my Ex-Library copy. I love a bargain.

As an historical document, it is invaluable. The GUIDE can be used to settle any argument about the Who, What, Where, When and Why of pre-war Modernism in the Northeast States. This 128-page book overflows with information.

As a Guidebook however, it has one serious flaw. McAndrew freely admits the word Modern is controversial in the cultural dialogue of 1940. He draws an irreconcilable distinction between Modern and the "Modernistic." That pejorative separation is historically interesting, but rather problematic. If I had attempted to use his guide on my travels through Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, Manhattan, etc., I would have missed the architectural highlight of my week-long trip.

In his foreword to the 60th Anniversary Edition of MACHINE ART [New York: Abrams/Museum of Modern Art, 1994], Philip Johnson wrote, "The battle of modern architecture has long been won. Twenty years ago the Museum [of Modern Art] was in the thick of the fight, but now our exhibitions and catalogues take part in the unending campaign described by Alfred Barr as "simply the continuous, conscientious, resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity -- the discovery and proclamation of excellence."

They missed their mark.

Jackson Pollack Walks Into a Bar . . .

2009-06-07T09:04:00.000-07:00

. . . carrying a paint-splattered canvas under his arm. Displaying it to the bartender, he says, "Look what I almost stepped in!"

Man, this is a tough room! How about this one: I walk into a used bookstore and, hours later, come out with a box of books.

In this box are three Roth [The Book of 101 Books] true first editions:

The punchline: how much I paid for the box of books.

Never mind, you probably wouldn't think it's very funny.

A Death in the Family

2008-12-14T16:37:00.000-08:00

My elation over hitting a rare trifecta in the Arts section of The Sunday New York Times, that is, actually reading all three of the lead articles -- Clint, I. M. and Kate/Leo -- was short lived. As happens with ever-increasing frequency, an Obituary squelched my elation, making my world a little bit smaller.

Mildred Constantine died at age 95. Times Go-To Guy Steven Heller provided the details:

"Ms. Constantine ... was associate curator and ultimately curatorial consultant in the Modern's architecture and design department from 1943 through 1970, many of those years under Philip Johnson, the department's founder. She was largely responsible for popularizing ignored or difficult-to-categorize collections, or what she called "fugitive material."

I have made a career of rounding up this "fugitive material," and although I never had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Constantine, I felt a kinship with her from her years of curating and chronicling the Modern Movement. Her 1968 catalog coauthored with Alan Fern, WORD AND IMAGE. POSTERS FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, as well as 1974s encore volume REVOLUTIONARY SOVIET FILM POSTERS are both books that have never strayed far from my reference shelf.

Heller again, quoted without comment:

"Ms. Constantine also developed what she called the Ephemera Collection, building upon the graphic materials -- from letterheads to business cards -- originally collected by the German typographer Jan Tschichold. Furthermore, she savored "wooing" objects away from their collectors."

Her collaborator Alan Fern, curator emeritus of the National Portrait Gallery, said "She was always on the prowl for untapped cultural artifacts, -- an advocate of modern anything on the cutting edge." Mr. Fern's sentiment reminds me of two of my favorite quotes from the Modern Canon: "Catalogues, posters, advedrtisements of all sorts ... believe me, they contain the poetry of our epoch." -- Guillaume Apolinaire, 1912 and "Modernism is not a style, it is an attitude." -- Marcel Breuer.

A quick review of my shelves found Ms. Constantine writing about Latin American Posters in a 1941 edition of A-D, profiling George Nelson and Associates for GRAPHIS in 1953, and providing the preface to Ladislav Sutnar's VISUAL DESIGN IN ACTION.

In VISUAL DESIGN IN ACTION, Mildred Constantine wrote:

"There is a force and meaningful consistency in Sutnar's entire body of work, which permits him to express himself with a rich diversity in exhibition design and the broad variations of graphic design. Sutnar has the assured stature of the integrated designer."

Substitute Curator for Designer in that last sentence and you have an excellent description of Ms. Constantine. Her advocacy of the Modern and her lifelong pursuit of the elusive fugitive material made her feel like family to me. She will be missed.

A Dialogue With Solitude

2008-12-05T12:59:00.000-08:00

During a recent telephone conversation, one of my friends confessed his desire to open a bookstore, but could not avoid the fact that he "hated people." While misanthropy is a definite liability for a bookstore owner, it's not necessarily a disqualification. Our last trip to Chicago confirmed this fact.

