Graphic Arts

Dale Roylance died Sunday morning, 19 May 2013, at University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro, New Jersey. He was 89 years old and had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Born on 9 December 1924, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Dale Ronald Roylance was the youngest of Kenneth and Una Roylance’s three children. He was raised as a Mormon and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943. When he was released, Dale moved to San Francesco to study art history at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1955, Dale came to Princeton University, where he was taken under the wing of Gillett G. Griffin, curator of graphic arts at Firestone Library. For several years, he served as Gillett’s assistant, working on a variety of exhibitions and research projects. Dale recalled, “In all that time, the influence of my first mentor, Gillett Good Griffin, was constant and inspirational. Few people in my experience can match his enthusiasm for the arts or his discernment for quality in the visual arts.”

From 1960 to 1979, Dale worked as curator of the arts of the book at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library but was persuaded to return to Princeton in 1979 to fill his mentor’s position as curator of graphic arts. Dale held this title until his retirement in 1995 and even then, continued to assist with exhibitions and projects until 2001. In the fall of 2004 Roylance joined Princeton Academy’s Manor House Library project where he helped to organize their book collection and mount small exhibits.

During his long and distinguished career, Roylance prepared over 100 exhibitions and worked on forty-four publications including European Graphic Arts: the Art of the Book from Gutenberg to Picasso (1986) and American Graphic Arts: a Chronology to 1900 in Books, Prints, and Drawings (1990).

Many of his friends will remember Dale’s a longstanding aversion to driving. He lived for many years on Scott Avenue in Princeton Junction specifically because of its proximity to the Dinky, which he rode to campus every day. As he told Town Topics in 1995, “I think having it go on such a pleasant route, sort of over the river and through the woods, is terrific. … it must be a very nice experience for someone coming from New York City who has never been here to get on the train and see the landscape change in front of his eyes.”

There will be a memorial service but a date has not yet been scheduled.

 

How do you store fragile prints that are five or more feet long and nearly three feet wide? Unfortunately, the past solution was to roll them up and store them on top of various cabinets, in the few inches between the furniture and the ceiling. Keeping the prints “out of sight” was not the best idea, as no one was aware of the water damage being done by a leak. We have now rescued a number of these fine art prints, many by the artist Leonard Baskin, and saved them from further decay.

Thanks to our Special Collections Paper Conservator, Ted Stanley, they are being washed one-at-a-time because of their enormous size. We are rehousing them in large, flat folders stored on oversize shelves. Here’s an example of before and after.

Koninglyke Almanach. Beginnende van ‘t jaar 1705 … &c. : waar in zeer duidelyk vertoond word De Loop der Zon des ongerechtigheids, Ofte Tooneel des Oorlogs in Europa, Behelzende de zinnebeelden der VII. Helde-Deugden …. = Almanac royal … Le cours du soleil d’injustice, ou, Theatre de la guerre en Europe … VII. vertus heroiques (Brussels: ten Koste de Compagnie van L.v.S. L.L.T. F.G. M.D. F.d.L. C.l.C. en L.d.D.B. &c., 1705). Series title: ‘t Lust-hof van Momus.

One of a series of satirical pamphlets ridiculing Louis XIV, King of France (1638-1715) and the role of France in the War of the Spanish Succession from 1701 to 1714. The imprint is a fake but the Dutch art dealer, cartographer, and engraver Carel Allard (1648-1709) is assumed to be the publisher. The plates are generally attributed to Allard, Abraham Allard and Balthasar Goris, although several institutions have also attributed them to Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708) a Dutch painter and printmaker remembered, in particular, for his political caricatures of Louis XIV.

In the first plate, [above right] Louis XIV is sitting in the middle of the sun with twenty-four rays. For each ray is a crime committed by the king, with verses and explanation in Dutch and French.

Created under the artistic direction of Umberto Brunelleschi (1879-1949), La Guirlande is one of the rarest of the Art Deco magazines. Early in his career, Brunelleschi produced fierce caricatures for L’assiette au beurre, a satirical weekly published in Paris from 1901 to 1914. He signed his drawings Aroun-Al-Raxid.

Mainly successful as an illustrator, Brunelleschi combined elements from the eighteenth-century galanteries with the buffoonery of the Commedia dell’arte. He contributed illustrations to numerous publications including Gazette du bon ton and Le rire. Between his numerous voyages, he illustrated Goethe’s Werther, Alfred de Musset’s La nuit vénitienne, Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy stories, among others.—Benezit Dictionary of Artists

By the time the Irish playwright John O’Keeffe (1747-1833) wrote his most famous farce Wild Oats; or, The Strolling Gentlemen in 1791, he was already a celebrated author. Within two years, the Old American Company in New York City staged a production and an American edition of the play was printed by T. and J. Swords for Manhattan bookseller and stationer John Reid. To decorate the volume, American engraver Cornelius Tiebout was commissioned to create a frontispiece (seen here).

