RAY NASH AND THE GRAPHIC ARTS WORKSHOP AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

Ray Nash in the Graphic Arts Workshop, Hopkins Center, June 1970.

Contents

Foreword
DAVID T. MCLAUGHLIN

Introduction
RODERICK STINEHOUR

A Master of So Many Skills and Arts
CHARLES G. BOLTÉ

Whistling, Washing, and Other Aspects of Printing as an Art
THOMSON H. LITTLEFIELD

As a Practitioner and an Historian of His Art
ALVIN EISENMAN

Brief Recollections and Tributes I

Chosen Places
SINCLAIR H. HITCHINGS

His Own Agenda
DAVID R. GODINE

Brief Recollections and Tributes II

Post-Dartmouth Graphic Arts Workshop
JOHN R. NASH

The Long Making
STEPHEN HARVARD

Biographical Chronology of Ray Nash

Published Writings of Ray Nash

Education in a Workshop
RAY NASH

Foreword

“HE IS GREAT,” Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, “who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.”

The contents of this volume attest to the fact that, as gauged by those Emersonian standards, Ray Nash was indisputably possessed of greatness. He was uniquely individualistic, in kind and in manner, and he was certainly “from nature” a master teacher—a mentor who had both a deep impact and a lasting influence on the lives of his students (not merely upon their learning experience within the classroom, but upon their lives) throughout the period of more than thirty years during which he was actively and vitally a member of Dartmouth College’s teaching faculty.

Even within an institution that prides itself on the quality, quite generally, of its teachers, Ray Nash was of special caliber: a man who in truly extraordinary ways, as well as to a truly extraordinary degree, not only instructed, but also importantly stimulated and inspired, those who came under his tutelage or guidance.

I am very pleased to have been invited to join in the projection of this book of memorial tribute. The privilege affords me an opportunity, which I welcome warmly, of acknowledging anew both indebtedness and appreciation centering upon Ray Nash’s long-time, devoted, varied service to the College. But most particularly I value this chance of expressing once again Dartmouth’s unending gratitude for Professor Nash’s achievements as the incomparably splendid teacher that he was.

DAVID T. MCLAUGHLIN

President of the College

Introduction

THIS BOOK has come into being as, in a sense, an extension of a memorial exhibition held in Dartmouth’s Baker Library during the autumn of 1984, an exhibit that paid tribute to Ray Nash by focusing on examples of work done by students, over the years, in his Graphic Arts Workshop. It was a major show that occupied the display cases of the Library’s main hall and those of its Treasure Room corridor, as well. Sinclair Hitchings, Class of 1954, selected the materials featured on that occasion, specimens drawn from the extensive files Professor Nash had maintained of proofs and sample copies representing student projects, from the Workshop’s earliest days onward. To mark the show’s opening, a reception was held in the Library, and many “Nash alumni” were among those in attendance. Mrs. Nash was present as guest of honor.

THE BEGINNINGS of Ray Nash’s long and fruitful association with Dartmouth were documented by College Librarian Nathaniel L. Goodrich in the May 1936 number of Baker Library’s Bulletin. “Mr. Ray Nash of South Royalton, Vermont, craftsman printer, has,” he wrote, “set up his hand press in BAKER. During the winter he has come over several days a week to instruct students and others in the fundamentals of printing as an art. Most generous with his time and advice, he has been of service in many ways. It is expected that next year, under his direction, students will print one or more booklets which will do credit to the rather unsubstantial entity which we have been calling, ambitiously, ‘The Baker Library Press.’”

Those informal visits during the winter of 1935–36, “to instruct students and others in the fundamentals of printing as an art,” led to the College’s making, in February 1937, a formal appointment of the “craftsman printer” from South Royalton as a part-time Lecturer in Art, with a teaching relationship to a second-semester curricular offering, “The Art of the Book,” that had for more than a decade and a half been conducted in the Department of Art and Archæology by Harold Goddard Rugg, Dartmouth’s Assistant Librarian.

By the 1940–41 academic year, the College catalogue featured the following description as relating to extra-curricular opportunities available in Art: “Students interested in typography, woodcut, lithography, drypoint, lettering, etc., may investigate these techniques and their materials through practice in the Graphic Arts Workshop under the direction of Ray Nash. The workshop, in No. 23 Baker, is equipped with tools, types, and presses, enabling students to explore the various mediums of printed design in black and white. Members of the workshop are encouraged to form and carry out individual projects. . . .”

Thus the achievement celebrated in this volume began.

IN 1946–47, following the end of World War II, with the College resuming peace-time operation once more (and with Mr. Rugg no longer involved in the classroom instruction), two courses by Ray Nash, rather than merely one, became available for election: “Graphic Arts: Art of the Book,” offered in the first semester each year, and “Graphic Arts: Prints and Printing,” in the second semester. During the quarter-century that followed, the essential subject matter of these courses changed but slightly, although in 1958–59 the title of the former became “Book Design and Illustration.”

Ray Nash knew, beginning very early in his years of teaching, just how he should proceed with instruction in the graphic arts, and he carefully followed that plan, with few modifications, thereafter. In the first number (June 1940) of Print: A Quarterly Journal of the Graphic Arts, he outlined his “suggestive framework” for the “lecture and reading course” he favored for educating undergraduates in the book arts, and the full text of that article is reprinted at the close of the present volume.

However, it was the Graphic Arts Workshop that was always the core element—the heartland—of Ray Nash’s teaching. His classes of instruction and discussion, supplemental to and also coordinated with Workshop activity, were always significant and vital to his program. (They were held on the upper floor of the Library, in what came to be his seminar room, with his office located next door in a smaller room.) And of course reading done outside of class, in the extensive literature of the graphic arts, was very important also. Nonetheless, it was the Workshop that was ever the vital center—where mind and hand were joined in careful effort, where theory could become practice, where both understanding and competence were developed. It was here that Professor Nash not merely presided, here he reigned—typically in an informal, seemingly casual manner, sometimes even in a somewhat distracted fashion, but here, indeed, he did reign. Here he was “the Master.”

When Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center was completed, in 1962, the Graphic Arts Workshop was moved from its long-time home in Baker to grander and more spacious quarters, across the College Green, in the new arts center. There it continued to function, on much the same basis (although his office and seminar room were kept, as before, in Baker), until the Professor’s retirement in 1970. But even then the Workshop did not end. Much of its type and most of its presses were at that point transferred to the Nash family’s Broadbrook Mountain Farm in Royalton, where for some seven seasons more the Workshop’s program was carried on during summer intervals.

THIS BOOK is in no sense a biography of Ray Nash. No attempt is made herein to chronicle comprehensively the events of his life or to reflect all of the many facets of the man and his career. His childhood and college years in Oregon, his early activity in journalism and business, and even his period of teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City are completely outside the scope of this volume. Herein the beginning date is 1937, the year of his appointment to the Dartmouth faculty—after Ray and Hope had, in 1932, bought their Vermont farm and, subsequently, abandoned urban life, to settle contentedly onto their chosen homeplace. This book relates to Ray Nash as teacher and mentor, without any particular focus upon the many other things that he was—among them: scholar, writer, editor, designer, publisher, committeeman, clubman, and farmer. Happily, however, the resources for a telling of the full story are available, now safely preserved at Dartmouth, thanks to the Nash family’s gift to the College in 1986 of the Professor’s personal archives and his book collections. The closest we come here to a general or broad-scale reflection of the man and his achievements is the inclusion of a biographical chronology, plus a listing of his published writings—both of which are selective in their coverage and treat only of the “Dartmouth years,” commencing in 1937 and continuing onward to the close of Ray Nash’s life.

The illustrations that have been chosen fall into two categories: reproductions, mostly scaled down in size, of a cross section of the student work included in the 1984 exhibition at Baker Library, and photographs, mainly from the College Archives, taken of Ray Nash during his Dartmouth period. To some, the representation of work done by undergraduates may be somewhat puzzling. At least at first, it may seem amateurish and inconsequential in nature. But I believe that a reading of the reminiscences that follow, as well as what Ray Nash himself imparts in “Education in a Workshop” regarding his teaching techniques and goals [pages 101–109], will allay or alleviate doubts as to its true significance. As Stephen Harvard, Class of 1970, recently observed, in assessing Ray Nash’s impact: “Nash taught by choice at a liberal-arts college, not at an art school. It would be surprising if an art-school teacher couldn’t show a gallery full of highly polished work. His students were, after all, chosen for their demonstrated talent. But with Ray Nash, at Dartmouth, the challenge was: What could a teacher do with a group of generalists—a group selected for inquiring natures, but having no particular predilection for the arts? What a teacher could and did make of such students, that is the measure of the man indeed.”

LOOKING BACK, I myself feel deep gratitude for having been accepted into the Ray Nash circle. The course of my life was thereby altered. Moreover, Ray continues to be a vital part of my direction. In me Ray Nash found a student eager to be instructed in the fundamentals of printing as an art. In him I found a teacher who, through printing, pointed me toward a rewarding way of life.

RODERICK STINEHOUR

Class of 1950

RAY NASH AND THE GRAPHIC ARTS WORKSHOP AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

A Master of So Many Skills and Arts

by CHARLES G. BOLTÉ ’41

Editor, The American Oxonian

RAY AND HOPE came to Hanover the same year as my class, and I was pleased nearly four decades later to move his adoption as an honorary member of the Class of ’41. It seemed a small recognition of what he had done for Dartmouth, and of what he had meant to me.

I discovered the Graphic Arts Workshop one day that year, 1937, when walking through the tunnel between Sanborn and Baker; bursting with diffident freshman curiosity, and an interest in printing from my high-school-newspaper days, I peeked in. The inhabitant, walrus-mustached and grave, beckoned me further. Conversation began, and lasted for forty-five years. Work began too: hand-setting type, pulling proof, studying prints and drawings and books, sitting in seminars on bibliography and the art of the book, submitting prose for improvement, learning about college politics (of which he was also a master: as Noel Perrin put it in his perceptive in memoriam for the Century Association Yearbook, “He enjoyed causing things to happen.”). He became one of my two permanent Dartmouth teachers. (The other was Sidney Cox, of the English Department. They had a wary respect for each other, linked by their devotion to Robert Frost, competitors in their rivalry for his attentions.)

Ray and Hope befriended me; then, when I went to war, the girl I married; and, then, our kids. We are frequent visitors at South Main Street and Broadbrook Mountain, and attended Grig’s and Holly’s weddings; Hope and Ray made the hard drive from Vermont to Maine for our daughter’s wedding. In undergraduate days I felt lucky to be at South Main with Henry Beston and Lewis Mumford; after graduation we spent a dizzying weekend at the farm with Robert Frost (a nice example of Ray’s way of “causing things to happen”: he somehow saw to it that I wrote an article for the Alumni Magazine on Frost’s return to Dartmouth, a triumphal event which Ray probably managed). One summer when they went abroad they turned over the farm to Mary and me for a month (the card bearing the names of our visitors still hangs inside the coat-closet door, including that of Harold Laski, who took such a long bath the spring ran dry).

Like a careful graphic artist, he was strict about rules, and guarded his dignity. When I got home from the war, I wrote him, “Dear Ray: Away with formality.” He replied, “Dear leftenant: Yes, away with formality, but preserve good form.” It wasn’t until several visits later that he said, “You may call me by my first name, if you like.” He could be prickly. Sometimes in exasperation I thought of the remark by one of Thoreau’s friends, which Emerson quotes: “I love Henry, but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.” Ray always kept that reserve.

When I became Editor of The American Oxonian, I asked Ray to letter a new title. He said his hand had grown (1977) too shaky, and suggested his son, John; a five dollar fee would be adequate. J.R. did a handsome job, and I sent him twenty-five dollars.

A group of Ray’s students celebrated his fiftieth birthday (1955) with a dinner (“in the abstemious manner traditional to both the College and the Art”) at the Grolier Club in New York. My contribution to the keepsake, printed by different hands, I titled “Octet for a Printer.” [See illustration on facing page.] Thirty years later, that still stands for the man—except for my styling him, in the title, simply “Printer,” which is surely too limiting for a master of so many skills and arts.

Ken Nevins ’41   8 × 5-3/8

Charles Bolté ’41   4-1/2 × 3-3/4

Charles Bolté ’41   1-7/16 × 1-3/16

Stanley Rice ’45   5-1/2 × 8-1/2

Stanley Rice ’45   3-1/2 × 7-1/2

Stanley Rice ’45   1-3/4 × 1-3/4

Stanley Rice ’45   2-3/4 × 1-3/8

Stanley Rice ’45   4-1/8 × 5-1/8

Stanley Rice ’45   3-1/16 × 2-1/2

Stanley Rice ’45   2-3/4 × 1-3/8

Whistling, Washing, and Other Aspects of Printing as an Art

by THOMSON H. LITTLEFIELD ’41

Professor of English, Emeritus, State University of New York at Albany

“WHISTLING,” he said, “does not agree with me. Printers do not whistle. There will be no whistling in the shop.” He was standing across the table from where I was working at locking up a forme.

“Yes, sir,” I said, “I’ll try to stop.”

“Just don’t whistle,” he said, and walked off, swaying just a little as he carried his weight soberly back to his work.

I went ahead with what I was doing, drew a proof, and as I studied it I realized that my lips had puckered and that breath was passing through them—I hoped soundlessly. My eyes came up. He was glaring. But he turned back to his work, and I to mine. I tried hard to keep my mind on not whistling.

It was October of 1938. I had been brought into the Graphic Arts Workshop and introduced to Mr. Nash by Chuck Bolté, who had started there the year before, when he and I were freshmen. Chuck had made a letterhead, which I very much admired, with his address in Russell Sage Hall. He was now making a new letterhead to go with his new address at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, where he occupied a cell in the basement, which was accorded him in consideration of his nightly labors at waxing and polishing floors.