My virtual storefront works quite nicely for me, since I don't have to meet and greet the public, keeping a smile on my face while poking through dusty old boxes of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and repeating the "no public restroom" mantra.

Selling rare and esoteric books on the Internet is a great way to meet folks from around the world with similar perspectives and passions. I welcome all inquiries and love to answer questions about condition, provenance and just about anything else. I try to establish a dialogue, even though English is frequently a second- or third-language option.

This week I received a question that topped all others with its Zen-like Beat spontaneity:

"Is there a picture of a painting titled "meat"? It has a monkey holding a stick w/an olive on the end of the stick and he's looking up at a spaceship."

My answer:

"No, but there ARE lots of Monkeys and Olives in this edition."

To Catalog is Human

2008-06-17T07:00:00.001-07:00

While perusing Paper Cuts, The New York Times Book Blog a few days ago, I came across a post by Rachel Donadio entitled "The Great Bruccoli."

Ms. Donadio recalled the recently-deceased Matthew J. Bruccoli as "a scholar of 20th-century American literature, rare book dealer and one of the most vivid characters in the literary marketplace." That certainly got my attention.

She continued, "I thought of him as a kind of Sydney Greenstreet character, someone who knew where to find precious literary gems -- and knew who might want to buy them." I'm hooked -- tell me more.

Here's the paragraph that really got my attention: "Although a life-long academic, Bruccoli had a collector's skepticism about what universities could actually teach you about literature, about the overt and covert conversations between writers, their echoes and influences. "Before the Web became the principal venue for bookselling, dealers sold their books through catalogs," Bruccoli said. "And I learned more through book dealers' catalogs than I learned at Yale, at U.V.A., than I learned in class. I got my education through reading book dealers' catalogs."

Even in the digital age, catalogs remain an invaluable tool for book collectors and dealers -- never underestimate the difference between information and knowledge. In the ever-expanding absence of second-hand bookstores, catalogs provide historical documentation, impeccable research and prices realized; I would be hard-pressed to last a week without access to my catalog collection. According to Det. Shakima Greggs from THE WIRE, "Police only as good as their CIs." Same thing for book collectors and dealers -- we're only as good as our catalogs.

I am very fortunate to have an extensive catalog collection issued by Ex-Libris, Arthur and Elaine Lustig Cohen's legendary bookstore. She was a graphic designer of no small renown, and he was a theologian, novelist, art and literary critic, who wrote extensively on Modern Art. The couple dealt in important and rare printed material and graphic documentation of International 20th-Century art, covering all the bases: Bauhaus, Futurism, Dada & Surrealism, Avant-Garde, Graphic Design, Architecture, Theater, Poster Design, Expressionism, Modern American and European Art Movements, and any other ISM that might tickle your fancy. Their catalogs remain exceptional research tools overflowing with important objects and information, include scholarly listings, descriptions, photographs and (1980s) prices of all kinds of early 20th-Century ephemera including posters, letterheads, magazines, reviews, brochures, books, stationery, correspondence, posters, advertisements and much more.

As a specialist in Design Books, I place great emphasis on faithful color reproduction and obsessive historical context for the books I sell. I knew from the outset that it would be problematic for me to issue catalogs of recent acquisitions. The costs of carefully-proofed 4-color presswork, postal charges and address database management were all challenges I chose to ignore by designing my website to function as a virtual catalog.

I truly regret I never had the opportunity to show Matthew J. Bruccoli my website. No doubt his critique would have been worth its weight in gold.

I Saw the Scroll

2008-06-08T14:47:00.000-07:00

I started collecting books a long time ago. At the time, I thought it would be cool to collect the books (in the first editions) that had made the biggest impression on me up to that date -- the books that had forged my self-identity, for better or worse. Ten was a good number, so I spent some time whittling down my list to ten titles, the ten titles that would form my Book Collection: On the Road, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion, Naked Lunch, Slaughterhouse Five, Lolita, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Thankfully, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into.

Just like real life, my Book Collection quickly became defined by compromise. I discovered that the true first editions of both Naked Lunch and Lolita were published in the Olympia Press Travelers Companion Series and were prohibitively expensive. My friend Richard Dorsett helped guide my collecting from his perch behind the counter of Olympia Books, where he convinced me there was no shame in pursuing the Grove Press Naked Lunch over the Olympia Press edition, and I eventually stumbled upon a later Olympia edition of Lolita, thus displacing the Putnam hardcover acting as my placeholder.