According to the historian D. M. Stauffer, Tiebout was the “first American-born professional engraver to produce really meritorious work, …significant for his role in introducing the English method of stippled portraiture to America.” Like many early printmakers, Tiebout apprenticed to a silversmith where he learned to carve in metal. Further training with the British artist James Heath led to his expertise in stipple engraving.

It is notable that Tiebout chooses to illustrate one of the humorous supporting characters rather than the leading man. His print offers a full-length portrait of the Quaker Ephraim Smooth and quotes his lines, “Why dost thou suffer him to put into the hands of thy servants, books of tragedies, and books of comedies, prelude, interlude, yea, all lewd. My spirit doth wax wrath.— I say unto thee, a play-house is the school for the old dragon, and a playbook the primer of Belzebub.”

For a contemporary production of Wild Oats, see:

Other sources on Tiebout: W. Dunlap: A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (New York, 1834); American Engravers upon Copper and Steel, 3 vols (i-ii, New York, 1907; iii, Philadelphia, 1917), i, pp. 271-2; ii, pp. 520-33; iii, pp. 271-84 [vols i-ii by D. M. Stauffer, vol. iii by M. Fielding]; N. E. Cunningham jr: The Image of Thomas Jefferson in the Public Eye: Portraits for the People, 1800-1809 (Charlottesville, VA, 1981) [disc. of Tiebout’s Jefferson prts, incl. newspaper advertisements and publishers’ corr.]; W. C. Wick: George Washington, an American Icon: The Eighteenth-century Graphic Portraits (Washington, DC, 1982) and G. W. R. Ward, ed.: The American Illustrated Book in the Nineteenth Century (Winterthur, DE, 1987).

When William Heath published a satire on Sir Francis Burdett’s opposition to Gale Jones’s imprisonment, Heath represented Spencer Perceval and his associates as a hydra or monster with multiple heads. It is a strong visual image but Heath was of course not the first to use the device. Knowing who he stole it from is complicated since the caricaturists borrowed and stole their parodies quite freely.


Surely Heath was reading Samuel Tipper’s magazine The Satirist or Monthly Meteor, in which Samuel De Wilde presented another variation of the scene in The Opposition Hydra, or Brittania’s Worst Foe. This might be the most immediate inspiration for Heath.


Or perhaps it Thomas Rowlandson’s The Champion of Oakhampton, Attacking the Hydra of Gloucester Place, published on March 15 1809? Especially with the subtitle he added from Horace’s Epistles, “Bellva Multorum es Capitum!!” (Thou Art the Beast of Many Heads).

And what about Rowlandson’s 1784 print, The Champion of the People, in combination with James Gillray’s St. George & the Dragon two years earlier?

It’s hard to say.

Here are a few others.

Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger (1805-1880), Peter Joh. Nep. Geiger’s historische Original-Handzeichnungen bestehend in neunzig Blättern mit einem erklärenden Texte (Peter Joh. Nep. Geiger’s original historic drawings consisting in ninety leaves with an explanatory text) Herausgegeben von Anton Ziegler. [Vienna, 1861.] 6 vols, First edition, privately printed. Graphic Arts Collection 2013- in process

Using linear visual narratives, Gieger chronicles Austrian history from the Middle Ages to Archduchess Leopoldina’s 1817 arrival in Rio de Janeiro as Empress of Brazil. The work first began to appear that same year as Historische Handzeichnungen, Vienna, kaiserlich-königliche Hof- und Staatsdruckerei. Graphic Arts recently acquired a compilation of the entire set of Gieger’s history.

Peter Geiger (1805-1880) was a respected history painter and illustrator, producing popular images based on the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare, as well as Austrian authors such as Grillparzer and Stifter. It was his work for an earlier project, Anton Ziegler’s Vaterländische Immortellen aus dem Gebiete der österreichischen Geschichte (1838-1840), which first brought him considerable public attention. Although Princeton does not own this multi-volume work, it is available through itunes. A note of caution when searching Geiger online: aside from Royal portraiture and literary illustration, he also had a lucrative business creating erotic art.