When I was presented, in the little room off the corridor between Baker and Sanborn House, Mr. Nash was sitting at his desk, by the door. He regarded me, appraisingly, for what seemed an unconscionably long time. Then, before he spoke, he smiled, briefly.

“Yes,” he said. “We welcome apprentices who are sober and industrious.”

He awaited my response. Chuck, always deft at filling gaps, remarked that though I was no longer quite a teetotaler, I could keep a straight face when I had to.

“Ha,” said Mr. Nash.

“I am a great booklover,” I stated. “I have a friend at home whose father is a very well-known typographer.” I mentioned his name.

“Ha,” said Mr. Nash. This time the smile flicked across his face so fast that it might never have happened.

I went on to express my admiration of Chuck’s letterhead and to say that I should like to print one for myself. I, too, had just moved to a new address, at 24 Occom Ridge. I mentioned a typeface that I thought might be suitable.

“Ha,” said Mr. Nash.

Chuck said that he would be glad to show me around the Workshop and acquaint me with the equipment.

“That won’t be necessary,” said Mr. Nash.

He worked himself to his feet and led the way to the Pearl kicker press and from there around the shop, explaining the uses of things as we went along. Chuck excused himself, fairly early in the tour, saying he had to be at the hospital for dinner. Mr. Nash gave him a hard look.

“Bolté, are you thinking of taking this man on as your apprentice?”

“I’ll take a chance on him,” Chuck said.

I said, “Chuck’s known for his courage.”

“Ha,” said Mr. Nash.

I learned to work, and learned to work silently. The silence was seldom broken, in those early weeks. The sounds of type coming together in the stick and of a press in operation do not break the serious silence. For the most part, Mr. Nash and I shared the shop alone during the hours when I worked. The silence would be mitigated only when he strolled over to see what I was doing, said “Hmm,” or made succinct suggestions. At the end of my first day of presswork he spoke more, all in one piece, than he had spoken to me hitherto during our association—if that is the word.

“When we finish at the press,” he said, casting an eye over the type I had just been using, “we wash.” He pronounced the word in a way that made it seem qualitatively different from any washing I had ever attempted. (It was as if “wash” had an “o” in it, and an “i” and an “r”.) There was something sacerdotal about it. (I understand that in the Roman rite the celebrant’s washing of his hands after the offertory is known as “lavabo,” but not pronounced in English the way the French say their word for a washbowl.) I learned to wash with care and reverence.

A year or so ago, I was invited to visit the printing equipment in the basement of the Art Department at the university where I have been employed, and to inspect work that students had done on it. I knew at once what was wrong. They believed the trouble was that the type they were using was worn. I knew differently. They had never heard “wash” pronounced right, nor had they learned that in the “Black Art” cleanliness is at least equal to godliness.

Silence and cleanliness. These were the lessons of my first year. The next fall an apprentice was assigned to work with me: Alvin Eisenman. By then Mr. Nash had got used to me enough so that he would leave Alvin and me to close up the shop after he had gone for the night. As the Master went out he would turn to us, show his teeth, and say, “Courage, mes enfants, le diable est mort.” (Alvin pretended that the words somehow applied to him, as the new printer’s devil. I hardly thought so.) When silence and washing are observed, the devil is defeated.

A few years later, when I was in uniform, Mr. Nash broadened the application. He finished one of his letters with a note of hope for the end of the war: “Courage, mon enfant, le diable est sera mort.” To be still, and to wash.

In fact, it all had to do with the sullying tunelessness of my whistle. Once it had been established that I could keep quiet, and that I would clean the type before distributing it, Mr. Nash permitted himself—not, certainly, to whistle—but to hum, and to sing a measure or two. Song did not compromise the right sobriety of the printer’s art. Like washing, it rather spread the silence.

M. W. Cornwell and R. D. O’Neil   15 × 8-1/4

Alexander Hoffman ’50   11-1/4 × 9

Edward Lathem ’51   7-3/8 × 5

Edward Lathem ’51   5 × 6-1/2

Alvin Eisenman ’43   10-1/4 × 6-1/8

As a Practitioner and an Historian of His Art

by ALVIN EISENMAN ’43

Street Professor of Painting and Design and Director of Graduate Studies in Graphic Design, Yale University

THE MOST remarkable thing about Ray Nash’s classes was the relationship he maintained between the practice and the history of art. Those two have had an unsettled relationship in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

When the 20th Century opened, the Beaux-Arts concept dominated formal art education everywhere. People who worked in that tradition studied the great monuments in minute detail, during their student years, in order to replicate them later as practitioners. Some very good work was done by Beaux-Arts designers, but a lot of it was frivolous and superficial, and the Beaux-Arts era ended abruptly during the Depression years, when the Modernist revolution swept the world. Art history was abolished from the design curriculum, and students and practitioners were required to base their studies and their work entirely on function, technology, and geometry.

That aspect of Modernism has long since been discredited, but when Ray Nash began teaching at Dartmouth, in 1937, it had just arrived in the United States and had immediately become the religion of the oncoming generation of architects and designers of all kinds. (Moholy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago, and Gropius took over the Harvard School of Design in that same year of 1937.)

Two years later, when I began work in Ray Nash’s Workshop as a brand new freshman, I had never heard of either the Bauhaus or the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but I found out about them right away from Nash and the students. My classmates in the Workshop, and particularly the upperclassmen, were passionate converts, ready to load Beaux-Arts adherents into the tumbrels, without even a hearing. Nash’s own position was much more complex.

It seems to me he was a functionalist by nature; and he was certainly interested in geometry—the favorite type in the Workshop in those years was Futura. And he loved to take pokes at Beaux-Arts excesses (the neo-Gothic architecture at Yale was his favorite whipping boy; he also liked to make fun of some of the more eclectic work of T. M. Cleland, Bruce Rogers, and Porter Garnett). In this sense he was a Modernist. But, on the other hand, he had a passionate belief in the value of art history in the education of artists. He believed it belonged in the center—not to serve as a model for imitation, in the Beaux-Arts manner, but rather as a means of putting the current generation of artists in touch with the great artists of the past and, particularly, with their design principles.

An example of how this worked in his classes was a study I made of legibility. That study began with an article which Adelbert Ames of the Dartmouth Eye Institute had called to my attention, a study by a perceptual psychologist and published in one of the learned journals. The conclusion of the study was that lines of type with thirty to forty characters were inherently more readable than lines of sixty or seventy characters. I tested this thesis against some extremely tedious reading I was doing for a required course in economics, and it seemed to me absolutely correct. I was sure short lines eased the torment.

When I mentioned this to Nash, he told me I was onto an interesting idea and that I should test it against the books he was about to show us in a survey of the history of the book. In those days his classes met once a week in the Treasure Room of Baker Library to look at books and prints. Unfortunately, most of the books in the first few weeks turned out to be in Latin, and although I was studying Latin, it was Classical Latin, and these were in Medieval Latin. After a little thought, he hit on the idea that since many of the books (and the forty-two-line Bible in particular) were designed for the lectern, I could try reading them aloud; he pointed out that lectors didn’t need to know what they were reading, anyway, and that this had the advantage of separating my interest or lack of interest in the text from the question of the legibility of the type.

So, Harold Rugg, the Treasure Room librarian, let me use a closed alcove, with a lectern, and I spent several afternoons reading books aloud—ranging from facsimiles of Codex Amiatinus and the Book of Kells to the Kelmscott Chaucer and the Oxford Lectern Bible. Rugg helped me get started by showing me how to read scribal abbreviations and how to recognize the Latin names of biblical characters. The most important lesson I learned from that exercise was that almost all books designed for reading aloud did in fact have very short lines and that their designers, working a thousand or more years apart, had apparently all hit on the same principle as the psychologist.

In the process of doing this reading, obviously, I learned a lot more about these books than I could ever have learned by merely observing the shape of the type or the arrangement of the pages. An incidental discovery was that the Kelmscott Chaucer, for all its overworked ornament, turned out to be remarkably comfortable to read, once I caught the hang of Middle English—something I would never have suspected from a casual look at the pages; and in the end I read it all the way through (though not aloud) for the pleasure of the reading.

This sort of exercise was typical of Nash’s functional approach to history. He asked students to search for design principles. In that sense he was clearly a functionalist—and, incidentally, a very wily teacher who knew how to put to good use the passing enthusiasm of a lazy student!

Very early on I told him that I intended to be a book designer. Like many other graphic arts students then and now, I had gotten that idea from an experience designing grade-school and high-school yearbooks. In those years Nash was responsible for the design and production of the books of Dartmouth College Publications, and one day he handed me a thick pile of typing paper tied up with string. “You want to be a book designer,” he said. “Here’s what a book looks like before it’s printed. See if you can design it.” It turned out to be about a hundred large statistical tables, joined together by small patches of dense prose—even harder to read than Medieval Latin. I did my best to make sense of it, for a week, without any luck at all. So, I took it back to him in dismay and told him I was reconsidering my career plan.

He explained that communication between scholars is almost always conducted in a special language or code, and that I could probably get a handle on it fairly easily by looking up the books in the bibliography at the end of the manuscript. This took me to a place in Baker where medical books and journals were kept. There I discovered that the code included not only the way the text was written, but also the typographical arrangement of the tables, the footnotes, and the bibliography. At first they all looked alike, but then I began to see that some of them were much better done than others.

My perception of that small distinction was really the beginning of my career as a designer of scholarly books. Two thousand books later, I’m still amazed at the simplicity of the lesson that brought me so early to that all-important percept, which again I would call an example of Nash’s kind of functionalism.

An example of another kind was my experience with the design of a symbol to replace the Dartmouth Indian. Ernest Martin Hopkins was occasionally in the Workshop, going over galley proofs. Noticing a woodcut of an Indian that one of the students was working on, President Hopkins mentioned to Nash that there were Indian alumni who were very unhappy with the idea of that symbol, as a representation of Dartmouth.

Our class was studying woodcuts then, and somehow we got the idea of trying to design some new emblems for the College, as an informal competition. This began a very extensive study of woodcut emblems. Of the ones the class did, I remember the Baker Library tower, Dartmouth Hall, a portrait of Wheelock, a peace pipe, a rum keg, and the Lone Pine. Mine, which was the Lone Pine, got picked in the end, but the execution seemed so bad (even to me) that somebody else was commissioned to make a better version. To my eye it was, finally, very beautiful and really a perfect symbol for Dartmouth. But it was never used. When I asked Ray Nash afterwards what had happened, he said he figured it had been a hopeless project from the start: “It was a very useful exercise. But, really, nobody has the power to change a symbol once it’s established. History tells you that—not a Roman emperor, not a Benjamin Franklin, not even a beloved college president, can do it.”

That was another of Nash’s functional lessons from history. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t learn it that first time; but now, having played Don Quixote in the symbol business many times, and having finally looked up those obscure references of Nash’s to Franklin and the Roman emperor, I finally understand.

One thing that distinguished Nash’s courses from art education in general is that he was active both as a practitioner and an historian of his art. I have the impression that it was President Hopkins who brought Nash to the College. If that’s true, it’s a special irony that the establishment of the Center named in Hopkins’ honor finally drove the wedge that separated the history and practice of art at Dartmouth. But there was another thing that distinguished his courses: they crossed the boundary between art and writing. This was demonstrated in my own case when Stearns Morse, of the English Department, joined Nash in supervising my work as an art major.

As technology continues to change and some of the specialized tools of the old Graphic Arts Workshop begin to appear in every student’s room at Dartmouth, it may occur to somebody in the College, whether it’s in English or art, that there are important visual principles one needs to know in order to work successfully with type and images. And perhaps someday soon the pioneer courses that were abandoned when Nash retired will be revived at the place of their origin.

?   5-1/4 × 3-5/8

Alvin Eisenman ’43   5-3/4 × 3-7/8

Roderick Stinehour ’50   4-5/8 × 3-1/2

Roderick Stinehour ’50   9-1/2 × 6-1/8

Roderick Stinehour ’50   4-3/4 × 3-1/2

Brief Recollections and Tributes

I

. . . I WAS NEVER a formal student in the Ray Nash Graphic Arts Workshop. I had graduated in 1933, before Ray came to Hanover, but I was back working in the Art Department from 1935 to 1938.

I still don’t know how I managed it, but I learned a lot from Ray. I couldn’t put in as much time as I wanted to in his lithography and letterpress projects, but I did spend a lot of time grinding those awkward litho stones, and I did listen when, now and then, he got around to saying something.

Mostly, though, his insistence on doing a job his way made me pay attention to ideas I never thought of before, and his example was a guide that I am still using. . . .

I remember one of my first meetings with Ray Nash, when he asked me whether I knew the difference between Futura and Bodoni. I thought that was a silly question, because what I wanted to do was print etchings like Zorns and lithographs that would turn out to be Daumiers. But I hung around, watching him work with sureness and great care—and realizing, finally, what he was telling me: that Futura came out of Germany and Bodoni out of France and that they both had the beauty of humanity.

Ray accepted my ignorance, allowing me to work and find out for myself. . . . He had me looking at type and paper and printing, for the beauty that was in them. So, for more than fifty years I have been enjoying this beauty. . . .

—GOBIN STAIR ’33

.   .   .

. . . AS YOU may not know, I got to know Ray by working as a paid hand in his Workshop, and I did not take his course. Although printing had been a boyhood hobby, I was thinking of civil engineering at that time, and I must shamefully admit that I was there mostly for the money. Despite my mercenary attitude, Ray did have an enormous influence upon my later career.

