This is the text of a talk I gave at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts on December 7, 2017.
Sara Ludewig curated a lovely exhibit including some helpful insights about The Limited Editions Club and George Macy. Allow me to reiterate a few points that appear throughout this little chat:
• The Club was founded in 1929
• George Macy’s mission was to produce beautiful, illustrated editions of classic pieces of literature.
• Each text was produced in 1,500 copies and signed by the illustrator
• Macy hired the best illustrators, designers, and typographers to create original work.
• Each title was printed from original type and engravings, and used fine papers and cover materials.
In considering these and other points, I’d like to uncover a little bit more about The Limited Editions Club by examining an item that belonged to another collector—well known, I’m sure, to the Alcotts and to the MCBA community: Governor Elmer L. Andersen.
Governor Andersen’s personal library came to the University of Minnesota in March 1999, housed in the library that bears his name. Within his collection are a number of works from The Limited Editions Club. What caught my eye were some of the earliest items: not the books themselves, but what we might call ancillary publications.
What particularly caught my eye is a prospectus, copyright 1929, for The Club. The cover is in marbled paper with the simple title, “The Limited Editions Club,” printed on a label and affixed to the board. Penciled inside on the flyleaf by an unknown bookseller is the note “Printed by D. B. Updike” and the price: $7.50. A back page, the colophon, reveals the same information: “Printed by D. B. Updike | The Merrymount Press | Boston.” Laid in the back of the book, and also printed on page 25, is an application to The Club, located at 551 Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Let us unpack this slender volume a little further—as a collector is wont to do. Already, at this point, there are a number of questions. Who marbled the paper? Who bound the prospectus? This is not noted in the colophon. But before addressing the prospectus, a bit more on the application.
The application and its address are intriguing. Unless street numbers have changed, 551 Fifth Avenue, New York is the site of the Fred F. French Building, designed by architects H. Douglas Ives and the firm of Sloan & Robertson. Erected in 1927, with a striking art deco façade and decorations and designs influenced by ancient Middle Eastern art—including the recently discovered tomb of King Tutankhamun—the French Building rose to the highest of heights on Fifth Avenue. Fred F. French was a real estate developer, who believed in spending money in the design and decoration of his buildings. Does this sound familiar? He “believed in spending money in the design and decoration of his buildings” in the same way George Macy thought about books. He named the building after himself and located his offices within. One wonders: did French and Macy know each other?
The application offered three payment options: 1) “to pay the postman ten dollars for each book upon its delivery,” 2) “to send you [the LEC] ten dollars for each book whenever you notify me that it is ready,” or 3) take “a discount of ten per cent., and enclose herewith my check for $108, for which the first twelve books will be sent me without further charge.” Ten dollars in 1929 is worth somewhere around $141 today. A pre-paid, discounted membership of $108 in 1929 would set one back by about $1,525 today. According to the Internal Revenue Service, the average net income for 1929 was $6,132.22 for all returns and $8,337.30 for taxable returns. So a full $120 membership in TLEC in 1929 represented somewhere between 1.4 and 1.9 percent of a person’s annual income—the equivalent of what we might pay if we bought coffee five times a week for a year.
After providing a payment preference, name, address, and bank reference, the applicant was invited to refer others to The Club. “I think these people might want to apply,” the form read, “for membership in The Limited Editions Club.”
I’m not sure, had I been living back then (and doing what I do), what my chances of becoming a member might have been. In the Prospectus, Macy states that “[m]ore than twenty-five thousand people in the United States are actively engaged in the collection of limited editions. They want beautiful books in their homes, books so well designed and so well printed that they are a joy to own and to preserve. And they want to own books which always maintain, and usually increase, their values.” If my math and Macy’s numbers are correct, 1,500 members in the LEC represented 6% of the total number of limited edition collectors. I’m not sure where he got his 25,000, but there might be a clue in those individuals already identified in the Prospectus as enrolled members of the Club. This is how the Prospectus reads regarding “The Members:”
Notice, too, the strategy Macy employed by seeding the membership with men—and they are all men—from the Institute of Graphic Arts, the Grolier Club, publishers, booksellers, and collectors. No attempt will be made to limit the membership to any one class, but one does wonder: how many women were members of TLEC? How many people of color? These are questions we can ask today. It is doubtful such questions came to mind in the late 1920s.
A minor kerfuffle erupted on the pages of the New York Times regarding the value of limited editions. In a May 12, 1929 “Notes on Rare Books” column, the unnamed writer noted:
As we know from the exhibit, The Limited Editions Club published 548 titles between 1929 and 1985. It survived the Great Depression and during those grim 1930s employed a number of artists and illustrators. Many of these books increased in value. By most measures, one can call this a success. It was, to many, “an altogether valuable help.”