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired sixty German diploma specimens collected and bound into an album with the gilt title Musterbuch B. Diplome (Pattern Book B. Diploma). Each sample was printed by the company Förster & Borries in Zwickau, which is south of Leipzig. The collection highlights various techniques and mediums, including chromolithographs, collotypes, wood engravings and embossing. The largest are 60 x 48 cm (or approximately 2 feet) and many offer bold art nouveau style borders. Here are a few of the samples:

Current Princeton University diplomas are written in Latin and have the University seal but no border or decoration. Here is Ryan Truchelut, Class of 2008, with his official document.

In the March/April 1920 issue of Proverbe. Feuille mensuelle pour la justification des mots (Proverb. A Monthly Pamphlet for the Justification of Words), editor Paul Eluard (1895-1952) selected two works by Francis Picabia (1879-1953) for the front page. “La jeune fille” (The Young Girl) features a hole or vagina in the paper surrounded by the words “Bracelet de la vie” (Bracelet of Life) at the top left and “Machine de bons mots” (Machine of Witticisms) frames the words “Oreille fatigante” (Tiring the ear) on the bottom right.

For his own contribution, Eluard wrote:
Hoo! Que disions-nous? Que disions-nous?
Nous avons perdu la mémoire
Hoo! Que faisions-nous? Que faisions-nous?
Nous avons perdu la mémoire

Hoo! What were we saying? What were we saying?
We’ve lost the memory
Hoo! What were we doing? What were we doing?
We’ve lost the memory

Also in March of 1920, the front page of Picabia’s magazine 391 featured his manifesto on Dada, proclaiming (here translated):
Art is a pharmaceutical product for idiots.
Tables turn, thanks to the spirits; pictures and other works of art are like strong- box-tables, the spirit is within them and gets more and more inspired as the prices rise in the salerooms.
Comedy, comedy, comedy, comedy, comedy, dear friends.
…Dada, on the other hand, wants nothing, absolutely nothing, and what it does is to make the public say “We understand nothing, nothing, nothing.”
“The Dadaists are nothing, nothing, nothing and they will surely succeed in nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Both Picabia and Eluard show the influence by their colleague Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), particularly the lines from his poem “Victoire”:
Ô bouches l’homme est a la recherche d’un nouveau langage
Auquel le grammairien d’aucune langue n’aura rien à dire

O mouths, humanity seeks a new language
Beyond the reach of grammarians

Our complete run of Eluard’s Proverbe has been digitized and will soon be available through Princeton Blue Mountain project. http://library.princeton.edu/projects/bluemountain/journals

“…Whenever I make a book,” said Amsterdam-based graphic designer Irma Boom, “I start by making a tiny one. Usually I make five, six or seven for each book, as filters for my ideas and to help me to see the structure clearly. I have hundreds of those small books and am so fond of them.”

Recently, Boom created a miniature flipbook for the Rijksmuseum, incorporating every self-portrait painted by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. Is it, as Mark Lamster called one of her miniatures, “a big book that is paradoxically small.”

Boom established the Irma Boom Company in 1991 and the following year, joined Yale University as a Senior Critic in the School of Art. Of the 250 books she has created, approximately 70 have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design.

“I honor the tradition of the book,” said Boom, “but do not want to stop there. My ambition is to develop the significance and the limits of the book. Structures that come from new media, the way that text and images are treated have given the book a new impulse. It is important to experiment … the book will keep its vitality. There’s a lot to explore in a technical way and even more importantly in terms of content and form. Happily through books, the past, present and future can take on profoundly contemporary results and become part of our everyday.”

Thank you to Mathieu Lommen, curator at the Special Collections department of the Amsterdam University Library, for this rare Boom treasure.

To hear the designer talk about her work, see this video from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis:

The Graphic Arts Collection holds a small selection of paper and model theaters, along with sets, costumes, figures, and props. Several are particular stages, such as the Globe Theatre where William Shakespeare's plays were performed. The rest are 19th century toy theaters produced by such manufacturers as Benjamin Pollock and Skelt & Webb. A larger selection can be found in the Cotsen Children's Library.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was given a paper theater as a child and remembered the toy in an essay for the Magazine of Art published in April 1884 entitled, "A Penny Plain And Twopence Coloured."

"These words will be familiar to all students of Skelt's Juvenile Drama. That national monument, after having changed its name to Park's, to Webb's, to Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's, has now become, for the most part, a memory. Some of its pillars, like Stonehenge, are still afoot, the rest clean vanished. It may be the Museum numbers a full set; and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else her gracious Majesty, may boast their great collections; but to the plain private person they are become, like Raphaels, unattainable..."