After World War II, engineering jobs were scarce, so I started a commercial-printing business in Derby, Connecticut, and continued to run it until my recent retirement, when the business was sold. I never sought or remotely approached the distinction of Stinehour Press, but we always tried to use type wisely in our work. It was Ray’s friendly pressure which taught me that his few cases of Caslon were more than enough to produce tasteful work. . . .

—BENJAMIN H. BACON ’40

.   .   .

. . . HE WAS a great teacher, in the best tradition of Dartmouth, and a notable figure in his profession. He achieved what would ordinarily be considered a most difficult feat, making a skilled craft, printing, integral with liberal education. Obviously, he was training no one to be a job printer. Rather, he sought to cultivate our tastes in the graphic arts, to give us a minimal experience in letterpress printing, and to lead us to think of graphical exposition as part of the process of dissemination of knowledge in society.

In all this, he was remarkably successful. His teaching method was a modified Socratic process that really did cultivate enquiry. I doubt I ever looked at a printed work uncritically thereafter. At least two interests in life, the lithographer and painter Honoré Daumier and the wood engraver Thomas Bewick, stem directly from Nash’s instruction. . . .

Although my fellow students at Dartmouth generally thought my choice of that course a rather odd one for a man who was mainly interested in gaining admission to a decent graduate school in economics, the instruction proved professionally very valuable.

Even though Nash, above all men, was not attempting to provide vocational instruction, I have dealt with publishers on technical matters far more intelligently than I could possibly have done without his training. (I have written ten books; the publisher of six of them, the late Morgan North, once complimented me on dealing with the typographical problems intelligently. I took some pride in that, for I knew he was really complimenting Ray Nash.)

?   4-3/4 × 3-7/8

?   5-1/2 × 3-1/4

?   6-1/8 × 2-13/16

William Wiles ’50   5-1/4 × 4

Joseph Donovan ’55   5-1/2 × 7-1/4

Mark Lansburgh ’49   7-3/4 × 5-1/2

After I had been teaching for about a decade, my parents asked me if I were glad I had gotten my A.B. at Dartmouth. I answered affirmatively, on three grounds. Two were purely professional: I had chosen economics, and Dartmouth had given me a postgraduate fellowship that had paid about two-thirds of my tuition for my course work at the University of Chicago.

The third reason was my exposure to Ray Nash. I told them that I wouldn’t have wanted to miss that.

The conversation occurred some twenty-five years ago, but it is surely a judgment I would not change. . . .

—GEORGE W. HILTON ’46

.   .   .

. . . I REQUESTED admission to Ray’s Graphic Arts Workshop in January 1947, just prior to the beginning of my final semester in Hanover, and I did it with some concern that my purpose might not meet his qualification standards. During the Christmas 1946 holiday break I had secured a job as a paper-merchant sales trainee, a job in Philadelphia that was to start in early July 1947, following graduation. I told Professor Nash that I didn’t aspire to become a graphic designer, typographer, or printer, but I did want to learn as much about the graphic arts, especially about printing paper, as might be possible in a few months. He accepted that and invited me to join.

. . . It soon became apparent to me that Ray Nash was an uncommonly gifted teacher; no force-feeder, to be sure, but a man who shared his enthusiasms and gave us the freedom to form our own. I’d never ventured into the arts before, but I should have known that graphic art, like any art, is a discipline so wedded to instinctive taste and craftsmanship that the cram approach can’t work. Ray just opened the door, invited us in, allowed us to explore and experiment, made suggestions, demonstrated techniques, and exposed us to the historical classics and the first-rate in contemporary design and printing. . . .

Two weeks into the course I asked when he might talk about paper. His eyes twinkled and the half-smile formed. He asked when I might be prepared to discuss the subject with the class. He’d allow me a two-hour session. When I timidly responded that I knew nothing about paper, he suggested that there was a pretty good library just upstairs, and he cited one resource title, Dard Hunter’s Papermaking.

Hunter was fascinating; I studied through its six-hundred-plus pages in a week of afternoons. Other books in Baker’s stacks added to Hunter, and to learn more about modern papermaking some written requests brought a lot of material.

Four or five weeks after our first conversation, I made the class presentation in two sessions, for a total of three hours. I don’t know how much the class learned, but the Ray Nash method certainly gave me a good basic start, and I enjoyed it.

I suspect that Ray’s do-it-yourself-guided-tour approach gave most of those fortunate enough to belong to the Workshop a similar sense of joyful awareness and accomplishment. So far as I’m concerned, it isn’t finished yet.

—JOSEPH M. FLOUNDERS ’47

.   .   .

MY FIRST memories are of Ray Nash’s strong medium build and red hair, his gifts as a storyteller, and the informal way that he was able to transmit his love of the graphic arts to us, his students. He did not lecture too much, despite his own great knowledge, yet he was always there to help us discover, and to lead us to the proper sources and let us do the digging.

The formal learning was only a part, for down in the basement of Baker Library we were able actually to set type, cut wood blocks, engrave on metal plates, and even “bite” a copper plate in acid. Making my first etching added a depth of understanding for me when, thereafter, I looked at a Dürer or Rembrandt print.

I especially remember Ray’s sense of humor, his short deep-throated laugh, and the sparkle in his blue eyes, as he let us know what great pleasure our first graphic arts creations gave him.

—PETER MICHAEL GISH ’49

Volney Croswell ’44   1-5/8 × 3

Volney Croswell ’44   3-1/4 × 1-3/8

Volney Croswell ’44   3-1/8 × 1-5/8

Donald Russell ’50   5-1/8 × 3-3/8

Kenneth Roman ’52   12-1/2 × 5-1/2

I WAS enrolled in one of Ray’s graphic arts seminars in my junior year (1948), but specimens of my woodcuts and printing will definitely not be found in Ray’s files: I was interested but not talented in these areas. Ray’s influence on my life-style emerged much later.

After two years at Tuck School and several years employment as a corporate comptroller, Ray’s “gift” to me finally surfaced. In 1955 I acquired a small hand press, twenty cases of type (Bulmer was my favorite), and started to print. My library shelves soon sagged from the weight of private press books and books by and about Zapf, Goudy, Updike, Van Krimpen, Mardersteig, Rogers, etc., etc. I truly owe my thirty-year love affair with the “art of the book” to Ray Nash. That to me has to be his Immortality. . . .

—DONALD EINAR MOSE ’49

Chosen Places

by SINCLAIR H. HITCHINGS ’54

Keeper of Prints, Boston Public Library

RAY NASH chose his habitats with care. You saw him where it suited him to be. Mainly, there were three: the farm, the house, and the Library. The farm, six hundred acres of woods and fields on Broadbrook Mountain in Royalton, Vermont, slants downward toward the White River, but in the memories of his students the farm was what we found at the top of the long dirt road: the granite house and adjoining lawn and lilacs and garden; and, above all, the sense of space as we looked up to clouds sailing across the Vermont sky and looked out to range on range of distant mountains, their green softened to blue. At the farm, Hope and Ray Nash held their annual picnic for students. My dreams, aspirations, and energies found plenty of room, up there. I will always connect the farm with the future.

The house, on lower Main Street, at the foot of the hill, not far from Mink Brook in Hanover, New Hampshire, was old and comfortable and lived in, in a settled way. Like many others, I received invitations to walk down the hill, in late afternoon, and found myself drinking tea (from the Nashes, in fact, I learned to drink tea), gratefully savoring Mrs. Nash’s cookies, and sharing conversation. Present to give greetings, and later curled up near the hearth at these gatherings, was Tracer, one of the truest, most faithful beagle hounds ever to grace this earth.

The Library, Baker Library at Dartmouth College, like all else in Ray’s life, was the subject of strong convictions. Eventually, these convictions burned their way through to me, and made me understand that the Library was the seat and center of learning and the most important location in the College. Ray’s territory there consisted of his second-floor office and the adjoining seminar room in which he presented his lectures to ten or a dozen of us, around a table; and downstairs, the basement room which he had fitted out as the Graphic Arts Workshop. It possessed a high ceiling and windows at the tops of the walls on two sides, made possible by a basement story which reached above ground level; it housed Ray’s presses and his cases of type. There I stood at a slanting metal work-surface to practise calligraphy with broad-nibbed pen, and there I faced, at other times, a case of type. As I reached with my right hand to pick up the letters I needed to set a line in one of my poems, and fitted each letter into the metal stick I held in my left hand, and added quads to justify each line tightly to my chosen measure, I stood in close kinship to centuries of compositors. I was not much aware of them, then; it was all too immediate and absorbing.

Like many other students of Ray’s, I once paused beside his desk, near the door of the Workshop, and asked him to suggest readings for a paper he had assigned. I received what I later learned was the usual answer: “You’ll find a very good section on printing in the stacks upstairs.” Students were startled by this terse rejoinder; some accepted it in silence, some complained to each other about it. But there it was: the doctrine of do it yourself.

When I took the suggestion, and found my way, in Baker Library’s open stacks, to the books on printing, one book, in particular, held my attention: a type-specimen book issued in England by the Curwen Press, I believe in the Nineteen Thirties. How absorbingly attractive a book it was, and how wonderfully conducive to teaching an eager student the look of type faces. Of course, my paper was not on type faces, and the specimen book had nothing to do with my assignment, but it may have had something to do with Ray’s theory of self-education. I returned to the book again and again; I lingered over each page, and later turned back, and lingered some more.

Beyond the farm, the house, and the Library, there was the Press. It was not Ray Nash’s fortune ever to carry on a press, in the business or corporate sense of the word, but he helped set Roderick Stinehour on the road to being a scholarly printer, and could be said to have been present at the founding of The Stinehour Press. In Ray’s life, this became the Press, just as Baker long since had become the Library; and from it, with Rocky Stinehour’s unfailing aid and support, he drew some memorable imprints. The volumes of Printing & Graphic Arts, edited by Nash and printed and published by Stinehour, epitomize his intense commitment to the press as an instrument of learning.

A look at Ray Nash’s years at Dartmouth reveals stories which I hope someone will undertake to tell, farther down the road—stories which overlap the story of the Graphic Arts Workshop and his teaching. At one time or another, he found occasion to suggest (and often to bring about) the reform of innumerable letterheads, college business forms, catalogues, and other publications large and small. Through him the printing of the College at times had great distinction. He also acted on various occasions in the role of College publisher, as Director of Dartmouth Publications. An exhibition of books which Ray encouraged, edited, and saw through the press on behalf of the College would reveal still another of his services to the College—in the life of learning he intensely lived.

L. M. Ayres   10-1/2 × 6-7/8

?   3-3/4 × 5-1/4

McAlister   6-3/4 × 9-1/2

William Marden ’49   4-1/2 × 5

Peter Gish ’49   4 × 4-1/2

Robert Chase ’39   4 × 5

John Riggio ’52   5 × 4

Robert Evans ’60   7 × 5-1/2

His Own Agenda

by DAVID R. GODINE ’66

Publisher

TO his closest friends he may have been “Ray,” but to the rest of us he was always “Nash” or, to his face, “Professor Nash.” To call him “Ray,” he said, was to use his “handle,” and that was a prerogative accorded only a very few. I knew him for twenty years, slept in his house, ate at his table, played on his piano, and read in his library. But he was still, always, “Professor Nash.” If he liked you, he would stick with you with a devotion bordering on the fanatical. If he thought you fluff, there was nothing you could do to convince him otherwise.

The courses he taught at Dartmouth, on books and bookmaking, and prints and printmaking, were seminal and revolutionary. Of course, we didn’t realize this at the time, and if we had, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. But in Ivy League circles what he attempted in teaching art to undergraduates was radical and innovative—radical in taking students immediately to the historical and technical roots of the discipline; innovative in demanding that we look, evaluate, and judge. The exposure to the materials themselves was firsthand and hands-on with Nash. There they were, spread out on the table—engravings and etchings, woodcuts and wood engravings, lithographs and mezzotints, incunables and manuscripts. Nash would provide the lexigraphical framework, the historical nexus, the hagiologies of the anointed. We would sit and look. Nash’s primary objective (the objective of all the arts) was to make us see. He did so in subtle ways.

This was radical teaching—unique in its time, unknown in ours. It taught the mind, the eye, and the hand. Nash was not much interested in our aesthetic sensibilities; he wasn’t in the business of producing great artists, realizing, quite properly, that the real artists had already internalized their talents and would produce their own initiatives. He was training enthusiasts—enlightened amateurs who might, or might not, take his passions seriously. He believed, at least subconsciously, in Chesterton’s dictum that “Enthusiasts soon understand one another.” In practice, he adhered to William Morris’s observation that “Waiting for an inspiration, rushing things in reliance upon inspiration, and all the rest of it, are lazy man’s habits. Get the bones of the work well into your head, and the tools well into your hand, and get on with the job, and the inspiration will come to you—if you’re worth a tinker’s dam as an artist, that is.” Nash saw his job as attending to our heads and hands; the art would take care of itself.

Nash’s house of intellect was somewhat uncomfortably lodged within the Department of Art. This was always an uneasy alliance, as Nash never taught art per se, but only art as it pertained to books and prints. He was far more interested in process—how things were made and put together—than in aesthetics. The contents of the books never really interested him (as they fail to interest any serious collector); but when a book was printed, by whom, where, and how, were subjects of intense fascination. Books were not objects to be read (and who but a fool would want to read the Kelmscott Chaucer?); they are architectural and artistic manifestations of unique and discrete spirits. Prints even more so.

He not only taught “books,” but in insidious, devious—and, often, invisible—ways. He also converted many of us into book addicts. He would always leave booksellers’ catalogues strewn innocuously about. He might make casual mention of a particularly fine item that could be had for a pittance. He offered a prize for the student who could find and buy the most interesting print or book for under ten dollars. He loved to test our eyes with fakes and forgeries, or impressions that weren’t quite right. He opened our eyes to artists whose names were never mentioned in standard courses: Benham, Hirschvogel, and the Little Masters; Arrighi and da Carpi; Tory, Fournier and Baskerville; Bresdin and Meryon; Burne-Jones and Will Carter.