The Prospectus raises a number of other questions. One wonders, for example, where those wood-blocks and engravings used in the production of LEC volumes are today. I’m sure they are as equally collectible as the volumes themselves. A quick search on eBay show 997 items for the term “Limited Editions Club.” A search on the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America website yielded 260 items, with some LEC titles listed for five figures. (But then, collectors and curators don’t like to discuss how much an item might be worth.) My quick searches for wood-blocks produced no results, but I’m certain they are out there, somewhere. I know of at least one block, alas, not used in a LEC production currently up for auction.
There are, of course, the printers and papermakers and binders and designers to consider. But that is probably a topic for another talk. Suffice it to say here that the Prospectus for The Limited Editions Club was produced by the American printer and typographical historian Daniel Berkeley Updike (died December 29, 1941), who was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 14, 1860. As a teenager, after leaving school, Updike assisted at a local library after the librarian had taken ill, a thought that warms my heart. About three years later, in early 1880, he moved to Boston, where he found work as an errand boy for the publishers Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
Updike was fascinated by book and print-making. While carrying proofs from the printers on Beacon Hill to the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Updike studied the pages and imagined what each page might look like coming from his own hand. He trained as a printer but it was typographic design that interested him even more. In 1893 he opened his own studio, designing type fonts. Three years later, in 1896, Updike founded the Merrymount Press.
In its list of the first twelve books, the Prospectus tells us who was involved as printer or designer. This list included designers and/or printers W. A. Kittredge, Frederic Warde (born in Wells, Minnesota), William Edwin Rudge, Allen Lewis, Norman T. A. Munder, Carl Purington Rollins, Daniel Berkeley Updike, John Henry Nash, W. A. Dwiggins, Thomas Maitland Cleland, and Frederic W. Goudy. Presses included The Lakeside Press in Chicago, the Harbor Press in New York, the Merrymount Press in Boston, the Marchbanks Press in New York, the Georgian Press in Westport, the Village Press in Marlborough, and the Grabhorn Press in San Francisco. Interestingly, only one woman appears in this list, in the eleventh volume, which was to be “printed by Mr. and Mrs. Goudy at The Village Press.”
Finally, being a curator, I wondered about the archives of The Limited Editions Club. I’m curious about that list of names George Macy was so eager to share with the correspondent for the Times, or for more information about the printers, designers, papermakers, and binders. Also, I’d like to know which edition numbers were assigned to each member. Who always received Copy 1 or Copy 100 of each edition? I think it would be very interesting, if we don’t know already, the provenance of volumes on display today, along with others in the Alcott collection. It would be fascinating to know who owned these volumes and when.
And where are the archives? Happily, they are under the excellent stewardship of colleagues at the University of Texas in Austin. The archives of the George Macy Companies, including both the Limited Editions Club and The Heritage Press, were purchased by the Harry Ransom Center in 1970. The archive includes the original art works that were used in Limited Editions Club publications and the few that were used for The Heritage Press. The art files contain 6,731 items by over 100 artists, and include original watercolors; pen and ink, wash, and charcoal drawings; colored overlays; proofs; original photographs; and photographic negatives. I think a field trip at some future date might be in order.
Thank you for this opportunity to reflect a bit on The Limited Editions Club, the legacy of James and Marilyn Alcott, and the continuing work of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.
The Limited Editions Club published 548 titles between the years 1929 and 1985. Upon George Macy’s death in 1956 his wife, Helen Macy, took control of the business. In 1970, the Limited Editions Club was sold along with the rest of the Heritage Press to the Boise Cascade Corporation.
George Macy’s love of books and commitment to the art of the book is visible in the large variety of publications by the Limited Editions Club. All of the Limited Edition Club books on display were once held in the private library of James and Marilynn Alcott and are now a part of MCBA’s collection. James Alcott was the Vice President of Cowles Media Company and was a founding member of MCBA, serving as the first board president. The books featured here are demonstrative of the art found within the Limited Editions Club.
* * * * * * *
Sara Ludewig curated a lovely exhibit including some helpful insights about The Limited Editions Club and George Macy. Allow me to reiterate a few points that appear throughout this little chat:
• The Club was founded in 1929
• George Macy’s mission was to produce beautiful, illustrated editions of classic pieces of literature.
