Albert Boni, American publisher. Recipient citation Rochester Museum Arts and Sciences, 1944; Pioneer medal National Microfilm Association, 1961. Fellow National Microfilm Association, F.R.M.; member American Documentation Institute, American Library Association, Optical Society American, Royal Society Photography, Society Motion Picture and television Engineers, Society Photographic Scientists and Engineers.
Background
Instead of starting his senior year at Harvard, Boni convinced his father to finance the establishment (originally at 95 Fifth Avenue and then at 135 MacDougal Street) of the Washington Square Bookshop with Albert's brother Charles as a partner.
Education
Born in 1892 to a Jewish family in New York City, Albert Boni moved, at an early age, with his family to Newark and completed his secondary school education there. He completed two years of college at Cornell University and one year at Harvard University.
Career
The Boni brothers' book store became a meeting place for leftist, Greenwich Village writers and intellectuals. The Boni brothers, with two other partners, created the Little Leather Library of pocket-sized editions of literary classics bound in imitation leather. These editions were hugely successful — the Woolworth stores sold a million copies in one year.
In 1913–1914 the Boni brothers published the short-lived literary magazine The Glebe. In 1914, Albert Boni, with Lawrence Langner and others, founded the Washington Square Players. In 1915 the Boni brothers sold the Washington Square Bookshop to Frank Shay.
In 1917 Albert Boni married Cornelia 'Nell' van Leeuwen, a widow with a young son, adopted by Albert Boni upon the marriage. Boni & Liveright founded the Modern Library (originally called Modern Library of the World's Best Classics), which was eventually acquired by Random House. A year and a half after incorporating, Albert Boni sold his interest in Boni & Liveright to Horace Liveright in 1919.
However, the name of the firm remained "Boni & Liveright" until 1928, when the name of the publishing house was changed to "Horace Liveright, Inc."
In 1923 the Boni brothers purchased the publishing company Lieber & Lewis and renamed it the "Albert and Charles Boni Publishing Company." In 1929 the Boni brothers created Boni Paper Books, which offered one soft-cover book per month for 12 months for a yearly subscription price of $5. Boni Paper Books failed during the Great Depression. In 1939 Albert Boni founded the Readex Corporation, a microfilm publisher of reference materials.
It occurred to Albert that if he could reduce rather than enlarge photographs this technology may enable publication companies and libraries to access much greater quantities of data at a minimum cost of material and storage space. Over the following decade, Boni worked to develop microprint, a micro-opaque process in which pages were photographed using 35mm microfilm and printed on cards using offset lithography.U.S. Patent 2,260,551AU.S. Patent 2,260,552A This process proved to produce a 6" by 9" index card which stored 100 pages of text from the normal sized publications he was reproducing. Boni began the Readex company to produce and license this technology.
He also published an article A Guide to the Literature of Photography and Related Subjects (1943) which appeared in a supplemental 18th issue of the Photo-Lab Index.
Membership
Fellow National Microfilm Association, F.R.M. Member American Documentation Institute, American Library Association, Optical Society American, Royal Society Photography, Society Motion Picture and television Engineers, Society Photographic Scientists and Engineers.