On the surface, he was a terrible teacher: his delivery was so torpid that we frequently found ourselves finishing the sentences for him, his pacing and cadences slow to the point of tedium. Looking back, he was right, for the sheer volume of knowledge he was trying to transfer onto the tabulae rasae of our minds was prodigious. He had to move slowly, measuring his words, picking his phrases, formulating his statements with punctilious deliberation. Art, he made us feel, was a serious business; it demanded judicious attention.

Let me try to explain what all this meant to me. First, it opened a door of possibility that I had never contemplated. According to the Nash gospel, one could be both an artist and a scholar. One might even be a businessman and a collector. Art was a part of life; not something you went to museums to see, but something that enlarged and enhanced your personal humanity. Art was immediate, and it was compelling. Second, life was a matter of making decisions, choices, distinctions. All art was not equally good or interesting or important. These were questions of knowledge and questions of seeing. His exams, extraordinary in their simplicity, were reflections of this approach. They were “open book.” They consisted of five objects placed on the table: What were they? Who made them? When? Out of what? For what purpose? In short, tell all you know about them and, by the way, don’t forget to mention whether or not you think they’re any good.

Nash probably learned this approach from Paul Sachs at the Fogg. Sachs taught graduate students, and his name for this process was “connoisseurship.” Nash taught “Pea-Green” undergraduates, most of whom knew nothing about art and had never had to make serious distinctions in their lives. Nash’s genius was that he could not only make the difference between a wood engraving and a woodcut matter to us, he could also make us see who cut wood well.

I was a Senior Fellow under, and certainly because of, Nash’s influence. (He had a certain authority with the powers at Dartmouth; God knows my academic record would not have inspired great confidence.) It was a year of genuine academic independence, absolution from the formality of course work and required classroom attendance—and, with that, the concomitant reaction of responsibility and obligation. It was, of course, a year that changed my life, a year of reading, of turning the pages of great books, of travel, of looking at prints and drawings. I felt, I still feel, a Herculean and unpayable debt to Nash, and to Dartmouth, for that experience, for their confidence and trust. Nothing inspires initiative so forcefully as the sense of unpaid debt.

I think everyone felt this way about Nash. We weren’t sure what was being done to us, but we were sure it was deliberate, benign, and permanent. Nash had his own agenda—in his household, in his scholarship, in his teaching, and in his life. We were all swept into it, made a part of it. We got from it in proportion to what we gave to it. For me, it was more than enough for one lifetime.

Brief Recollections and Tributes

II

. . . A FEW recollections:

1. Catching hell for tugging too hard at the hand-press handle, although no types were crushed.

2. Telling Ray that one issue of Flair, a 1948 slick magazine, “was worth two years of Colophons.” How’s that?

3. On completion of an Alumni Magazine ad on the Dartmouth Song Book, Ray said, “We did a pretty good job on that.” To which I replied, “Oh, did you help me?” At which time he took a mock cuff at me.

4. His comment that one more war could ruin the country, as “no one would remember how to work.”

5. His statement that “You have to learn to take orders from your inferiors.”

6. Walking with him from the Inn to Baker, he noted parked cars. The newest would evoke the comment “student”; the oldest, “faculty.”

I have much more—as I was rude, irreverent, obstinate, and an idiot. But I never remember a really cross word. He seemed to sense when young men had personal emotional problems, and really tried to help.

I asked Ray once what I could do at Rumford Press, and he replied, “They might let you sweep up.” And I thought in terms of the presidency! . . .

—ROBERT L. ALLCOTT ’50

.   .   .

OF ALL my teachers at any level, Ray Nash was the embodiment of the principle “if you really want to know and enjoy something, go dig it out for yourself.” He drove that idea home during my first laboratory session with him.

Ray spent the first hour introducing our bewildered class to all the infernal devices in the room, from California job cases and composing sticks to engraving tools, different kinds of paper, inks, the press, woodcuts, and so on until our minds spun. ONE HOUR. Then, he smiled gently beneath his mustachios, sat down at his desk, and began to work on some papers.

Jane Steedman   13 × 10-1/8

We had another hour to go. He said nothing further. We gazed at him, looked at each other. What the hell is this? So we wandered around, reviewing what he had showed us, asking dumb questions from time to time—which he answered briefly and returned to his work. My reaction was ANGER. I’m spending all this tuition for what? When is he going to begin teaching?

To shorten the narrative, I left the lab after twenty minutes without saying anything to him (not like me) and headed upstairs for the stacks. I found the graphic arts section absolutely loaded with some of the most fascinating volumes on the art and history of the art of reproduction—and left with an armful.

When I returned to the Workshop, Ray was just closing up and wanted to know where I had been. “To the stacks,” I said. “If you aren’t going to teach us, I’ll do the job myself.” (Pretty fresh!) “You know, Grinnell,” he said, “there might be a glimmer of hope for you yet!”

At the next lab, I selected my first project—setting some poems in type—and he was at my elbow whenever I asked for advice. I learned then that the road to success is usually as much fun as the success itself. . . .

—DAVID B. GRINNELL ’50

.   .   .

RAY NASH was both friend and teacher. He stimulated and expanded my interests and abilities, and was a strong influence in the setting of objectives for my career.

I first became aware of him and that unique creation of his, the Graphic Arts Workshop, while making my way one rainy afternoon from Sanborn to Baker, by way of that underground passageway which was then lined with portraits of Daniel Webster (of which the College appeared to have an inexhaustible supply). From my left, through an open door, came the heady aroma of printer’s ink.

I looked into a small, crowded room (filled with ancient-looking presses, cases of type, and sundry other printing equipment) and caught my first glimpse of a friendly looking man with a luxurious reddish mustache. His expression seemed to invite me in. Starting with that chance encounter, one thing led to another, and over the next few years some of my most rewarding hours were spent studying with Ray Nash and, in response to his stimulation, trying things out in the Workshop.

I wound up as Editor of the now-departed (if not lamented) Jackolantern, during my last year at Tuck, and I had a marvelous time with Ray, trying to improve its wildly erratic graphics, as well as its humor. I used to illustrate my own pieces with woodcuts, and Ray got me going on my most ambitious project: making a small book of a collection of these pieces. It was set in handsome twenty-four-point Centaur and printed damp on beautiful handmade English paper. To this day I can remember the pleasure of lifting each sheet from the press—the eye delighted at the sharp clear impression of type and wood on paper, the nostril delighted at the mixed aromas of damp paper and thick black ink.

I have made my career in book publishing and bookselling, and I think of Ray Nash every time I have an opportunity to try to make a book a bit more handsome, or to draw someone’s attention to the pleasures of good graphic design.

—ALEXANDER C. HOFFMAN ’50

.   .   .

. . . WHEN he was teaching me, of course I was unaware he was anything but Teacher Nash. Teachers, with rare exceptions, were not so much people, for me, as founts of whatever it was they were teaching. This confession, inevitably, makes clear one of my considerable flaws; and looking back I acknowledge an inner ache at having lost more than I shall ever know, because of this particular youthful attitudinal bent.

Thus, I then did not know—that is, understand—what it was exactly Ray Nash really did teach me. Though now I do. He taught me to see better. Not just graphic arts, but everything. To see details. To understand that things—all things, and people—are details.

Gobin Stair ’33   9-1/2 × 12-1/2

Robert Van Valzah ’50   4 × 3

Gerard Cracas ’56   5-1/4 × 3-3/4

Henry Wollman ’66   11 × 11

Henry Wollman ’66   11 × 11

Henry Wollman ’66   11 × 11

Henry Wollman ’66   11 × 11

John Talbott ’67   5-1/4 × 4-1/4 each

Recently I found a statement from the philosopher Hegel: “God is in the details.” I think Ray Nash knew this.

There was no way I could have guessed Ray Nash had implanted a time-release capsule which would ultimately release for me this wisdom. And I suppose it is a bittersweet reality that frequently gifts given us are understood too late to let the giver know fully, at the time, what a truly precious gift has been received—and how lastingly it will be appreciated.

So now: Thank you, Mr. Nash.

—SAM B. VITT ’50

.   .   .

WHENEVER I think of Ray Nash I remember three of his qualities that I have always prized highly:

Pleasure in craftsmanship

Love of Vermont

Generous warmth of friendship

—WILLIAM E. UPTEGROVE ’42

.   .   .

. . . WHEN I read Ray Nash’s obituary in The New York Times my thoughts went back to Dartmouth and to the courses I took with him. What a happy time that was. Of all the teachers I had, Ray was the one I felt closest to. . . .

I planned to go into advertising, and his courses gave me a head start. Because of his teaching, I began my career in the production department, instead of at the bottom of the ladder, in the mail room. . . .

I still have a wood block from one of my undergraduate projects, an original design of a joker, which I did as an illustration for “A Short History of the Playing Card.” I still cherish it today, and every time I look at it, I’m back in Ray’s Workshop. . . .

I had my first book published in the fall of 1983, and I’m now [1984] busy working on my second book, which I plan on dedicating to Ray Nash. . . .

—WILLIAM H. BRISTER ’56

.   .   .

. . . RAY NASH taught me an understanding and love of graphic arts and, gratuitously, put up with my lack of talent in the field. My experience with him and the other members of the Dartmouth Art Department have given me a love of fine arts which has been the cornerstone and the soul of my life.

Ray Nash was one of the most understanding, patient, and delightful people I have ever known.

—ROBERT S. TAFT ’56

.   .   .

MY RECOLLECTIONS of Professor Nash are those of a quietly enthusiastic man who relied on subtle prompting of those of us studying with him, to experiment and try new things. . . .

I had spent much of my growing-up years in sketching, life drawing, and watercolor painting, and I wished to broaden my exposure to the graphic art media. While in Ray’s course I produced an etching and a wood engraving. . . . I still have the prints and take pleasure in recalling the pleasant atmosphere of the class during which they were produced.

I did not go on in graphic arts, though I did plan a career in art direction with the advertising industry in New York. I ended up in a series of management roles and relegated my interest in art to an avocation. . . .

—CHARLES W. MASCHAL JR. ’57

.   .   .

WHILE I was a geology major at Dartmouth in the 1950’s, little was I aware that my exposure to Ray Nash would later have a profound impact on my life.

At that time I was certain that I would become a petroleum geologist, so sure in fact that I pursued graduate studies in micro-paleontology. I simply took two electives from Ray, graphic arts and typography, if memory serves me well. However, the courses and my mentor were fascinating enough to kindle further interest in the graphic arts.

Twenty-four years ago I started a “mom/pop” offset-printing shop in the Virgin Islands, which eventually grew to become a publicly held company, subsequently acquiring a daily newspaper. Eight years ago when I divested my interests and returned with my family to the Mainland, I continued to be in the newspaper business.

Dartmouth may have shaped my world view, but Ray Nash was directly responsible for directing my career destiny. Although I have never told him, I am indeed grateful that he touched my life. . . .

—WILLIAM H. MULDOON III ’57

.   .   .

. . . I WAS a student of Ray’s around 1959–60, and indeed I still possess the notebook I made when taking Ray’s course—Art 42—at that time. Such dedication!

I was not a particularly brilliant student, but I was very keen and quite enchanted with the printing processes which Ray so lovingly explained. I remember well the excitement of taking one’s first pull from a plate.

I have subsequently followed a career as an artist, both as a painter and etcher, and I am currently senior lecturer in printmaking at the National College of Art and Design, here in Dublin. I am also a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy, of which I am Secretary at the present. . . .

—BRETT MCENTAGART ’61

.   .   .

. . . I WAS a geology major at Dartmouth, but took several art classes, including Ray’s. Probably as a result, I have continued an active involvement in art, particularly in printmaking. (A few months ago I even had an etching accepted in a juried exhibition in the Washington, D.C., area.) Certainly, over the years the influence of his teaching has probably been one of the major dividends of my Dartmouth education. Although my career has a very different direction, my interest in printing and the graphic arts gives my life an additional dimension which I have found very important. As I look back to my years at Dartmouth, Ray Nash was one of two or three professors whose influence on me remains as a distinctive and positive part of my experience. . . .

—JOHN C. STORMER JR. ’63

.   .   .

HARDLY a week goes by that I don’t think about Ray Nash. Sometimes it is just about him and Dartmouth in general, sometimes about quality of education and rigorousness of thought, but mostly it’s about his courses and my work. . . .

I now work for a company producing very large text-processing systems for newspapers, magazines, and other text-intensive users. We are moving into the type-generation and graphics business, as part of a move to digital-storage laser-output full pages. The questions of loss of quality in such items as vector-outline type fonts versus bitmapped fonts are with us daily, and cause my thoughts to turn to R.N. often. I wonder what he would say if he could see what is happening now.

I know this sounds corny, but in recent years, when visiting the campus and walking by the now-shuttered and closed workshop, I get a lump in my throat. . . .

—JOHN T. MANARAS ’67

.   .   .

Mark Riley ’64   7-5/8 × 5

Ellsworth Wheeler ’57   10 × 6-1/2

ALTHOUGH I was not an art major at Dartmouth, I did take a number of studio courses, and of them, I think that Ray’s Workshop had a most lasting effect on my endeavors.

Like most students, I had a dandy idea of exactly what I wanted to do, and every confidence in the result being a quintessential work of art. It was not. Talking with Ray, watching him teach, watching him watch others and make a few, precise comments, and most of all, being exposed to artistic values developed so carefully over so many years, I learned the difference between the words “craftsman” and “artist.”

In the end, I decided I was only an aspiring craftsman.

