The First Flowering: Bruce Rogers at the Riverside Press 1896–1912

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Jerry Kelly

David R. Godine, Boston, 2008, English

Nonfiction, Graphic Design; Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History

9 x 6 inches, hardcover, 96 pages

ISBN: 9781567923742

Suggested Retail Price: $25.00

From the Publisher. Probably no book designer of the 20th century has had more written about him, his work, or his life than Bruce Rogers. He was, as his primary biographer Joseph Blumenthal observed, the ultimate “artificer of the book.” His career as a working designer spanned six decades, but arguably his finest (and certainly his happiest) years were spent at Cambridge’s Riverside Press where he took over from D. B. Updike in 1896 and where he remained until 1912, overseeing his own department and designing at least 60 titles for Houghton Mifflin’s list of Riverside Press Editions. This small and elegantly produced volume, aimed at the same audience who once appreciated (and who perhaps now collects) these paragons of the printer's art, contains an essay by Jerry Kelly outlining Rogers’s tenure at Riverside, a checklist of all the work he executed there (for Houghton Mifflin as well as others), and 20 pages of reproductions displaying the full range of Bruce Rogers titles, specimens of printing that—as he later wistfully remarked—“give me a definite satisfaction.”

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