Stumble is the key word here -- I have always had a knack for finding bargains, and my nascent Book Collection was strongly assisted by luck, pluck and just plain weird happenstance. The story of how I acquired my first edition of On The Road is a perfect example of what Hunter S. Thompson called "the pull of the great magnet."

Like many American males, I cannot overstate the importance On the Road played in my life. I was very fortunate to read it at the absolute perfect point in my development: seventeen years old stuck in Abilene, Texas. Kerouac's sorrowful love letter to Neal Cassady and America helped me through my years in the twilight wilderness between adolescence and adulthood. Other books helped me appreciate the joys of earthly delights such as motorcycles and alternative belief systems, but Kerouac really infused me with Life itself, manifested by a burning desire to see the obscured mysteries hidden over the flat horizons of West Texas.

The years passed and my 10-volume Book collection grew from a shelf to a household, always acting as an imperfect, fun-house of mirrors reflecting distorted splinters and fragments of my life. Seasons and fashions have changed, and Burroughs gave way to the Bauhaus, Mailer to Moholy, Bukowski to Berlewi, etc., but Kerouac always abides. On the Road has remained one of the few constants in my life, one of the only things that has never been outgrown, outsourced, understated or undervalued. That's why I was thrilled and humbled to hear the Scroll was coming to Austin.

I never dreamed I would have the opportunity to view Kerouac's legendary 120-foot long first draft of his Road book. But that too came to pass this Spring, and it felt like I was in the presence of the Shroud of Turin. The first 45 feet of the scroll were unrolled and displayed in a lengthy glass case as the centerpiece on an exhibition on the Beat Generation. As I started reading the displayed manuscript, the great magnet hummed to life and I was overwhelmed by visions.

Savoring the real names long substituted for aliases in the published version, I read the passage concerning Neal's imminent arrival in Manhattan; the image in my mind was from Robert Frank's The Americans -- the rodeo cowboy displaced in Manhattan. As my eyes worked their way down the scroll, beatific grainy gravure images from Frank's series flooded my mind, forming a perfect minds-eye visual tableau to the text in front of me: fragments of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces. Very unexpected, but not the least bit unpleasant.

As I left the Ransom Center, I realized that Robert Frank's book had joined On The Road as an integral, intertwined part of my life (read: collection). In his introduction to the Grove Press American edition, Kerouac wrote that Frank "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world." As my collecting interests moved from the literary to visual culture, I have found myself shambling after those tragic poets, endlessly debating whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin. And whether a book club edition is better than no edition at all.

A Family Album of the Modern Movement

2008-05-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

Photography Book Collectors have it so easy. True, they have to deal with cut-throat prices and an ever-shrinking supply of quality material, but those obstacles are irrelevant to the Serious Book Collector. The reason Photobook collectors have it easy is
their collecting agendas have been codified by a holy trinity of reference books: The Book of 101 Books, The Open Book, and The Photobook: A History (volumes 1 and 2). These books have dictated the collecting tastes and set the agenda for Photobook collecting since 2001. In the Rare Book Field there are few bets more certain than offering a nice copy of a Roth 101 title for sale.

Design Book Collectors do not have the luxury of a set agenda dictating their collecting parameters. They tend to know it when they see it, but they are also remarkably open to suggestion. And that's my job.

I believe this truth to be self evident: a Good Design Library® should be built on a foundation of the classics. In this regard, there is no book more fundamentally worthy than Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, Ise Gropius (editors): BAUHAUS 1919-1928. [NYC: Museum of Modern Art, 1938. 4to. Mustard cloth boards stamped in black and red in photographically-printed two-color dust jacket. 224 pages and 550 b/w images. ]

BAUHAUS 1919-1928 remains the most influential Book on Modern Design ever published. The 1938 book -- a guide to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art -- portrays the Dessau School as the well from whence all species of modernism have evolved.

This book exists as more than an object, occupying three-dimensional space as represented by the X, Y, Z axes -- it exists as a physical and spiritual manifestation of the Dessau Bauhaus. If you own an original 1938 MoMA first edition of this book, you know what I'm talking about. I know this book means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I can imagine what this book meant to Walter Gropius.