"There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain stationer's shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins the city of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we made a party to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since in those days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak, this of itself had been enough to hallow it. But there was more than that. In the Leith Walk window, all the year round, there stood displayed a theatre in working order, with a "forest set," a "combat," and a few "robbers carousing" in the slides; and below and about, dearer tenfold to me! the plays themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another. Long and often have I lingered there with empty pockets."

Note the two finger holes for raising and lowering the curtain.

To search these and other theater resources, see the Visuals database: http://libweb5.princeton.edu/RBVisuals/index.htm

K.K. Merker, letterpress printer, book designer, fly fisherman, pheasant hunter, jazz singer, poker player and poet, passed away on Sunday, April 28 in Iowa City. Princeton University Library is fortunate to hold at least one copy of each of his books, thanks to the generosity of Daniel and Mary Jane Woodward. The following information on Mr. Merker’s life is thanks to the University of Iowa Center for the Book, presented here with a few of our volumes.

Kim Merker was the founder of the University of Iowa Center for the Book. His vision led to the creation of the UICB in 1986, the establishment of a certificate program in 1996, and an MFA degree in 2011. Through the Windhover Press, established in 1967 as one of the first teaching fine presses at a university, and the subsequent programs at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, Merker was a major influence in the establishment and growth of many fine printing and book art programs across the country.

Kim Merker came to Iowa City in 1956 as a poet and a student in the Writers’ Workshop. While at the University he had the opportunity to work with Harry Duncan, who operated the highly regarded Cummington Press and who was then the director of the Typography Laboratory in the School of Journalism. Duncan and Merker collaborated on a number of publications. The Stone Wall Press was established by Merker and Raeburn Miller, a fellow student in the Writers’ Workshop who was soon to leave Iowa City in pursuit of an academic career.

Merker published such renowned poets as Ezra Pound and Theodore Roethke as well as younger poets such as W. S. Merwin, Donald Justice, Mark Strand, and Philip Levine. As Dana Gioia wrote about Kim Merker in 1997, “To his lasting credit, he has published the writers, mainly poets, in whose literary merits he has believed. Today a checklist of his books may look like a Who’s Who of contemporary poetry, but Merker first published many of those authors early in their careers.”

The Stone Wall books have been issued in editions of 200 to 300 copies. They employ fine printing papers, impeccably chosen type designs, nearly flawless hand-composition, meticulous printing executed on hand-presses, and hand-binding. The approach to design exercised in the books is pristine and classical in nature, and color is used with restraint. Theodore Roethke’s Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical is a particularly elegant representation of the Stone Wall quality.

The establishment of the Windhover Press by Kim Merker in 1967 at The University of Iowa innovatively situated a private press in an academic setting. Windhover was in part a teaching press. Students with interests in bibliography, publishing, or bookmaking were able to work directly with Merker and to participate in the design and execution of the publications. The Windhover bibliography includes translations, poetry by distinguished international writers and little-known or unpublished literature by such historical figures as Thoreau and F. Scott Fitzgerald. John Hoole’s Journal Narrative Relative to Dr. Johnson’s Last Illness, a manuscript of primarily scholarly interest, is representative of the diversity of Windhover’s publications. Edition sizes and production methods are similar to those of the Stone Wall Press, and the high standards visible in those books were maintained under Merker’s direction.

In lieu of flowers the family requests that donations be made in Kim’s name to the University of Iowa Center for the Book, which he founded and in which his legacy lives on. A memorial service, interment and celebratory poker game are planned for this fall, details to be forthcoming. An obituary is expected to be published in the Iowa City Press Citizen at http://www.press-citizen.com

Information in this announcement were derived from the following sources, which provide additional information on K.K. Merker, the Stone Wall Press, the Windhover Press, and a checklist of books by Kim Merker.

Karl Kimber Merker announcement The University of Iowa Center for the Book, http://book.grad.uiowa.edu/news/04-29-2013/karl-kimber-merker-1932-2013

Amert, Kay, “Works Printed by K.K. Merker: the Stone Wall Press, the Windhover Press, and Others,” Introduction Kay Amert, Checklists O. M. Brack, Jr. and K. K. Merker, Books at Iowa 25, November 1976, The University of Iowa, http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/bai/amert.htm

O’Connell, Bonnie, “The Quality of Response: Kim Merker and the Literary Fine Press,” Books at Iowa 64, April 1996, The University of Iowa, http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/bai/oconnell.htm

Berger, Sidney E., Printing & the Mind of Merker: A Bibliographical Study , Grolier Club, New York, 1997.