I learned a lot of how to judge my own talents and desires, and how not to confuse a warm appreciation for any medium with the self-deception of being a dilettante in it.

Enough philosophy, however. The simple fact is, the Ray Nash experience is a real part of me, and I remember the man and all his foibles with great fondness.

—WAYNE WADHAMS ’68

.   .   .

I TOOK Professor Nash’s graphic arts course in the winter term of 1969. I decided that my project would be a sixteen-page book of poetry, written by another student, with woodcuts drawn by a third Dartmouth student and cut out by myself.

After suitable instruction in the use of the press, I was allowed to run off an edition of thirty copies of the poems, complete with the woodcuts.

The term was coming to a close, and I still had to disassemble my layout and replace the type in its cases. I had been hoping to get a ride home to Baltimore a little early, so I asked Professor Nash if I could finish “distributing” the type, which was the word he used, when spring-term classes resumed.

When he said that I would have to complete my project before I left Hanover, or else not receive my grade, I felt my heart pound in my chest, as I knew that I would never get the job done before all of my fraternity brothers had left town for spring vacation.

As it turned out, the job of distributing the type did not take as long as I expected, and a fraternity brother, who was giving me a ride as far as New York, was able to hold his departure for a day.

I was glad, when it was over, that I had gotten the project out of the way. I came back to Hanover feeling that I had just finished one of the best terms of my college career.

—JOHN L. PARKHURST ’70

.   .   .

David Godine ’66   19 × 12-1/2

Terry Lee ’65   19 × 8-1/2

Dana Atchley ’63   13-3/4 × 5-1/2

Andrew Harvard   8-1/2 × 5-1/2

John Hager ’67   12-1/2 × 9-1/2

John Melanson ’54   11 × 15-7/8

Post-Dartmouth Graphic Arts Workshop

by JOHN R. NASH ’60

Graphic Artist and Teacher

IN 1970 my father retired from the Dartmouth faculty. I don’t think he ever contemplated the possibility that the instructional program the reputation of which he had established during well over three decades would, then and there, be abandoned. Years before, he had commented on the shortsightedness of Yale in allowing Carl Rollins’ influence to fade; now he found himself in the same position.

In 1972 a friend wrote to him: “My Dartmouth sophomore son tells me that since your retirement there are no graphic arts presses in Hopkins. Can this possibly be?” My father’s answer was a regretful yes. “I must admit,” he added, “it was a blow to see the College go its way, seemingly oblivious to the importance of typography and book design.” It was as near complaint as I ever knew him to get—indeed, if Dartmouth was criticized in his hearing he tended to spring to its defense.

The College had, likewise, no interest in keeping the Chandler and Price press, the Washington or Hoe hand presses, the lithography and etching equipment, the stands of type and other materials which my father had collected over the years; it wanted the space. What to do? First of all, we began to clear out the ground floor of the small barn at my parents’ farm in Vermont and, by hook or by crook, to move the Graphic Arts Workshop into it. The two horse stalls, with partitions removed, became the letterpress department; the lithography and etching presses went into the calf pen; and the paper, on makeshift shelves, into one of the ox stalls. The tackroom was cleaned out to make a dark little scriptorium which any monk might have envied; the stands of type went along the south wall of the barn. Everything seemed to fit in. Friends, relatives, and former students all pitched in and helped. Rocky Stinehour commandeered his son Steve’s pickup truck, to move one of the presses, and I very much fear that we bent the tailgate beyond recall. My father’s books came up, box after box, from his seminar room in Baker Library, to be stored upstairs in the farmhouse.

By 1972 everything had been transferred, and the idea of a small, select, country version of the Graphic Arts Workshop had taken shape in our minds—a project, my father insisted, in which we should all share (my mother with wood engraving, my sister with lithography, myself with calligraphy and lettering); however, no one had any illusions but that if students were to come it would be mainly for the printing.

Publicity took the form of announcements of postcard size, the first of which was designed by Stephen Harvard, and the others, through the following years, by myself. My father had comments to make about wording, and once or twice about style (“Don’t piddle with commas in display lines of caps, please,” he wrote me. “Do it with SPACE,”), but in general he was content to give me my head—with the result that I destroy these efforts whenever they turn up. It was certainly not on account of them that enquiries began to come in, but as the result of a mysterious grapevine whose tendrils seemed to run farther afield than anyone had guessed. “I have heard . . . ,” most of these letters seemed to begin, written by persons of both sexes and varying backgrounds and personalities, but all sharing youth and enthusiasm and (it seemed) the willingness to pay one hundred dollars (later two hundred dollars) to spend five weeks, in primitive conditions, learning traditional skills long out of date. Suddenly, in the spring of 1972, we were faced with the prospect of eight duly enrolled and paid-up students, seven of whom had to be accommodated on the premises.

At the time we had available two small, spartan cabins, and a brand-new (but half-finished) house which we had been building ourselves over the past three years. Somehow beds and bedding were got together and the cabin made habitable where my father had ordained that the two boys were to sleep (he was dead against the sexes sharing facilities and had earlier sent me a clipping of a Stanford co-ed dormitory scandal to prove his point). It was all less a panic than a complicated bad dream. (I have abiding memories of frantically working to connect the electricity to the second floor of the new house as darkness began to fall and the first girls began to move in.) Through it all my father moved serene and unflustered and eternally optimistic. And so he remained through the next hectic day and through the next seven years, as he had for the past forty—speaking slowly; often not speaking at all; creating a sometimes frustrating atmosphere in which students, more often than not, found themselves solving their own problems. Nothing seemed to move to a pre-ordained plan, and yet things got done, and done in a craftsmanlike way, without hurry. It was my sister who observed that, while all about him were covering themselves with ink, our father worked in clean shirtsleeves (even as he had during the College years worked in coat and tie), never wearing an apron, never getting dirty.

Each year there was a steady trickle of enquiries, and each year enrollments followed. After that first year, much against my father’s will, it was decided to limit numbers to five; even so, my sister and myself found ourselves leading schizophrenic lives. There remained on the farm a sizeable flock of sheep, and the sheep had to have hay, and the hay had to be cut and baled. So, weekdays tended to consist of leaping off the tractor, rushing down the hill to the barn to be on duty for a couple of hours, then rushing back and leaping on the tractor again. I fear I gave neither the calligraphy nor the farmwork the detailed attention each ought to have had. But it was pleasurable, and good for the ego; and the students were a wonderfully pleasant lot, full of enthusiasm and originality and endearingly willing to forgive such shortcomings as cranky presses, antiquated type, shortage of composing sticks, cramped space, and the necessity of weilding pens in dark corners on wobbly drawing boards.

For five weeks every summer, during the hot sunny days, that barn was a hive of activity, and many small but splendid things came out of it. I never ceased to be amazed at the care and ingenuity which went into those broadsides and lithographs and small books—seemingly unaffected by the dust which floated down, over everything, as my sister’s young children played in the hayloft overhead. Late in the summer, when everyone had gone, that barn seemed very empty indeed.

By 1979 my father’s health was already failing, and it became obvious that his teaching life was at an end. Without him the Workshop could not continue, at least not in the same form. So, we closed it up, and there it remains. I like to think that someday it might be possible to revive it—or perhaps, even, that Dartmouth might realize the possibilities of once more putting these elderly but timeless tools to use in a course on fine printing—for which, after all, competent teachers and enthusiastic students still exist. It’s all there, waiting.

The Long Making

by STEPHEN HARVARD ’70

Vice President, Meriden-Stinehour Press

RAY NASH’s students were apt to get more than they bargained for. They came for instruction but left, as likely as not, with a way of life. That was his greatest strength: the vision to disclose a kind of work so rich and vital as to transcend a mere profession—a kind of work that was a way of living in the world; a way of making, rather than consuming, culture.

Not that any such lofty ideas attended my first days with him. Terror struck early. My first experiment at his bank was with Perpetua—a pristine, crisp, and ample English foundry type, direct, for all I knew, from the hands of Gill and Morison. I was already in love with letter forms, already carving inscriptions after hours, already working with a broad-edged pen; but here was a perfection I had not yet considered. These letters had not only grace, but heft: a satisfying weight that made them architecture more than script. How could I have dropped one? But I did, and Nash was at my elbow. The shop fell silent while he turned it over in his hand. I saw from where I stood a dented serif glint. He gave it to me with an arch, but civil, admonition: “Put this in your pocket. It is no further good to us.” I did. He left. I kept it in my pocket all semester, expecting to be called to show it, like a passport, on demand. By the time I guessed the coast was clear, the type was more a talisman than stigma.

And in that term I came to see the wit behind the deadpan barbs. I saw him merciless to fools, but warm and patient to anyone with a spark of interest. To those for whom the spark became flame, he freely opened a wide world: his tools, his books, his farm at Royalton; his company, his stories, and his plans. My recollections of him include firm pronouncements about margins and letterspacing, but also nights before his fire when, warmed by incomparable single-malt scotch, he gently steered me toward The Golden Bough, to Santayana, Wardrop, and West-Running Brook. From the broad pine shelves at hand he filled lacunae in my modern schooling. The bursar and the registrar were not consulted; this was education far beyond their scope or fee.

Stephen Harvard ’70   8-1/4 × 8

Stephen Harvard ’70   18 × 13

Stephen Harvard ’70   15 × 11-1/2

Stephen Harvard ’70   15 × 14-7/8

He taught with tools and objects, never slides. Rembrandt etchings, Dürer engravings, Aldine incunabula, wood blocks from Bewick’s hand, all came to the table to be touched, examined, talked about. He taught with presses, ink, and paper. He taught with friends, and with the world at large. A chance remark about Van Krimpen or Garamond might lead to a winter at Enschedé, a year on the Vrijdagmarkt, or both. His universe was broad and engaging. I walked the towpath with him from his Iffley flat to Oxford; we walked backcountry sheep fence in Vermont.

If there was a seam between his life and work, I never saw it. His world was bigger than the other teachers’ worlds. It was more richly peopled; its ends and means more finely balanced, its tools and methods more congenial. His was a world with resonance; it seemed to echo with the way we knew life should be lived.

He hated cant, and lampooned spineless fashion; he cherished precision in the use of words. “Creativity” drove him to despair. “Why can’t they just say ‘making things’?” he asked. And that was it, of course; he was for Making Things: letters, inscriptions, etchings, woodcuts, and books, for a start. And also journeys, libraries, friendships, houses, barns, and families. It all seemed to make sense; it all seemed to be connected.

One day, with a young wife and in an old pickup packed with tools, I drove up to his farm. Paula discovered an ancient walking wheel, set it to rights, and settled in to spin. Professor Nash (emeritus, by then) and I discussed the work at hand: some lettering I had to mark and cut on a massive standing slab of gray-green slate. It was good to be there with him once again, talking shop about the roman majuscules—good to have come all that way into his world of Making Things; good to have found the colleagues and the friends his teaching led me to; good to hold the tools by second nature that he first directed to my hands. This time, nothing dropped. The carving of that stone went on for days. It gave me time to think—about his full and useful life, about my own unfolding one. It was the last of many projects we collaborated on. Or maybe, as I sometimes guess, they were all one uncompleted whole, starting years ago at the Workshop bank. Sometimes it all seems one long Making, letter after letter—a work transmitted to the hands of students, and their students; a great work unaffected by his passing; a work sustained into the future by his careful life.

RAY NASH

Biographical Chronology

Published Writings

“Education in a Workshop”

Biographical Chronology of Ray Nash

Selective Coverage 1937–1982

1937

Appointed to the Dartmouth faculty as Lecturer in Art, with the rank of Instructor.

Engages in a summer interval of art studies in Belgium under a grant from the C.R.B. Educational Foundation.

1938

Designated by Dartmouth as Printing Adviser to the College.

1940

Helps to found and serves as an Editorial Board member (1940–1951) of Print: A Quarterly Journal of the Graphic Arts.

1941

Advanced in his Lectureship, within the Dartmouth faculty, to the rank of Assistant Professor.

1943

Serves as a Juror for the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ 1943 “Fifty Books of the Year” selection and becomes, also, Chairman of the Institute’s committee for the “American Calligraphy Exhibition” shown in New York City and at Chicago in 1944.

1944

Elected to membership in the Grolier Club, New York City.

1945

Completes, as the Boston and Maine Railroad’s chief typographic consultant (1940–1945), a project for redesigning the B & M timetable.

1947

Becomes an Honorary Member of the Rounce and Coffin Club, Los Angeles.

Receives a Master of Arts degree (in Fine Arts) from Harvard University.

Becomes National Chairman of the School and College Program of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

1949

Becomes an Associate Editor of Renaissance News; continues as such through 1964.

Advanced in his Lectureship, within the Dartmouth faculty, to the rank of Professor.

Receives an honorary Master of Arts degree from Dartmouth, in privatim, following his promotion to full professorial rank.

1950

Revisits, by invitation of the city’s Burgomaster and Council, the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp and prints a broadside using Plantin types and press.

1951

Participates in his alma mater’s “Renaissance Institute,” inaugurating the observance of the University of Oregon’s seventy-fifth anniversary.

1953

Causes the founding and serves as principal Editor (1953–1965) of Printing & Graphic Arts (which publication was originally called Notes on Printing & Graphic Arts and in its later years featured the abbreviated designation PaGA in addition to the title itself).

Elected to membership in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and in the Club of Odd Volumes, Boston.

Receives a fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation to spend the summer as an adviser at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp.

1955

Honored by former students on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, February 25, 1955, by a gathering at the Grolier Club, New York City, and the issuance of a keepsake publication having the cover-title RN a fresh approach.

Elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society.

Serves as a Delegate to and lectures at the International Congress on Printing and Humanism, Antwerp.

1956

Awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts; concurrently made an Honorary Life Member, extending from his previous long-time membership.

1957

Receives an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from New England College.