Gropius arrived in America in 1937 deeply unsatisfied that his story -- the story of the Bauhaus -- has not been comprehensively recorded.

The Weimar Exhibition Catalog from 1923 had been ambitious, but the physical limitations of book production kept the form and content beguilingly separate. Gorgeous gravure printing and nine original lithographs, representing color work from Kandinsky, Bayer, Schelemmer et al. presented the Weimar bauhaus as an Arts and Craft studio -- an exceptionally competent Arts and Craft studio, but an Arts and Craft studio nonetheless. Herbert Bayer's typographic treatment for the boards is recognized as a high-water mark for the Neue Typografie. But its nascent publication acted like a serialized novel -- promising the best is yet to come.

The Promised Best began arriving later in 1923, when Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy created the Bauhausbucher series. The series editors managed to publish 14 volumes between 1923 and 1928. Each volume addressed a specific area (Architecture, Cubism, Neoplasticism) and the editors envisioned a lengthy series that dealt with the great challenges of the day in a comprehensive and coherent fashion. The comprehensive part fell by the wayside in 1928, with Moholy-Nagy authoring The Materials of Architecture as he was leaving the Bauhaus Dessau -- his departure suddenly ended the series. His departure also -- along with Gropius and Bayer -- effectively ended the Dessau years. While the School would continue until its closure by the National Socialists in 1933, the Gropius-designed building at Dessau would always bee remembered as the Mansion on the hill for the Modern Movement. But the story remained unfinished, untold.

Shortly after Gropius arrived in Masschusetts to oversee the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Alfred Barr and the Museum of Modern art approached the retired Bauhausler. Would Gropius be interested in curating an exhibit about the recently deceased, but already legendary institution?

Walter Gropius was a man who had no need for a publicist. He agreed to edit the book along with his wife Ise and assisted by fellow emigre Herbert Bayer. For a third contributor, Bayer's contribution was considerable: the mustard-colored cloth and the distinctive black and red typographic design is the cue to the fact that you are in the presence of a very significant piece of work.

The MOMA catalog was only hindered by some rather sticky political considerations. Many objects cataloged in the Book are unattributed, in order to shield their creators from unwanted scrutiny from Berlin.

With BAUHAUS 1919-1928, Walter Gropius finally devised the platform to tell his story -- the Bauhaus story. As co-authors, Ise and Herbert Bayer were intimately involved with this book -- it feels like the trio approached the publishing task with a very specific perspective. It feels like they assembled their own family album, with all the cousins, nieces and nephews in beautifully-letterpressed black and white.

Thumbing through this 1938 book in 2008, the slim, strangely hefty volume feels like a family album of the Modern Movement.

Fluttering Hearts in a Storage Bin

2008-02-04T05:35:00.000-08:00

I love my job, I really do. Three days ago I had to root through a plastic storage bin looking for an issue of DIRECTION magazine -- with a classic Paul Rand cover -- that had just been sold. I knew where it was, I just needed to extract it -- I would find my DIRECTION in the storage bin full of miscellaneous periodicals purchased from a Boston estate a few years ago.

This particular estate belonged to an NYC-based Art Director and Commercial Artist straight from the Old School. He studied with Alexey Brodovitch in Philadelphia (and was credited with snapping the frontis portrait in BRODOVITCH by Kerry William Purcell) before heading to NYC to work for the Mutual Broadcasting System. Assigned to the Office of War Information for the duration of World War II, he was very active in both the AIGA and NYC ADC, as well as holding teaching and administrative positions at Pratt and the Cooper Union.

I learned all this backstory after moving 15 boxes of Design material from the Back Bay Condominium where this Art Director retired after his years as a serious Gotham Scenester. Judging from the amount of Gallery Exhibition Guides he saved, he went to every NYC-Modern Art event from the mid-thirties to the late seventies. He saved everything, making his living situation somewhat cluttered; and complicating the lives of his heirs. His daughter contacted me after his death with the opportunity to make an offer on the remains of her father's Design Library. I always love going back to Boston .