• Each text was produced in 1,500 copies and signed by the illustrator
• Macy hired the best illustrators, designers, and typographers to create original work.
• Each title was printed from original type and engravings, and used fine papers and cover materials.
In considering these and other points, I’d like to uncover a little bit more about The Limited Editions Club by examining an item that belonged to another collector—well known, I’m sure, to the Alcotts and to the MCBA community: Governor Elmer L. Andersen.
Governor Andersen’s personal library came to the University of Minnesota in March 1999, housed in the library that bears his name. Within his collection are a number of works from The Limited Editions Club. What caught my eye were some of the earliest items: not the books themselves, but what we might call ancillary publications.
What particularly caught my eye is a prospectus, copyright 1929, for The Club. The cover is in marbled paper with the simple title, “The Limited Editions Club,” printed on a label and affixed to the board. Penciled inside on the flyleaf by an unknown bookseller is the note “Printed by D. B. Updike” and the price: $7.50. A back page, the colophon, reveals the same information: “Printed by D. B. Updike | The Merrymount Press | Boston.” Laid in the back of the book, and also printed on page 25, is an application to The Club, located at 551 Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Let us unpack this slender volume a little further—as a collector is wont to do. Already, at this point, there are a number of questions. Who marbled the paper? Who bound the prospectus? This is not noted in the colophon. But before addressing the prospectus, a bit more on the application.
The application and its address are intriguing. Unless street numbers have changed, 551 Fifth Avenue, New York is the site of the Fred F. French Building, designed by architects H. Douglas Ives and the firm of Sloan & Robertson. Erected in 1927, with a striking art deco façade and decorations and designs influenced by ancient Middle Eastern art—including the recently discovered tomb of King Tutankhamun—the French Building rose to the highest of heights on Fifth Avenue. Fred F. French was a real estate developer, who believed in spending money in the design and decoration of his buildings. Does this sound familiar? He “believed in spending money in the design and decoration of his buildings” in the same way George Macy thought about books. He named the building after himself and located his offices within. One wonders: did French and Macy know each other?
The application offered three payment options: 1) “to pay the postman ten dollars for each book upon its delivery,” 2) “to send you [the LEC] ten dollars for each book whenever you notify me that it is ready,” or 3) take “a discount of ten per cent., and enclose herewith my check for $108, for which the first twelve books will be sent me without further charge.” Ten dollars in 1929 is worth somewhere around $141 today. A pre-paid, discounted membership of $108 in 1929 would set one back by about $1,525 today. According to the Internal Revenue Service, the average net income for 1929 was $6,132.22 for all returns and $8,337.30 for taxable returns. So a full $120 membership in TLEC in 1929 represented somewhere between 1.4 and 1.9 percent of a person’s annual income—the equivalent of what we might pay if we bought coffee five times a week for a year.
After providing a payment preference, name, address, and bank reference, the applicant was invited to refer others to The Club. “I think these people might want to apply,” the form read, “for membership in The Limited Editions Club.”
I’m not sure, had I been living back then (and doing what I do), what my chances of becoming a member might have been. In the Prospectus, Macy states that “[m]ore than twenty-five thousand people in the United States are actively engaged in the collection of limited editions. They want beautiful books in their homes, books so well designed and so well printed that they are a joy to own and to preserve. And they want to own books which always maintain, and usually increase, their values.” If my math and Macy’s numbers are correct, 1,500 members in the LEC represented 6% of the total number of limited edition collectors. I’m not sure where he got his 25,000, but there might be a clue in those individuals already identified in the Prospectus as enrolled members of the Club. This is how the Prospectus reads regarding “The Members:”
The membership of The Limited Editions Club is restricted to fifteen hundred. All of the books will be printed from the original type or the original wood-blocks and engravings made for the illustrations. When books are printed from these original processes, it is felt that only sixteen or seventeen hundred equally perfect impressions can be made. The logical limit for such a book is therefore an edition bordering upon this figure. For that reason, the books printed for this Club will be printed in editions of fifteen hundred; and for that reason (emphasis in the original), the membership is limited to that number. Each book in each edition will be numbered, and each member will receive the same number in each edition. These numbers are assigned to the members in the order in which their applications are received.