1958

Elected to membership in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Elected to membership in the Century Association, New York City.

1959

Becomes a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

1960

Named Director of Dartmouth Publications, having served as Acting Director during the closing months of 1959 through February 1960.

Elected an Honorary Member of Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha of Massachusetts, at Harvard College; gives the Oration at the chapter’s annual Literary Exercises.

Designated Honorary Curator of the Class of 1926 Memorial Collection within the Dartmouth College Library; continues as such until his retirement from the College in 1970.

1961

Serves during the autumn as a Delegate from the Renaissance Society of America to the Manteona Convegno at Florence, Venice, and Mantua.

Appointed to membership on Marlboro College’s Council of Academic Advisers.

1964

Elected to membership in The Athenaeum, London.

Causes the founding and becomes the first President of the American Friends of the Plantin-Moretus Museum; continues to serve as a Board member throughout the remainder of his life.

1965

Accorded the title Professor of Art at Dartmouth, in succession to the designation Lecturer in Art.

1966

Spends the winter and spring at Oxford University, to reorganize the Bibliography Room within the New Bodleian Library.

Made, by royal decree, an Officer of Belgium’s Order of Leopold II.

1968

Elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London.

1970

Honored by an exhibition and a published catalogue thereof, Renaissance Books of Science . . . , sponsored jointly by Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center and the Wellesley College Library.

Retires from active service at Dartmouth; becomes Professor of Art, Emeritus.

1972

Establishes a summer instructional program, in continuance of the Graphic Arts Workshop, at his farm in Royalton, Vermont; continues to conduct such through the summer of 1978.

1974

Made an Honorary Member of the Dartmouth Class of 1941.

1980

Elected an Honorary Member of the Society of Printers, extending from his previous long-time membership.

1982

Dies at Royalton, Vermont, May 28th; aged seventy-seven.

Ray Nash in the Graphic Arts Workshop, Baker Library, 1936

Hanover, October 1947

Ray Nash at the hand press, March 1950

Graphic Arts Workshop session in the 1940s

Ray Nash and David Grinnell ’50 in the Graphic Arts Workshop.

Ray Nash and David Grinnell ’50 in the Graphic Arts Workshop.

Page from the 1955 keepsake.

Page from the 1955 keepsake.

Ray and Hope Nash in 1954, from the 1955 keepsake.

Ray Nash on the occasion of the May 1969 Graphic Arts Outing at Royalton, Vermont, at which he was given his Dartmouth chair.

Ray Nash in New York, April 1969.

Ray Nash at Broadbrook Mountain Farm, Autumn 1973. Photograph by John Dreyfus.

President John Sloan Dickey, Ray Nash and Leon Voet, Director of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, at the Hopkins Center opening of the exhibition Treasures from the Plantin-Moretus Museum, April 1963.

James Hamilton ’65, President of the Society of Printers, Boston, confers upon Ray Nash honorary membership in the Society at its seventy-fifth anniversary celebration in 1980.

Published Writings of Ray Nash

SEPARATE PUBLICATIONS

1

AN ACCOUNT OF / CALLIGRAPHY / & / PRINTING / IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY / FROM DIALOGUES ATTRIBUTED TO / CHRISTOPHER PLANTIN / Printed and published by him at ANTWERP, in / 1567. French and Flemish Text in facsimile, Eng- / lish Translation and Notes by RAY NASH and / Foreword by STANLEY MORISON / [ornament] / CAMBRIDGE / MASSACHUSETTS / Department of Printing and Graphic Arts / Harvard College Library / 1940

7 × 4-5/8 inches; unsigned 1^8 2^4 3–4^8 5^4 6^8 [inserted leaf after 1_1 provides a frontispiece, facing the title page]; 41 leaves; pages [i–ii] [inserted leaf] [iii–v] vi–viii [1–3] 4–21 [22–23] 24–30 [31–72].

A statement on the verso of the bastard-title page specifies: “Two hundred and fifly copies have been printed by / D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston, / in January, 1940, as the first publication of the / Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, in the / Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Massa- / chusetts.” The text was reprinted in Liturgical Arts (Vol. XVII, No. 4, Part II, August 1949), and a new and enlarged edition, carrying the altered title Calligraphy & Printing in the sixteenth century and having as its sub-title description “Dialogue attributed to CHRISTOPHER PLANTIN in French and Flemish facsimile,” was published at Antwerp in 1964 by the Plantin-Moretus Museum.

2

PIONEER PRINTING / AT DARTMOUTH / By RAY NASH / [horizontal row of type ornaments] / With A Check-List of Dresden Imprints / by Harold Goddard Rugg. / [horizontal row of type ornaments] / HANOVER: / DARTMOUTH COLLEGE LIBRARY / M, DCCCC, XLI.

7-7/8 × 5 inches; unsigned 1–6^4 [inserted leaf after 1_3 provides a folded frontispiece, facing the title page; two inserted conjugate leaves quired in the center of Signature 4 provide three pages of facsimiles and a blank page]; 27 leaves; pages [4] [1–2] [inserted leaf] [3–4] 5–6 [7–8] 9–24 [two inserted leaves] 25–27 [28–30] 31–40 [41–44].

The colophon specifies: “THIS IS NUMBER [. . .] OF / two hundred copies printed on Laverstoke from / Hampshire in Old England by George T. Bailey / at The Rumford Press in New England at Con- / cord, New Hampshire: the first thirty copies con- / stituting Keepsake No. 46 of The Columbiad Club / of Connecticut, fifty copies for the Dartmouth / College Library, and one hundred copies for sale.”

3

[within a border of calligraphic flourishes, which also features, near the top, the word “Writing” ornamentally rendered:] Copyright / 1943 / by Ray Nash / SOME EARLY AMERICAN / WRITING BOOKS / AND MASTERS / BY RAY NASH

7-7/8 × 6 inches; unsigned 1–4^4; 16 leaves; pages [2] [1–7] 8–9 [10] 11–24 [25–30]. The colophon specifies: “225 copies / PRINTED APRIL 1943 PUBLISHED BY / H & N”. The abbreviation “H & N” represents the surnames of the author and Philip Hofer, Curator of the Harvard College Library’s Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, which should be regarded as in fact the volume’s publisher. Mr. Hofer later wrote, in this connection, “This . . . book appeared actually without the Department’s name, for it was war time and a formal publication seemed out of place.” The text is that of a talk given by R.N. at a meeting of the Club of Odd Volumes, Boston, during November of 1942. A second edition was issued at the close of 1943, the colophon of which reads “PUBLISHED BY H & N SECOND EDITION” on but a single line, in place of the three-line colophon present in the initial edition.

4

Fifty Years of Robert Frost / A Catalogue / of the Exhibition held in Baker Library / in the Autumn of 1943 / Edited by / RAY NASH / [diamond-shaped arrangement of typographic flowers] / Dartmouth College Library / Hanover, N.H. / 1944

9 × 6 inches; unsigned 1^8; 8 leaves; pages [1–4] 5–14 [15–16]. Published as a supplement to the Library Bulletin issue (Vol. IV, No. 3) for March 1944. Some copies were cased in stiff covers and contained, also, both a photograph of the poet and a facsimile of a manuscript poem by him.

5

[caption title, beneath a square, orange S·P monogrammatic device:] THE SOCIETY OF PRINTERS: FOR THE STUDY AND / ADVANCEMENT OF THE ART OF PRINTING: BOSTON / [inverted triangle of three dots] / FOUNDERS’ DAY

9 × 6 inches; unsigned 1^2; 2 leaves; unpaged.

The text is signed “RAY NASH” at its close. The leaflet, distributed at the Society’s meeting on February 14, 1945 (the actual fortieth-anniversary date of the organization’s founding), carries at the bottom of its final page a statement indicating that “The foregoing note on Founders’ Day is condensed from the fortieth anniversary history of the Society in preparation by our committee. . . .”

6

Navy at Dartmouth / BY RAY NASH / [arms-and-anchor device] / HANOVER / DARTMOUTH PUBLICATIONS / 1946

9-1/6 × 5-15/16 inches; unsigned 1–7^8 [inserted leaves providing illustrations are present as follows: two conjugate leaves quired so as to come between 12·3 and 16·7, two conjugate leaves wrapped around Signature 2, two conjugate leaves quired within the center of Signature 3, and two conjugate leaves quired within the center of Signature 4]; 64 leaves; pages [i–iv] [inserted leaf] [v–xii] [inserted leaf] 1–4 [inserted leaf] 5–20 [inserted leaf] 21–28 [two inserted leaves] 29–44 [two inserted leaves] 45–54 [55] 56–70 [71] 72–85 [86] 87–96 [97–100].

Lines at the bottom of the copyright page specify: “THE VERMONT PRINTING COMPANY, BRATTLEBORO / ILLUSTRATIONS: PHOTOGRAVURE & COLOR CO.”

7

[ornamental red AD 1511 device] / DÜRER’S 1511 DRAWING OF A / PRESS AND PRINTER / BY RAY NASH / CAMBRIDGE / DEPARTMENT OF PRINTING AND GRAPHIC ARTS / HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY / 1947

9 × 11-7/8 inches; unsigned 1^8 [inserted leaf after 1_4 provides a facsimile illustration, facing the first page of the main-text section]; 9 leaves; unpaged.

The colophon specifies: “550 copies printed in September 1947 at / The Anthoensen Press, Portland, Maine, in / Janson types, on Oxbow paper, accord- / ing to the author’s arrangement. Collo- / type by The Meriden Gravure Company.”

8

Thoreau MacDonald’s / Drawings for Dartmouth / with notes by Ray Nash / [green star-shaped ornament] / North Country Press / LUNENBURG · VERMONT

4-1/2 × 3-3/8 inches; unsigned 1^10; 10 leaves; unpaged.

The colophon specifies: “200 copies printed by / Roderick D. Stinehour / at the Graphic Arts Workshop / Dartmouth College / Hanover, New Hampshire / May, 1950”.

9

[caption title:] C. P. R. / Keeper of the Human Scale

8-15/15 × 5-15/16 inches; unsigned 1^10; 10 leaves; 1–6 [8] 7–9 [10–12].

The colophon specifies: “Two hundred and fifty copies have been printed by / The Printing-Office of the Yale University Press. The / collotypes have been done by The Meriden Gravure / Company and the binding by The Peck Bindery. The / Fabriano Cover was furnished by The Stevens-Nelson / Paper Corporation.” At the bottom of the colophon page appears: “THE DYKE MILL / Montague, Massachusetts / 20 August 1954”.

10

[within a red-rule border enclosing, in turn, a second red-rule border within which horizontal red rules separate the title from the elements above and below it:] [horizontal row of ornaments depicting books] / [in blackletter, with ornamental flourishes appended that descend decoratively into the center of the page:] Printing as an Art / PUBLISHED FOR THE SOCIETY OF PRINTERS / BY HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS / CAMBRIDGE / 1955

9-3/8 × 6-1/2 inches; unsigned 1–9^8 10^6 11–14^8; 110 leaves; pages [i–ix] x–xi [xii] [1–2] 3–97 [98–99] 100–123 [124] 125–141 [142–208].

The colophon specifies: “This book was written to commemorate / The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Society of Printers / Designed by Bruce Rogers / Fifleen hundred copies printed”.

11

AMERICAN / WRITING MASTERS / AND COPYBOOKS / History and Bibliography / Through colonial times / BY RAY NASH / BOSTON / The Colonial Society of Massachusetts / 1959

9-3/8 × 6-1/8 inches; unsigned 1–6^8 [followed by one signature of two leaves and two signatures of eight leaves, providing facsimile illustrations]; 66 leaves; pages [2] [i–iv] v–vii [viii] ix–x [xi] xii–xiii [xiv] 1–66 [67–68] 69–77 [78–80] [36].

Printed at the Anthoensen Press. The third publication in the series “Studies in the History of Calligraphy,” sponsored by the Harvard College Library and Newberry Library. A Preliminary Checklist of American Writing Manuals and Copybooks to 1850, compiled by R.N. and bearing on its front cover the declaration “CHECKING COPY ONLY: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION,” was sent to librarians in 1950 by the Newberry Library, as a provision associated with preparations for the issuance of this work and for that of R.N.’s American Penmanship 1800–1850 (1969). [See also the entry for Item 14.]

12

[cover title:] THE AMERICAN / SCHOLAR-PRINTER / BY RAY NASH / [wood engraving depicting a Phi Beta Kappa key] / AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE / HARVARD CHAPTER OF PHI BETA KAPPA / IN SANDERS THEATRE · CAMBRIDGE / 13 JUNE 1960

8-7/16 × 6 inches; unsigned 1^8; 8 leaves; pages 1–16.

Printed at The Stinehour Press.

13

Philip Hofer / [red VERITAS books-and-oak-branch device, followed by:] as author / and publisher / Harvard College Library / Department of Printing & Graphic Arts

10-1/16 × 7 inches; unsigned 1–4^8 [followed by one inserted leaf]; 33 leaves; pages [1–6] 7–8 [9–10] 11 [12] 13–14 [15–16] 17–18 [19] 20–23 [24] 25–26 [27–28] 29–32 [33] 34–39 [40] 41–46 [47] 48–49 [50] 51–52 [53–54] 55–64 [65–66]. The colophon specifies: “Five hundred copies of this book have been printed / by Harold Hugo at The Meriden Gravure Company / and by Roderick Stinehour at The Stinehour Press / in celebration of the anniversary on 14 March 1968 / THIS IS COPY NUMBER” [. . .]. The anniversary commemorated was Philip Hofer’s seventieth birthday

14

AMERICAN / PENMANSHIP / 1800–1850 / A History of Writing and / a Bibliography of Copybooks from / Jenkins to Spencer / RAY NASH / [circular seal in red] / American Antiquarian Society / WORCESTER · 1969

9-1/4 × 6 inches; unsigned 1^6 2–20^8 [inserted folded leaf after 91 provides numbered pages 115 and 116]; 159 leaves; pages [i–iv] v–vii [viii–x] xi–xii [1–2] 3–67 [68–70] 71–257 [258–260] 261–266 [267–268] 269–303 [304–306].