Several years later, the ever-dwindling, miscellaneous ephemera and periodicals from this estate are now stored in a single plastic bin in my office. I was pretty sure the DIRECTION was near the bottom of this bin. I carefully unstacked the magazines in the bin, all the time wishing I had the time to catalog every single item: Zwart, Tanning, Zwart, Avedon, Sutnar, Tschichold -- no shortage of good stuff here. Burrowing halfway through the stack, I uncovered an old, oversized magazine in stiff wrappers covered with a plain, hand-made white cover. I lifted the flap and pulled back the cover and my eyes dilated over Marcel Duchamp's brilliantly lithographed Coeurs Volants -- his Fluttering Hearts cover for Cahiers D'Art Nos 1/2, 1936.

Back in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression, this struggling Commercial artist in New York City acquired this Parisian Avant-Garde Broadside and fully comprehended the importance of Duchamp's cover contribution. He had the prescience to hand-make an archival paper slipcover for this magazine, so the grasping fingers of time wouldn't mar the beautiful vibrating Duchamp surface. The cover was neatly detached from the textblock along the spine juncture, but otherwise in wonderful unfingered condition. Finding an original print of one of the iconic images of Modern Art makes you forget about DIRECTION magazine for a little while. Examining the slipcover felt like overhearing a conversation in a crowded bistro, one artist speaking to another.

From the catalogue raisonne on Marcel Duchamp by Arturo Schwarz: "[that particular] issue contained Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia's essay 'Coeurs Volants' ('Fluttering Hearts'), a study of Duchamp's optical works. Duchamp made a paper collage composed of three hearts alternating the blue, red, and blue. The strong color contrasts between the red and blue create the illusion of 'fluttering' hearts. He spoke of the project at a later date: 'At a time when I was working on the Rotorelief series in 1935 or thereabouts, I remember having a conversation with an optical physicist who told me about 'Fluttering Hearts' as one of the classic examples in the study of optics. Without carrying my investigations any further than that, I applied this old idea of 'Fluttering Hearts' to my cover (without even looking at any of the reproductions, probably in colour, in the official textbooks). I kept the title 'Fluttering Hearts'. There are many combinations of 2 colors that give the desired effect, especially in dim light."

The flat winter sun streamed through my office window and bounced around on the Cahiers cover. The magazine vibrated in my hands. Life was good. Then I noticed more of the Art Director's artistic handiwork -- he had signed his name in a tiny cursive scrawl to form the crossbar of the A in CAHIERS. Like R. Mutt before him, he had sketched his own little mustache on a masterpiece -- signing his name on another work and forever shifting the art world a tiny bit off its axis, forever defacing and changing it.

I leaned back in my Aeron Chair and recalled George C. Scott chewing the scenery in Patton: "Rommel, you magnificent bastard -- I read your book!" I replaced the lid to the storage bin and said " Rommel-- you magnificent bastard -- I have your book ..." Nobody heard me.

What's in a Name [Change]?

2007-12-20T06:33:00.000-08:00

As a collector and dealer in rare and unusual Design ephemera, I have a special relationship with the publishing sub-genre commonly referred to as "Little Magazines." I love them.

The term "Little Magazine" has become synonymous with the vessels that chronicled the parallel risings and subsequent high-water marks left by both organized Labor and unorganized Literature in the early years of the 20th- century. If you're interested in the little histories of those movements, I politely suggest googling THE LITTLE MAGAZINE: A HISTORY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY by Frederick J. Hoffman (et al) -- published by the Princeton University Press. It's the standard reference on the subject.

But if you have a strong interest in the Graphic Arts and are endlessly fascinated (like me) by exactly how the fruitful seeds of European Modernism found purchase in the often-barren rocky landscape of North America, I strongly recommend getting acquainted (maybe even intimate) with my favorite little magazine -- the one with the supersized name: PM [AN INTIMATE JOURNAL FOR ART DIRECTORS, PRODUCTION MANAGERS, AND THEIR ASSOCIATES].

The story of PM (short for Production Managers) gets bibliographically complicated by a name change during their sixth year of publication in 1940 to A-D (short for Art Directors). You certainly couldn't argue with the name change from a marketing standpoint, but the name change truly reflected an editorial and ideological shift that helped make PM/AD the gold standard for Graphic Arts magazines in the United States. Look no further than Martin Pederson's emasculation of the once-virile GRAPHIS for the hintermost end of the measurable spectrum.