No attempt will be made to limit the membership to any one class of person. Prominent members of The Institute of Graphic Arts, such as John Clyde Oswald, Burton Emmett, William Reydel, are enrolled. Prominent members of The Grolier Club, such as Earnest Elmo Calkins, Melbert B. Cary, Jr., Parke Simmons, Mitchell Kennerly, are enrolled. Prominent book publishers, such as Alfred A. Knopf, F. N. Doubleday, M. Lincoln Schuster, Crosby Gaige, are enrolled. Booksellers and book collectors are in the membership. And hundreds of people who just love fine books.What strikes one immediately is that it was the materiality of the printing process that determined membership size, not, as I immediately presumed, the population of limited edition collectors. Type, wood-blocks, and engravings—based, we assume, on the testimony of expert craftspeople—are good for sixteen or seventeen hundred perfect impressions. After that, the quality is diminished. Fifteen hundred, allowing for waste, is the perfect number.
Notice, too, the strategy Macy employed by seeding the membership with men—and they are all men—from the Institute of Graphic Arts, the Grolier Club, publishers, booksellers, and collectors. No attempt will be made to limit the membership to any one class, but one does wonder: how many women were members of TLEC? How many people of color? These are questions we can ask today. It is doubtful such questions came to mind in the late 1920s.
A minor kerfuffle erupted on the pages of the New York Times regarding the value of limited editions. In a May 12, 1929 “Notes on Rare Books” column, the unnamed writer noted:
If the book-collecting game is to remain interesting to any large number of its adherents, it must be played within decent price limits. The inordinate rise in the money value of rare and early examples of English literature, manuscripts, association books and typographical masterpieces left many collectors bewildered.This, no doubt, refers to such stellar results at auction as seen in the January 1929 Jerome Kern sale which realized over $1.7 million—about $24 million in today’s dollars. The unnamed writer continued:
Substitute fields of enjoyment had to be found for them [the collectors] and one noted the mad scramble for first editions of prominent living authors, the exploitation of the New England school of literature and books remembered from childhood, and, inevitably, the manufacture of artificial rarities in the form of limited editions….Publishers have grown careless in their definition of a limited edition: it may embrace as few as twenty-five or as many as 3,000 copies of a book….Sensitive collectors are outraged at the turn of affairs, but this new game continues merrily.The drumbeat continued in a June 9 “Notes on Rare Books” column with these anonymous and pointed observations:
Will someone please start a Last Edition Club to reprint, once and for all, in an unlimited quantity all the hackneyed old favorites, so competently edited and so beautifully designed that no publisher will dare challenge them in the future with rival editions?...The book club idea has been sweeping the country and has finally burst upon the collecting game with a vengeance. Now we shall see the wholesale resurrection of classics and neo-classics and mediocre publications placed on an equal footing with works of real merit, while collectors are to be clubbed into acquiescence. Within the past few months at least three such organizations have sprung into existence, and we fear that they are but an advance guard….We must confess that we are not stirred to any great heights of enthusiasm by the prospectuses of these various enterprises….Personally, we feel that none of them offers the happy substitute for high-priced first and limited editions. With no desire to minimize their influence on a certain class of collectors, we think that none of them will be of long duration. They seem to us to represent a phase through which book collecting must pass, and having passed, may purge itself of much that is undesirable.George Macy read these columns—certainly the second one—and quickly responded.
Your contributor,” Macy wrote, “says ‘the appeal is to collectors’; ‘it remains to be seen whether the clubs will sweep collectors off their feet.’ No attempt at all is being made to sweep ‘collectors’ off their feet! Nowhere in our literature is any such statement made; in the several advertisements we have inserted in The New York Times Book Review we have deliberately said that the books to be issued by The Limited Editions Club are intended for those who realize that ‘collectors’ items’ are beyond them, but who want to build libraries of beautiful books at moderate costs to themselves. It is obvious that your contributor thinks of ‘collectors’ as an esoteric group….Yet, when we decided to send out a prospectus announcing The Limited Editions Club, we gathered lists of those people who have actively indicated a desire to purchase limited editions. These lists totaled more than twenty-five thousand names! I should scarcely refer to this as an esoteric group.After outlining the plan of the Club, Macy continued:
I think this whole idea should indicate that we are not appealing to an esoteric group at all, even though that esoteric group may be included. Your contributor says, ‘confirmed collectors have been quick to register objection to the club idea.’ With whom? Certainly they have not registered such objections with us. At least two hundred of our present subscribers (names on request) are ‘confirmed collectors,’ some of them internationally famous as book collectors….But at least three hundred more are people who are just beginning to build libraries, to whom such a venture as ours is an altogether valuable help.From this we gather that by July 1929 Macy had at least five hundred subscribers to the Club. By early December the ranks were nearly filled. In a display advertisement in the New York Times of December 8, the Club offered “to that number of booklovers a final opportunity of acquiring the finest examples of modern book craftsmanship at a very low cost. Because of a reduction in the number of subscriptions entered for our English agents, The Limited Editions Club has 69 of its 1500 memberships open for subscription. This offers a final opportunity to a few discriminating readers to obtain the finest works of outstanding, living illustrators and typographers at the remarkably low price made possible by the plan of group subscription.”
