Elmer Adler

Background

Elmer Adler was born on July 22, 1884, in Rochester, New York, United States. He was a son of Abram Adler and Ella Adler, maiden name Stern. His father managed the clothing firm of Rochester-Adler, one of the largest in the city.

Education

Elmer Adler attended private schools. He later alleged that he had been dismissed from at least four of them. In 1899-1901, he studied at Powder Point, Duxbury, Massachusetts. In 1903, he studied at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.

Career

About 1904, Elmer Adler began to work for the family firm of clothing manufacturers called Adler Rochester, gravitating to sales promotion and advertising. In 1922, he resigned his $15,000-a-year job and moved to New York City to make a vocation of an increasingly absorbing avocation-the collecting of books and fine prints. He had started collecting as a defense, he said, against his inadequacies as a student. He bought his first piece of incunabula, a fifteenth-century book, in 1909. Curiosity about the provenance of items that fell into his hands led to absorption in the history of the printed word. He had shared and promoted these interests with others in Rochester. In 1915, he organized for the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery an exhibition of James McNeill Whistler's portraiture; in 1920 he prepared an exhibit on the history of the art of printing. The success of the latter, rippling far beyond Rochester, won him recognition as an authority on the printed word.

In New York City, in 1922, Adler founded Pynson Printers, named after the sixteenth-century printer Richard Pynson. Pynson adopted the slogan, "we will do no work in which quality must be sacrificed to exigencies of time and cost." The firm's first significant commission came from the young publisher Alfred A. Knopf, for whom Pynson designed and printed in 1923 a limited edition of Willa Cather's 1903 book of poems, April Twilights. The Pynson Printers worked on such publications as the New York Times and the American Mercury.

The publisher with which Adler's printing shop had the closest tie was Random House. When Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer bought the Modem Library from Horace Liveright in 1925, they hired Adler to redesign the books and the Modem Library catalog. When the Cerf-Klopfer partnership evolved, in 1927, into Random House - absorbing the Modern Library - they used the Pynson Printers for many of their limited edition books. In 1928, Adler was made a partner in Random House. Cerf was a stockholder in the Pynson Printers and was involved with the planning of The Colophon.

In 1924, Pynson Printers moved into the annex of the New York Times building on West 43rd Street, remaining there until 1940. The establishment was noted for its handsome exhibition area and growing library that spanned five centuries of work by master printers. Equally noted were the informal seminars on prints and printmaking that Adler conducted around a wide oval table in the library.

Elmer Adler served as a consultant on typography for the New York Times, and in 1925 for Harold Ross of the New Yorker. In 1924, he designed the cover for the American Mercury, a magazine newly launched by Henry Louis Mencken and George Jean Nathan.

In 1930, Pynson Printers began publishing The Colophon, a quarterly journal for book collectors containing articles on literary, bibliographical, printing, and collecting topics, and original prints. It was meant to be an example of fine printing itself, sometimes containing signatures by other presses as examples of their work. In 1938, Adler established at Pynson a permanent exhibit and center for the study of the history of the printed word. Pynson placed its imprint on nearly 10,000 jobs ranging from small special printings of personal bookplates and commercial announcements to sumptuous limited editions such as the twelve volumes of The Work of Stephen Crane for Knopf.

Adler left Random House in 1932 to devote full time to Pynson and to the Colophon: A Book Collector's Quarterly, a venture he began in 1930. Others shared the editorial masthead, but the Colophon (1930-1940) was essentially Adler's show as chief editor, designer, and producer, and so, too, was the revived New Colophon (1948-1950). From 1930 to 1935 the Colophon appeared in five volumes totaling twenty parts, with each part made up of sections produced by printers other than Pynson. From 1935 to 1938, it appeared as the New Series, twelve numbers in three volumes, and was wholly the work of Pynson. From 1939 through 1940, it appeared as the New Graphic Series (subtitled The Quarterly for Bookmen) in four volumes, returning to the original assemblage of sections by different printers. Breaking into Print (1937), published by Simon and Schuster, edited and designed by Adler, reproduced several accounts by writers that had originally appeared in one of the regular features of the Colophon.

In 1940, Elmer Adler closed the Pynson Printers and stopped publication of The Colophon. In 1940, he attached himself and his collection to Princeton University, where he founded the department of graphic arts and became a professor and curator, and a typography consultant to the Princeton University Press. He retired from Princeton in 1952 and moved to Puerto Rico to be a typography consultant to Puerto Rico's Economic Development Corporation. In 1952-1953, he toured the South, Southwest, and California, giving informal talks on book collecting at colleges and universities. Touring again in 1953-1954, under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts, he offered joint seminars with Dard Hunter on the graphic arts and papermaking.

In March 1955, Elmer Adler's two-week vacation in Puerto Rico led to an invitation to establish an art-of-the-book project, and in September he returned for a two-year commitment to oversee the restoration of a dilapidated eighteenth-century building that was to house the project. In July 1956, this job completed, he moved in as curator of La Casa del Libro, a museum and design center. It opened on October 12 with an exhibit based on materials related to Christopher Columbus. His two-year stay extended, Adler continued his collecting and informal teaching. In 1958, an official Puerto Rico "Operation Bootstrap" advertisement appeared in several magazines featuring a full-page portrait of Adler standing before some of La Casa del Libro's new treasures and captioned "Puerto Rico and the Princeton Professor."

Achievements

• Elmer Adler's Pynson Printers was one of the great United States' printing houses of the 1920s and 1930s and his achievement is most evident in the many works of printing art that Pynson Printers and others issued under his guiding hand. Adler was also known for organizing a printing arts library and a department of graphic arts at Princeton University, as well as for the establishment of one more printing arts library and museum for the University of San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Works

More photos

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  • Catalogue Of An Exhibition Of Portraitures Of James Mcneill Whistler 1915
  • Breaking Into Print 1937
  • An Informal Talk by Elmer Adler at the University of Kansas 1953

Personality

All who were associated with Elmer Adler, while they often expressed gently ironic reservations about his business acumen, judged his influence as decisive. Some judged him dictatorial, but Adler exercised his authority benignly. His lifelong aim at perfection, precision, simplicity, and quality earned him the sobriquet "Squire" from undergraduates at Princeton. Somewhere in the affectionately respectful mantle of that title lies a fuller, if a subtler, measure of his influence as teacher and apostle of good taste in art and life joined.

Connections

Father:

Abram Adler

Mother:

Ella Adler

References

• Elmer Adler: Apostle of Good Taste