Both names -- PM and A-D -- were appropriate for their times. But times change, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of Graphic Arts. When PM started publishing in 1934, the Graphic Arts was the realm of typesetters, job printers and the afore-mentioned production managers. By 1942, when wartime restrictions forced the renamed A-D to cease publication, the Graphic Arts industry had undergone a transformation, thanks in a large part to the pre-war influx of European emigrants. The Production Manager had been replaced by the Art Director. The Industry and our visual culture has never been the same.

PM started publication in 1934 as the House Organ for the Composing Room in New York City, a typesetting firm run by Dr. Robert Leslie and Sol Cantor. Way back in the thirties, production artists and designers hired typesetters to set and produce type -- it was actually a pretty big and competitive industry. Dr. Leslie set his firm apart by offering exceptional service and bringing an artistic sensibility to the table. He also used PM to showcase the high standards of the Composing Room.

If you've never handled an issue of PM, please allow me: each issue measured 5.5 x 7.75 with a variety of bindings, including saddle-stitching, perfect-binding and spiral and wire-o-bindings. Paper stocks varied as widely as the production methods. A true "why-not?" spirit infected the publication from day one, with covers screen-printed on Japanese wood veneers, dry-mat stamping, our old friend Pyroxylin paper, embossed & foil stamped with gold leaf, Unifoil stock -- and that's only a sampling from the first year of publication.

Regardless of how adventuresome the production technologies for the covers were, the editorial content suffered from the dusty fustiness of the age, with articles on the joys of typesetting, half-tone engraving and the rapidly expanding field of color separation. As we have witnessed the ruthless march of technology, we know the inherent hazards of documenting industry milestones. In the early years, PM was more William Morris than Walter Gropius. If PM had contented itself to merely semaphoring combat dispatches from the typesetting trenches, it would mainly be remembered by Bruce Rogers and Frederic Goudy completists. But these are not my people.

New York in the thirties was apparently a pretty exciting place, the Great Depression nonewithstanding. By 1936 it was obvious that the lights were starting to go out all over Europe, and immigrants and refugees were starting to come to the United States. Dr. Leslie opened the doors of the Composing Room to European artists and designers looking for opportunities in the New World. He understood the value of community and his role as an educator and liaison to the NYC-based advertising and publishing communities. By 1936 it was obvious that the times were indeed changing, with tastemakers like Philip Johnson, Alfred Barr and the other mandarins at the nascent Museum of Modern Art calling the shots and loudly naming the tunes. By March, Dr. Leslie decided it was time to dance.

The March 1936 PM presented an original cover design by Lucien Bernhard as well as a 24-page section devoted to the Poster work of the Modern German master. This was the first time an American magazine so prominently featured the work of a European emigre. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. By rejecting the past, Dr. Leslie put all his chips on the future.

After the Bernhard cover and feature, the race to outrun the spotlight was on: covers and features on George Salter, and Gustav Jensen immediately followed in 1936. 1937 started with A.M Cassandre, E. McKnight Kauffer (not technically an emigrant, but work with me here) and finally the home team was represented by Lester Beall's classic cover and feature in November.

Beall's cover can be seen as a cornerstone of the ongoing dialogue between the Cream of the American Advertising industry and the ever-growing influence of the Europeans. It is also one of the most widely-recognized images in the history of Graphic Design -- a perfect synthesis of the European Avant-Garde neue typographie, interpreted by an extremely sensitive Designer from Missouri.

In February/March 1938 Walter Gropius contributed an article on the Bauhaus and Architectural education (designed by Herbert Matter) and in June/July L. Sandusky wrote THE BAUHAUS TRADITION AND THE NEW TYPOGRAPHY -- the first published account in English of the Bauhaus Typographic philosophy. Sandusky wrote the text and Lester Beall provided the design work for the 34-page, 2-color insert that has become one of the standard bibliographic references for the cross-pollination of European and American avant-garde typography. This article features work by Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Archipenko, Walter Gropius, Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Karel Teige, Piet Mondrian, Jan Tschichold, Paul Renner, Herbert Bayer, M. Peter Piening and many others. While it seems common today to attach these names together under the common avant-garde umbrella, it was quite an intellectual stretch to merge the plastic arts of architecture, painting, typography, printing and sculpture into a coherent argument in 1938.

And the hits kept on coming: the first feature on the rising star Paul Rand in October/ November 1938; Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha featured in August / September 1939; Herbert Bayer owned December 1939; Gyorgy Kepes was introduced by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in February / March 1940 ; and followed by Joseph Binder, Jean Carlu, George Giusti, Alex Steinweiss, Will Burtin and many others before war shortages forced the now-named A-D to cease publication in 1942.

