The American Printing History Association

APHA's Special Publications
The Spiral Press, 1926-1971

The Spiral Press, 1926-1971: A Bibliographical Checklist.
Compiled by Philip N. Cronenwett, Rauner Special Collections Librarian, Dartmouth College.
New York: American Printing History Association, 2002.
196 pages. Printed by the Studley Press.

While preparing an exhibition to accompany the 1997 Dartmouth Book Arts Summer Workshop, "Joseph Blumenthal and the Spiral Press" Mr. Cronenwett discovered that there was no standard bibliography of The Spiral Press. Since that time Mr. Cronenwett has exhaustively researched and examined the holdings of many collections to compile this checklist of over 600 items. The bibliography lists the press's monographs, pamphlets, exhibition catalogs and all publications relating to printing arts. This APHA publication will be an important research tool to literary and printing history scholars and collectors.

The significance of The Spiral Press to American letters and cultural history is underscored by the items listed in the bibliography. Joseph Blumenthal designed and printed for Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Institutions counted among the press's clients were The Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Morgan Library, The Grolier Club and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The press is also extremely significant to printing history in America. As a printer, Joseph Blumenthal set standards that are unequalled for dedication to the details of fine printing and design. His proprietary typeface, Spiral, was admired by the Monotype Corporation and adapted as "Emerson" for commercial book composition. [See APHA's 1998 publication American Proprietary Typefaces.] In his later years Blumenthal prepared a series of exhibitions on fine printing in America and Europe. He wrote and taught, sharing his passion for the book. To him the book was "a prime cultural heritage. Poetry, knowledge, the aspirations of mankind have been spread by the book to the whole of society."

Contents. Introduction. Acknowledgments. A Note on the Organization of the Bibliography. The Spiral Press Bibliography. A Sampler of Ephemera. Index.

About the book. The book has 196 pages containing more than two dozen reproductions of Spiral Press pages. These are offset-printed, in additional colors where appropriate, at the Studley Press. The book is casebound in a fine imported cloth over boards and issued in an edition of 500 copies. In addition, a special edition of 50 copies has been specially hand-bound by Judi Conant and contains a few original specimens of Spiral Press printing.

The price for the regular edition is $55. The price for the deluxe edition (if available) is $275.

Sample Pages from The Spiral Press, 1926-1971: A Bibliographical Checklist
These scanned images include some pages of text and some sample facsimiles. The images are from pages xv A Note on the Organization of the Bibliography, 7 Fritz Eichenberg titlepage, 24 (sample page for the year 1936), 47 Robert Frost's "A Young Birch" (tip-in facsimile), and 145 "The Book of Genesis" (tip-in facsimile).  An attempt has been made to depict margins accurately. Text pages were scanned in gray-scale, rather than color. Each image file is between 110K and 140K. Please note that original page size is approximately 5-3/4 x 9". (The images are 150 dpi and will display at twice actual size on some browsers.)

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