Printed at The Stinehour Press. A Preliminary Checklist of American Writing Manuals and Copybooks to 1850, compiled by R.N. and bearing on its front cover the declaration “CHECKING COPY ONLY: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION,” was sent to librarians in 1950 by the Newberry Library, as a provision associated with preparations for the issuance of this work and for that of R.N.’s American Writing Masters and Copybooks (1959). [See also the entry for Item 11.]

CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PUBLICATIONS

[book reviews and reprinted matter are excluded from this listing]

1938

“The Graphic Arts in Belgium” in News-letter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (Number 47), February 1938, pages 4–5.

1939

“Black Spots Before the Eyes” in The Delphian Quarterly (Vol. XXII, No. 3), July 1939, pages [15]–18.

1940

“Education in a Workshop: A Fresh Approach to the Graphic Arts” in Print (Vol. I, No. 1), June 1940, pages 62–72.

“A Built-In Program: Harvard’s Department of Printing and Graphic Arts” in Print (Vol. I, No. 3), December 1940, pages 25–29.

1941

“Early Writing Masters in Vermont” in Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society (New Series; Vol. IX, No. 1), March 1941, pages 27–37.

“The Press and the Undergraduate” in Print (Vol. II, Nos. 3 & 4), October–December 1941, pages 39–42.

“Rediscovering the College Seal” in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (Vol. XXXIV, No. 3), December 1941, pages 17–20.

1942

“Meeting of Mounted Men” in Print (Vol. III, No. 1), Spring 1942, pages 63–[64].

1943

“Foreword” in Fifty Books of the Year (New York: American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1943), on two unnumbered pages.

“Rastell Fragments at Dartmouth” in The Library (Fourth Series; Vol. XXIV, Nos. 1, 2), June, September 1943, pages [66]–73.

1944

“American Calligraphy Exhibition” in News-letter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (Number 77), March 1944, pages 3 and 8.

“The Second ‘R’ in America” in The Magazine Antiques (Vol. XLVI, No. 3), September 1944, pages 132–134.

“Good Order: A Morality Fragment” (with G. L. Frost) in Studies in Philology (Vol. XLI, No. 4), October 1944, pages 483–491.

1945

“The Society of Printers and the Public Library” in More Books (Sixth Series; Vol. XX, No. 5), May 1945, pages 221–226.

“Josef Albers” in Print (Vol. III, No. 4), Fall 1945, page [9].

1946

“Robert Frost and His Printers” in The Book Collector’s Packet (Vol. IV, No. 5), January 1946, pages 10–12.

“Introduction” in Sixty Years of Fine Book-Making: Publications of the Grolier Club . . . (Johannesburg: Imprint Society, 1946), pages iii–vi.

1947

“The Approach to Printing as an Art in America” in De Gulden Passer (Vol. XXV, Nos. 1 & 2), 1947, pages 1–12 [supplemented by a section of illustrations].

1948

“Rudolph Ruzicka as Engraver and Typographer” in Publishers’ Weekly (Vol. CLIII, No. 23), June 5, 1948, pages 2408–2410.

1949

“Education and Printing” in Graphic Arts Education (Vol. XXVI, No. 2), January 1949, pages 13–17.

“Library’s ‘Founder’ Honored” in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (Vol. XLI, No. 5), February 1949, pages 27–28 and 40.

“Thomas & Dartmouth” in The Isaiah Thomas Donation (Hanover: Dartmouth College Library, 1949), on five unnumbered pages.

1950

“The Poet and the Pirate” in The New Colophon (Vol. II, Pt. 8), February 1950, pages 311–321.

1951

“The Alfred Byers Wade Collection” in Dartmouth College, Library Bulletin (Vol. V, No. 4), March 1951, pages 57–59.

“DeVinne’s Paradise Revisited on a Summer Summary &c.” in Book Club of California, Quarterly News Letter (Vol. XVI, No. 4), Fall 1951, pages 80–84.

1952

“An American Colonial Calligraphic Sheet of King Charles’s Twelve Good Rules at Dartmouth College Library” in The Library (Fifth Series; Vol. VII, No. 2), June 1952, pages 111–116.

1953

“Abiah Holbrook and His ‘Writing Master’s Amusement’” in Harvard Library Bulletin (Vol. VII, No. 1), Winter 1953, pages 88–104.

1954

“Rembrandt’s Influence on Seymour Haden, Whistler, and the Revival of Original Etching” in Printing & Graphic Arts (Vol. II, No. 4), December 1954, pages [61]–73.

1955

“A View of Dartmouth in 1803 by George Ticknor” in George Ticknor, A View of Dartmouth (Hanover: Dartmouth Publications and Dartmouth College Library, 1955), inside front cover.

“The Handwriting of the Founding Fathers” in Manuscripts (Vol. VII, No. 4), Summer 1955, pages 208–213.

1956

“Plantin’s Illustrated Books” in De Gulden Passer (Vol. XXXIV), 1956, pages 144–156.

1957

“American Book Illustration 1945–1955” in Aloys Ruppel, ed., Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1957 (Mainz: Gutenberg-Gesellschaft, 1957), pages 286–293.

“‘Mr. J. B.’s Twelve Cyphers’” in Printing & Graphic Arts (Vol. V, No. 2), May 1957, pages 34–35.

“John Jenkins’s American System of Penmanship” in Printing & Graphic Arts (Vol. V, No. 3), September 1957, pages [37]–45.

1958

“Handwriting in the British North American Colonies” in Aloys Ruppel, ed., Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1958 (Mainz: Gutenberg-Gesellschaft, 1958), pages 20–24.

1959

“Handwriting in America from Colonial Times to 1850” in Aloys Ruppel, ed., Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1959 (Mainz: Gutenberg-Gesellschaft, 1959), pages 17–21.

“The Exhibition of Chancery Italic Manuscripts” in Renaissance News (Vol. XII, No. 2), Summer 1959, pages 91–92.

1960

“For the Graphic Artist Challenge and Expanding Opportunity” in The New York Times Book Review (The New York Times, Section 7), Part II, January 17, 1960, page 7.

“A Colonial Writing Master’s Collection of English Copybooks” in Harvard Library Bulletin (Vol. XIV, No. 1), Winter 1960, pages 12–19.

“The Designer’s Point of View” in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (Vol. LII, No. 7), April 1960, pages 9–10.

“Notes on the Riverside Press and D. B. Updike” in Aloys Ruppel, ed., Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1960 (Mainz: Gutenberg-Gesellschaft, 1960), pages 329–[333].

“J. J. Lankes” in Printing & Graphic Arts (Vol. VIII, No. 4), December 1960, pages [97]-[109].

1962

“Gehenna Press Books” in Leonard Baskin (Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1962), on three unnumbered pages.

1963

“Foreword” in Treasures from the Plantin-Moretus Museum (Hanover: Hopkins Center, 1963), on two unnumbered pages.

Untitled introductory note in Class of 1926 Memorial in Dartmouth College Library (Hanover: Class of 1926 Memorial Committee, 1963), inside front cover.

1965

“Benjamin Franklin Foster” in A. S. Osley, ed., Calligraphy and Palaeography: Essays presented to Alfred Fairbank on his 70th birthday (London: Faber & Faber, 1965) and (New York: October House, 1966), pages 155–168.

1966

“Illustrated Books published in New England from 1769 to 1870” as an introduction in A Checklist of the Class of 1926 Memorial Collection (Hanover: Dartmouth College Library, 1966); on one unnumbered page.

“Thomas Bird Mosher: His Life and Work” in Benton L. Hatch, comp. and ed., A Check List of the Publications of Thomas Bird Mosher of Portland, Maine (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966), pages 9–[32].

1967

“The Genius of Rudolph Ruzicka” in American Artist (Vol. XXXI, No. 10), December 1967, pages 44–50, 71–73.

1969

“The Undergraduate and the Graphic Arts” in Education in the Graphic Arts (Boston: Boston Public Library, 1969), pages 5–15.

1970

“Calligraphy” in Encyclopædia Britannica, (Fourteenth Edition; 1970 issuance), Volume 4, pages 656–659 (incorporating signed sections on “Chinese and Japanese Calligraphy” and on “Islamic Calligraphy” by other authors).

1974

“Types for the Standard Prayer Book of 1928” in The Library (Fifth Series; Vol. XXIX, No. 1), March 1974, pages [61]–79.

“Sources of Zamorano’s Calligraphic Styles” in George L. Harding et al, A Copybook from the hand of Agustin V. Zamorano (Los Angeles: Zamorano Club, 1974), on five unnumbered pages.

1976

“A Note on Christian Meadows and His Engraving of Dartmouth College” in An 1851 View of Dartmouth College by Christian Meadows (Hanover: Dartmouth College Library, 1976).

“Ornamented Types in America” as Chapter Nine in Nicolete Gray, Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pages 115–130.

Education in a Workshop
A Fresh Approach to the Graphic Arts

by RAY NASH

GRAPHIC ART, as I understand the term, takes in the considerable sweep of human activity devoted to the making and manifolding of visual symbols based on drawing or writing. Like speech, its sister handmaiden to communication, graphic art has largely become so common, so near the reflex level and so frequently mean, that the kinship between the greatest and least of it, as well as its relation to other art and to man himself, can be perceived only by way of a fresh approach to the subject as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to suggest such an approach.

Ordinary educational procedure involves graphic art at many points. From the first grade of public school, if not previously in nursery school and kindergarten, young Americans have writing and drawing materials put in their hands, pictures of sorts placed before their eyes. They may, as time goes on, cut lino-blocks and set stickfuls of Caslon in the school shop. But no matter what educational course is followed, the organic nature of graphic art—the fact that it all issues from a common origin in significant human gesture committed to a carrying surface—will be ignored, the essence lost in an over-formalized, over-specialized, non-integrated system.

There are schools and courses in abundance where different aspects of graphic art are dealt with piecemeal. In technical printing schools little or no contact is made with, say, calligraphy, the basis of and possible successor to typography. The professional art school assigns exercises of alphabets without giving a background of the source, meaning and appropriate use of the forms. However, the needs of the student looking definitely toward a career in some phase of graphic art can be much better served by present educational facilities, especially in view of the possible resurgence of a modified apprentice system, than can the broader interests of those students seeking to explain, understand and become part of their cultural ambient. For these latter the fine arts curriculum now offers the study of expensive prints, but fails to give more than the faintest inkling as to what stuff such dreams were made on.

Summing up the graphic art educational opportunities, it seems fair to conclude that there are two, but quite separate, avenues of approach, (1) “Artistic” and vocational students may take courses of training for their craft, or, more happily still, may find a chance to attach themselves to a qualified master and thus escape routine initiation into such black arts as dynamic symmetry. (2) Students with more general interests follow the well-trodden path of masters and masterpieces leading through art appreciation and history of art courses.

The outline for education which I am suggesting is oriented primarily to the interests of the student of culture, the man or woman who is not necessarily immediately concerned with the problem of getting a living out of graphic art but who wishes to live more richly and fully, with more sensibility and understanding, by means of graphic art. This plan proposes to consider afresh the broad realm of human communication by means of visual symbols. If successful, it has to comprehend and relate the simplest, most abstract sign, like the figure 1, with the most heavily-laden invention of individual genius, like a Goya lithograph.

The experiments which furnish the ground for my outline have been conducted, as they say, at the college level. The colleges and universities, however, probably do not offer the most fertile field of endeavor for as a rule they remain oblivious to the special claim graphic art has upon them. There are exceptional instances, like the work of Mr. Carl Rollins at Yale, and the promise of more good things at Harvard under the guidance of Mr. Philip Hofer, which are very heartening; but by and large the institutions of higher education give extraordinarily short shrift to the arts which sustain them, the arts which supply the intimate touch with people of all times, which is mankind’s rarest solace. Possibly such an agency as the American Institute of Graphic Arts could give the project practical direction and application, with the cooperation of schools and colleges. In any case the plan should not be thought of as limited to college students alone.

The times favor this enterprise, for there is everywhere an impulse to re-examine critically the assumptions upon which our institutions are founded. It pervades the contemporary air. Analysis of the structure of ideas has brought philosophers to a rediscovery of the stuff ideas are made of, the word forms thought is molded in. So words have come in for a full share of critical attention. And the savant’s interest in semantics is matched by the debutante’s streamlined four-word vocabulary of “swell,” “cute,” “O.K.,” “nuts.” From words, the next logical move is to a study of the symbols which are pictures of sounds composing words, the more actual raw material of thought. The same inquiry must consider the elaborate clusters of symbols which go under the name of prints. So our plan has a timely bearing on other fields besides art!

The beginning has to be made by attempting to clear away all preconceptions which prevent the student from coming cleanly at the subject. This means suspending much time-honored jargon and doing away with the systematic pigeonholing which obstructs free circulation of ideas. Categories such as those of “fine” and “other” prints would have to prove themselves on reasonable grounds before being accepted. With Renaissance-like naïveté we should take it quite as a matter of course that one graphic artist finds within the narrow limits of lettering an activity as responsive and rewarding as another does in etching. We should overturn the tyrannical hierarchy of artistic means, abolishing the dicta that woodcut must curtsy to wood engraving, both bow to line engraving, and all make obeisance to etching. We should outlaw the point of view, proper enough to museum men, collectors and dealers, that rarity, mere antiquity, quaintness, market values and so on are pertinent to the purpose.