Dr. Robert Leslie was a true American Modernist in every respect -- a facilitator, an educator, an advocate and a patron. His talents as a cultural barometer and an astute businessman allowed him to unfurl his sails right when the wind started to pick up.

In April 1937, the editors of PM announced their intent to devote an issue entirely to the Bauhaus: "This issue will be the most ambitious expression of the editors' belief that those engaged in a given art of design should be aware of their common interest with those in other branches if design, whether it be poster art, typography, scenic design, furniture design, or architecture."

When PM changed its name and editorial focus from the nameless and faceless Industry Production Managers to A-D for the Art Directors who were rapidly becoming the cultural agenda setters of pre-war America, the magazine made the leap from being an insular House Organ to a Little Magazine which cast a long shadow over the cultural landscape of the 20-century.

If you don't believe me, pick up and issue and see for yourself. Go ahead, get intimate.

Now is the perfect time, since it is my good fortune to have just acquired an exceptional run of PM and A-D consisting of 47 of the 66 total issues, including all of the above-mentioned highlights.

For an exceptional overview of PM Magazine and its founder, Dr. Robert Leslie, I strongly recommend a lengthy visit here -- a website that serves as a virtual tribute to Erin K. Malone's MFA Thesis project from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Authenticity Is a Commodity

2007-11-26T19:28:00.000-08:00

As October turned into November, I became the very proud owner of an excellent selection of books from the library of Charles Niedringhaus -- a man who shares a quality with five other individuals in the whole, wide world: one of five students in the first graduating class of the Institute of Design in May, 1942. As a student, he served Institute Director Laszlo Moholy-Nagy as an assistant in the Basic and Product Design Workshop, as well as assisting the Director in two seminars on Contemporary Art and Design problems. As all top-shelf students of my website know, I am into all things Bauhaus, especially the peculiar Midwest institution known as the New Bauhaus.

When I heard that a shelf of Niedringhaus books were coming onto the market, I did exactly what I had to do: I bought them. The 45-book lot arrived in Austin and I had a blast extracting the long-forgotten ephemera and examining inscriptions from fellow travellers Sigfried Giedion, Harry Bertoia, James Prestini and Moholy himself. Collating these books was as much fun as I can possibly have with all my clothes on. As a recovering graphic designer, I believe it better to sell a product than a service. But my mercantile lifestyle tends to jade me. The shock of the new quickly wore off, and I rolled up my sleeves and started my due diligence, researching the man and the shadow he cast through his books.

I discovered Niedringhaus' student work was well-represented in VISION IN MOTION, with multiple b/w reproductions of molded plywood furniture formed by a machine co-developed with Nathan Lerner. This furniture was infinitely more useful than the prototype machine dubbed the “Smell-O-Meter," featured in the slim Wittenborn edition of THE NEW VISION and ABSTRACT OF AN ARTIST. Anybody credited with the furniture design at the New Bauhaus was okay by me. I cross-referenced Niedringhaus (along with Bertoia) as a design research assistant to Herbert Matter on the production of the KNOLL INDEX OF DESIGNS in 1950. I was onto something.

Bouncing between books in the stacks and that Internet, I picked up his tracks long after Niedringhaus' skills in furniture design and production had come to the attention of Hans Knoll -- always on the lookout for designers to work for what was then Knoll Associates. Niedringhaus enjoyed a long and fruitful career with Knoll; earning a patent with Florence Knoll on July 21, 1953 for their design of a sofa/daybed on angular steel frame. Throughout his long career with Knoll, Niedringhaus often acted as an artistic liaison linking the inspired visions of designers such as Isamu Noguchi with Knoll's engineers, draughtsmen, and marketing departments. This confluence of art and business was fundamental to Knoll's identity and success. That same confluence of art and business first encountered as Moholy-Nagy's student in Chicago helped Charles Niedringhaus secure his rightful spot in the pantheon of American Modernism. And here I was, with a nice selection from his personal library, reading his history like a botanist examining the rings of a redwood tree. But as the most advanced form of hunter and gatherer -- the collector -- I wanted more.