As we know from the exhibit, The Limited Editions Club published 548 titles between 1929 and 1985. It survived the Great Depression and during those grim 1930s employed a number of artists and illustrators. Many of these books increased in value. By most measures, one can call this a success. It was, to many, “an altogether valuable help.”
The Prospectus raises a number of other questions. One wonders, for example, where those wood-blocks and engravings used in the production of LEC volumes are today. I’m sure they are as equally collectible as the volumes themselves. A quick search on eBay show 997 items for the term “Limited Editions Club.” A search on the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America website yielded 260 items, with some LEC titles listed for five figures. (But then, collectors and curators don’t like to discuss how much an item might be worth.) My quick searches for wood-blocks produced no results, but I’m certain they are out there, somewhere. I know of at least one block, alas, not used in a LEC production currently up for auction.
There are, of course, the printers and papermakers and binders and designers to consider. But that is probably a topic for another talk. Suffice it to say here that the Prospectus for The Limited Editions Club was produced by the American printer and typographical historian Daniel Berkeley Updike (died December 29, 1941), who was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 14, 1860. As a teenager, after leaving school, Updike assisted at a local library after the librarian had taken ill, a thought that warms my heart. About three years later, in early 1880, he moved to Boston, where he found work as an errand boy for the publishers Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
Updike was fascinated by book and print-making. While carrying proofs from the printers on Beacon Hill to the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Updike studied the pages and imagined what each page might look like coming from his own hand. He trained as a printer but it was typographic design that interested him even more. In 1893 he opened his own studio, designing type fonts. Three years later, in 1896, Updike founded the Merrymount Press.
In its list of the first twelve books, the Prospectus tells us who was involved as printer or designer. This list included designers and/or printers W. A. Kittredge, Frederic Warde (born in Wells, Minnesota), William Edwin Rudge, Allen Lewis, Norman T. A. Munder, Carl Purington Rollins, Daniel Berkeley Updike, John Henry Nash, W. A. Dwiggins, Thomas Maitland Cleland, and Frederic W. Goudy. Presses included The Lakeside Press in Chicago, the Harbor Press in New York, the Merrymount Press in Boston, the Marchbanks Press in New York, the Georgian Press in Westport, the Village Press in Marlborough, and the Grabhorn Press in San Francisco. Interestingly, only one woman appears in this list, in the eleventh volume, which was to be “printed by Mr. and Mrs. Goudy at The Village Press.”
Finally, being a curator, I wondered about the archives of The Limited Editions Club. I’m curious about that list of names George Macy was so eager to share with the correspondent for the Times, or for more information about the printers, designers, papermakers, and binders. Also, I’d like to know which edition numbers were assigned to each member. Who always received Copy 1 or Copy 100 of each edition? I think it would be very interesting, if we don’t know already, the provenance of volumes on display today, along with others in the Alcott collection. It would be fascinating to know who owned these volumes and when.
And where are the archives? Happily, they are under the excellent stewardship of colleagues at the University of Texas in Austin. The archives of the George Macy Companies, including both the Limited Editions Club and The Heritage Press, were purchased by the Harry Ransom Center in 1970. The archive includes the original art works that were used in Limited Editions Club publications and the few that were used for The Heritage Press. The art files contain 6,731 items by over 100 artists, and include original watercolors; pen and ink, wash, and charcoal drawings; colored overlays; proofs; original photographs; and photographic negatives. I think a field trip at some future date might be in order.
Thank you for this opportunity to reflect a bit on The Limited Editions Club, the legacy of James and Marilyn Alcott, and the continuing work of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.
* * * * * * *
The Limited Editions Club published 548 titles between the years 1929 and 1985. Upon George Macy’s death in 1956 his wife, Helen Macy, took control of the business. In 1970, the Limited Editions Club was sold along with the rest of the Heritage Press to the Boise Cascade Corporation.
George Macy’s love of books and commitment to the art of the book is visible in the large variety of publications by the Limited Editions Club. All of the Limited Edition Club books on display were once held in the private library of James and Marilynn Alcott and are now a part of MCBA’s collection. James Alcott was the Vice President of Cowles Media Company and was a founding member of MCBA, serving as the first board president. The books featured here are demonstrative of the art found within the Limited Editions Club.
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