II

THE GRAPHIC ARTS WORKSHOP is at the heart of the scheme. Instead of examining works of graphic art out of their context as isolated phenomena, or the personal history and social milieu of the artists who made them as distant creatures of another order, the workshop puts the student into direct contact with the tradition, the materials and instrumentalities by which artist and work of art, and now the student himself, are all governed and formed.

It appears hard to keep always in mind that the purpose of the workshop is not primarily to gratify the needs of self-expression or to make charming things, but to create sound understanding of graphic art through immediate feeling at the pristine stage. The workshop should differ radically from the hobby shop or puttering place where, with carpentering, and linoleum gouging, a miscellany of crafts is pursued. For, following a program dovetailed into the definite plan of study to be suggested later, the workshop is the single-purposed laboratory in which the physical aspect of graphic art is dealt with at first hand.

This may look like the hard way of doing it, but students can never begin to understand a vast segment of their cultural heritage without that sympathetic sense which comes only after direct experience of graphic processes in their traditional light. In this way only can they realize the potentialities, the limitations and proper use of technical means.

Although vitally important, the graphic arts workshop need not be elaborate in order to provide opportunity for the required experience. Materials for drawing and writing, woodblocks and tools to work them, copperplates and points, lithographic stone and crayon, some types, and three presses of the simplest sort with their accessories to handle the three kinds of printing surface, complete the basic requirements for the plant. All can be tucked into one small room in an obscure corner of the library or any other available space. Here is the place for the student to get his bearings as he can nowhere else. He is now equipped to follow in the footsteps of the graphic artist, even the great master—not all the way, not more than a very short distance, perhaps, but still far enough to get some inkling of what the master saw, how he felt about it and what he did with it.

The student who, in spite of the years of school drill in writing and wax crayon drawing, retains his birthright ability to draw, is favored above the common. All children have it in their earliest years, but it usually withers under stress of trying too soon and too hard to make their effort look like a model ABC or other set form, on a two-by-four bit of paper. If there is any ability remaining, the student can coax it back and put it in effect. It is rarely the case that this faculty is completely dead.

At least some vestige of the easy, confident ability of childhood may be won by working at arm’s length, recapturing the vigor and rhythm of a savage graphic artist amusing himself on a mudbank with a stick. After the mudbank, the cave wall and a stump of charcoal, then a flint on a mammoth tusk, and civilization has begun! As will presently appear, this plan of study is essentially a recapitulation by the students of their ancestors’ long course in graphic art.

After a little of the kind of warming-up suggested, the student may satisfy (and delight) himself by finding out, with brush, split reed, quill, stylus and chisel, the originally necessary and therefore right forms of writing, which is properly a department of drawing. In seeing the forms spring out of the very nature of the materials and of the tool in his hand, he realizes first that sense of inevitability which denotes good design. It is just one of the many percepts flowing directly from his work that lodges deep under the skin and will serve him well all through life.

He will cut designs with a knife on a plank of pine or pear, engrave them on the end grain of boxwood, trace or scratch them on copper, dash them on lithographic stone. He prints his woodblock and type on the relief press, intaglio plates on the rolling press, lithograph on a planographic press. Each experience yields an entirely fresh orientation toward graphic art as a whole and the artists who pursued these different mediums. By direct contact he becomes to some degree infected by the excitement, mounting sometimes to high passion, of the graphic artist for the stuff he works in and is inspired by.

III

ACCOMPANYING and closely tied in with the workshop program is the lecture and reading course. The question in academic circles as to how much practice work can helpfully reinforce so many hours of lectures and pages of reading is vexed by many considerations and is far from any clear solution. Of all art teaching, however, it appears reasonable to insist that the many-faceted graphic field is most dependent on intimate acquaintance with materials, tools and their proper use for the sort of comprehending growth which education means. There is also disagreement among the doctors regarding the proportionate amount of reading and lecture time. If I understand Professor Jakob Rosenberg’s opinion, and it ought to have great weight in determining the point so far as graphic art teaching is concerned, it is that reading is relatively of minor importance.

Accordingly, no pretense can be made that the following outline of topics and readings is perfectly balanced or properly selective. It is intended as a suggestive framework, substantial enough to build on but flexible enough for adaptation to a variety of situations. It could serve equally as a blueprint for a symposium, or a university art course, or an orientation course in an exceptionally liberal professional school. I put it forward with due diffidence, for, as Professor Paul J. Sachs once remarked out of his mature wisdom, it takes ten years of actual teaching experience before any course is likely to amount to much, and then only if it had the making of a good one in the beginning.

THE BEGINNINGS OF GRAPHIC ART. Introduction. Bibliography.

Paleolithic drawing and engraving. Forms foreshadowing writing. Methods and materials; art values. Neolithic stamping blocks, primitive prints, stencils. Human body as printing surface. Attempts to convey idea of solidity. Development of graphic conventions; stylized symbols for talismans, amulets. Writing: pictograms or pictures standing for ideas and thoughts; actual objects, symbols for abstract ideas; phonograms or graphic signs for sounds, words, finally letters. Alphabet development: evolution of characters from pictographs; variants.

Readings in Spearing, The Childhood of Art: “The Origins of Drawing,” “Why Did the Cave Men Draw?” Hoffman, The Beginnings of Writing, “Symbols.” Taylor, History of the Alphabet, pp. 1–25.

GREEK AND LATIN MANUSCRIPT FORMS AND THE RISE OF GOTHIC.

Monumental inscriptions, scrolls, codices. Materials, instruments, and their effect on form. Separate functions of literary and cursive alphabets. Book hands and books of the Middle Ages. Reform of Charlemagne; school of Tours. Vernacular and other hands. Irish and English manuscripts: Book of Kells, Lindisfarne Gospels, etc. Illumination. Bookmaking centers and their styles. Transition from decoration to illustration. Materials, methods, masters.

Readings in Johnston, Writing and Illuminating and Lettering: Eric Gill’s “Inscriptions in Stone”; also author’s preface and “The Development of Writing”; also chap. VII on manuscript books and versals. Thompson, Introduction to Greek and Latin Paleography, pp. 1–43. Putnam, Books and Their Makers in the Middle Ages.

ORIENTAL CONTRIBUTIONS: PICTURE PRINTING AND PAPERMAKING.

Chinese origins and the silken thread of cultural communication between East and West. Textile printing blocks in Europe. Processes and printing materials preceding paper. Paper, the ideal printing surface. Chinese and Arab eras; traditional methods in Europe; effect on drawing and printing activity. Social habits influencing rise of printing, e.g., pilgrimages, card playing. Wood and metal cuts; relation to miniature painting. Tools, kinds of wood and metal used. Friction printing and the first presses. Characteristics distinguishing Flemish, German, Italian, French schools. Trend from line to tone substituted for color.

Readings in Carter, Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westward; Hind, History of Woodcut; Dodgson, Dotted Prints in the British Museum, etc. Facsimiles in Courboin, Histoire de la gravure en France; Dodgson, Woodcuts of the Fifteenth Century in the John Rylands Library.

Study of original impressions.

CALLIGRAPHY AND THE BEGINNINGS OF TYPOGRAPHY.

Stimulus of Renaissance writing and decoration. Venetian and Florentine schools of humanistic masters. Neo-Caroline movement: Sinibaldi, et al. Casting of first alphabets, “freezing” of hitherto fluid forms. Gutenberg, Schoeffer, Fust, Jenson, Griffo, et al. Dürer’s study of alphabets; Tory’s Champfleury, etc. Processes: type cutting, type casting. Work of representative early presses. Composition, imposition, presswork, etc. Typography as simple extension of old scriptorial tradition; design and arrangement. Type design from Aldus to Caslon.

Readings in Encyclopædia Britannica, 14th edition, Mr. Stanley Morison, “Calligraphy”; in The Fleuron, II, the same authority on “Towards an Ideal Type,” and elsewhere, including his editions of such writing masters as Vicentino. Tory, Champ Fleury, Ives translation. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, DeVinne edition. Nash, Calligraphy and Printing in the Sixteenth Century, edited from supposed Plantin text. Study of original specimens.

EARLY ENGRAVING AND ETCHING. INTAGLIO METHODS.

Northern work, e.g., Master of Playing Cards, Master E. S., Schongauer, Dürer, Lucas van Leyden. Linear depiction and devices to give plasticity. Use of burin and dry-point. Plate printing and the rolling press. Italian work: broad and fine manner; Tarrochi cards, Otto prints; Mantegna, et al. The etching process; combination with dry-point. Comparison etched and engraved line. Tools and materials. Dürer’s experiments on iron. Detailed study of Rembrandt.

Readings in Hind, History of Engraving and Etching, and his Catalogue of Rembrandt’s Etchings. Old authors, e.g., Bosse. Lumsden, Art of Etching. Study of and reports on originals.

BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN MOOD.

Goya, chiefly his aquatints, Desastres de la Guerra, Caprichos. Comparison with contemporaries as to use of graphic symbols; attention to artist’s problem of communication through unfamiliar or personal reinterpretation of recognized symbols. William Blake; technique of relief etching; his wood engravings, e.g., Vergil; illustrations for Book of Job, Dante. Calvert and Palmer. Nineteenth century etchers, e.g., Meryon, Haden, Whistler. Thomas Bewick and white line wood engraving. Relative possibilities of plank and end grain; reproductive wood engraving; periodical illustration. Consideration of economic and social factors rapidly extending circulation of printed pictures and type; literacy correlations.

Readings in Jackson, History of Wood Engraving; Bewick, Memoir, Linton, History of Wood Engraving in America; Prideaux, Aquatint Engraving; Hind, Great Engravers.

Study of original prints and good facsimiles of them.

LITHOGRAPHY AND THE RISE OF DISPLAY ADVERTISING.

Senefelder’s planographic process; its special contribution to the times. Outstanding masters, e.g., Daumier. Political and social satire, personal caricature. Popular prints such as Currier & Ives, Kellogg as influence and commentary on pioneer America. Pictorial advertising; first phases of mass production economy symbolized in prints. Novelty in letter-forms, e.g., Thorne contrasted with Bulmer, Bensley; Miller and Richards following Bodoni, Baskerville. Reaction; revival of old face. Victorian ideas and ideals; “progress” in print. Technological advances; presses and type-casting devices. Evolution of handwriting.

Readings in Senefelder, Complete Course of Lithography; Updike, Printing Types; selected articles in periodicals: The Dolphin, Typography, Signature. Peters, Currier & Ives.

Study of prints, e.g., Daumier and Gavarni, Le Charivari, La Caricature, etc.; Currier & Ives; advertising specimens.

BOOK DESIGN: LAYOUT MAN AND TYPOGRAPHER.

Moxon’s definition; traditional status of specialist in choosing, arranging symbols; Fournier’s definition. Morris, his principles, work, influence; artist-scholar-printer. DeVinne, Updike, Rogers, Rollins, Dwiggins, et al. Problems of page harmony, experiments with type and pictures. Yellow Book, Neolith, Imprint. Archeology applied to letter-forms, resuscitation of styles in ornament. Goodhue, Ruzicka, Cleland. “Monumental” printing. Work of presses, e.g., Chiswick, Kelmscott, Doves, Riverside, Merrymount, Roycroft, Rudge, etc. Special role of great university presses. Printers’ societies, book clubs, typographic libraries, schools and courses.

Readings in DeVinne, Practice of Typography and in such representative periodicals as Printing Art Monthly; Morris, Notes on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press; Updike, In the Day’s Work; Notes on the Merrymount Press; Morison, Four Centuries of Fine Printing; Hornby, Ashendene Press; Dwiggins, Layout in Advertising, Form Letters.

Study of specimens like Kelmscott Chaucer, Merrymount Book of Common Prayer, Oxford Lectern Bible.

PRINTING PRODUCTION AND PUBLISHING. TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES.

Photographic processes: line etching and halftone; photogelatine or collotype; photogravure; photolithography. Photography in type manufacture, implementing eclectic movement. Pantographic matrix engraving, further implementing revivals. Electrotyping. Fourdrinier papermaking machine, new sources of pulp; new surfaces, colors, textures. Effect on artistic style of drawing for mechanical processes. Publicity as expanding field for graphic artist, e.g., book jackets. Increase of photographic newspapers and periodicals; significance of the factual shadow displacing symbolized reality. Competition of publishers stimulated by mass production methods and effect on style; novelty, “smash” in type and pictures.

Readings in Penrose’s Annual and trade publications. Study of magazines, books, typefounders’ catalogues, posters, and advertising material.

“ORIGINAL” GRAPHIC MEDIUMS AND ARTISTS. EXPERIMENTALISTS.

Compromise and refusal to compromise with technological advances. Representative artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Gauguin and reaction to photographic “faithfulness to nature.” Attempts to find adequate graphic symbols for inner truth, leaving superficial statement of fact to photograph. Graphic accompaniments to political movements, e.g., Masereel and Flemish reversion gothicwards; Kollwitz in Germany. Break with essential tradition in Bauhaus; attempts to use letters as decoration, individually or in mass, ignoring reading function. Wood engraving, woodcut and lithography as newly favored mediums for “original” artist; review of representative work, book illustration and separate prints. Calligraphic renascence following work of Johnston; present growing use of handwritten forms, freed from drudgery by typewriter, for display with printed text; experiments with calligraphic texts.

Readings in The Fleuron, Signature, The Dolphin; Mueller, Woodcuts and Wood Engraving; art periodicals.

Note

Reprinted from Volume I, Number 1 (June 1940) of Print: A Quarterly Journal of the Graphic Arts.

One thousand copies of this book

were printed and bound at

Meriden-Stinehour Press

in Lunenburg, Vermont.

The type is Linotronic Baskerville; the paper is Monadnock Caress.