Like every collector (except for possibly Merrill Berman), I thought my primary source material was somewhat ... lacking. I needed to know more about the hierarchy at 247 Ontario Street: who did what, where, when and why. Who was responsible for bringing the doughnuts? There were gaps that needed to be plugged, credit that needed attribution. After a certain point, there is only one avenue left to the Modern seeker -- eBay.

The auction listing titled 1941 Moholy-Nagy ~ School of Design BROCHURE, Bauhaus caught my attention -- an original enrollment form for the 1941 Summer classes in Chicago and Sommonauk, Illinois. Unlike old issues of National Geographic, this is not the kind of ephemera that has been actively preserved. It is rare. And very desirable to certain individuals. I did what I had to do: I bought it.

The Brochure arrived a week later. I tore open the priority envelope and examined the brochure. Let me pause here for a moment to remind you that I am a recovering Graphic Designer. I love examining old books, periodicals and ephemera and tracing my fingertips along the embossed ridges flanking hand-set lines of letterpressed type. I use a 10-X engravers loupe to marvel at crisply-cut halftone plates. In the right context, the production methodology is frequently as significant as the material being presented; you know that whole form and function thing. This was one of those times.

I was the less-than-proud owner of a Canon color copy of a 1941 School of Design Brochure. It was a damn good copy -- full-color on two sides of a glossy oversized sheet trimmed and hand-folded to resemble an original document. Anybody that has ever had their breath taken away by a printed item produced before World War II would not be fooled by the heavy blacks and the weird, off-kilter CMYK replication of spot color and 100% K type. Maybe I'm kidding myself. In terms of technical skill, this was not a bad knock-off; the premeditation literally dripped off the page. Maybe there's a graphic designer or production artist out there who has this wonderful original document and is actively counterfeiting it -- thinking that nobody will know the difference.

If you're out there and come across this post, I can only ask: Why Are You Doing This? I can understand the desire to duplicate $20 bills, food stamps, stock certificates, drivers licenses, etc. But if you took the time to counterfeit the Brochure for Two Summer Sessions of the School of Design in Chicago, ask yourself: don't you have something better to do than attacking our common Design heritage?

IT'S TIME TO SHOW SOME SPINE.

2007-09-06T07:19:00.001-07:00

As a passionate fan of modern design, I spend an unhealthy amount of time looking at slickly-produced object catalogues. As a bookseller who specializes in modern design, I confess to obsessively reading the spines of the stacked and shelved books that strategically litter most lifestyle catalog product shots. Eventually a pattern emerged.

I deducted with certainty that all of the prop and decorating perfessionals shop at the same bookstore. And that this particular bookstore never runs out of Hans Wingler's behemoth Bauhaus Slipcased Edition. This is sad for many reasons.

A high-end catalog like DWR retains so many stylists and aesthetes that Nothing is Left to Chance. That's why you can reliably find the Wingler Bauhaus (not yet used as a doorstop), a tasteful assortment of Photography monographs and a few Contemporary Travel Books (Judd, Marfa, et al) in whatever setting needs that extra layer of sophistication. Let's face it -- nothing says Modern quite like a stack of books on the floor. That's what I tell my wife, anyway.

After a DWR photography session is over, it wouldn't surprise me if all the prop books were returned to the shelves in some mid-level cubicle at Pentagram's San Francisco Office. The people at DWR are smart enough to let a creative type select appropriate signifying props for surrounding their furniture and ever-increasing amounts of housewares. I suspect it is easier to get somebody to volunteer selections from their library than it is to get somebody to agree not to bring potato salad to the Company Picnic. People who love books love showing off their books. A good, honest book collection is a mirror of the person who built the collection. The DWR people know all this - they know books speak volumes about where a person has been and where that person is going. I'm okay with that.

When I redesigned this website, I believed there were enough people like me out there who spent an unhealthy amount of time looking at the book spines in the latest DWR catalogs. Hence my Front Page -- form meets function: book spines could visually cue my audience to this websites' essence more efficiently than any Jive Flash presentation. I thought it was a Pentagram-worthy concept.

Like the faceless SF Pentagram team-member, I eagerly raided my booksheleves, volunteering my signifiers and projecting my modern sensibilities. It was just like making a sexy Mix Tape for my college Girlfriend. That girlfried is now my wife and together we had a blast combing our shelves for some books to attract the attention of all those restless, spine studiers out there. You may not care for my website, but you have to agree: my bookshelves are cooler than the ones DWR use.

And we do have a copy of the Wingler book.