Are you going to be in NYC over the holidays? If you have a chance, consider checking out the lovely new Poets House, located in Battery Park City at 10 River Terrace (at Murray Street). Opening on December 2, through January 15, 2010, they’ll be displaying “Robert Frost’s Annual Christmas Cards” -- “...beautiful, illustrated chapbooks of Frost’s poetry” that the poet and his publishers sent out as holiday greetings for almost 30 years. (For directions, click here.)
Poets House is closed December 24, 25 & 26, 2009 and January 1 & 2, 2010.
In 1926, 28-year-old Joe Blumenthal founded The Spiral Press with a partner, George Hoffman. For Christmas in 1929, Blumenthal printed an illustrated chapbook of Robert Frost poems to send out as the holiday greeting from himself and Henry Holt and Company (one of Frost’s printers.) All 275 copies were sent out before they realized that none had been sent to the poet, himself. (Frost insisted that the printer retrieve a half dozen for his own Christmas list!)
Spiral Press was hit hard during the Depression. Blumenthal closed shop and lived in Europe for several years where he designed a new font type (Emerson). He returned to the US in late 1933, settling just north of NYC in Croton Falls, NY, and started up Spiral Press with a small handpress, quickly reestablishing his reputation as a master printer. Each Christmas from 1934 through 1962, Spiral Press printed - in collaboration with Robert Frost this time!!! - new illustrated chapbooks of Frost poems.
No comments:
Post a Comment