Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in AmericaIn post-World War I America, teeming as it was with magazines, newspapers, radio broadcasts and movies, many feared that the survival of traditional, serious books was in peril. This concern led to a publishing boom in fine editions; books valued primarily for their beauty, craftsmanship, extravagance, status, or scarcity. Beauty and the Book is a lively cultural history of the explosion in demand for these deluxe books during the 1920s and 1930s. Megan L. Benton argues that the clamour to own fine books reflected the anxieties and desires of those who mourned the rise of a modern mass culture. For them, such volumes not only affirmed a preindustrial ideal but also imparted social distinction and cultural superiority. Benton combines new archival research with a close examination of three hundred fine editions of the period. In theory, fine bookmakers were devoted to beauty and quality and were unwilling to compromise with machinery, popular taste, or concern for profit. But such ideal standards were nearly impossible to maintain. Paradoxically, fine publishers' ostensible indifference to commercial considerations was one of their most prized and lucrative products for sale. This b |
Contents
To Shame the World to Please the World | 1 |
The Glut of the Good Life | 11 |
The Theory of the Ideal Book | 32 |
Strategies of Fine Design | 83 |
Classics or Cabbages? The Question of Content | 123 |
The Business of Anticommercialism | 167 |
Death of a High Tradition | 213 |
Other editions - View all
Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America Megan Benton No preview available - 2014 |
Common terms and phrases
advertising American artistic authors Beatrice Warde beautiful Bennett Cerf bibliophilic book design book's bookmaking booksellers Bruce Rogers buyers California Carl Rollins Cheshire House classics collectors colophon commercial copies costs Covici-Friede Crosby Gaige cultural decorative dollars Donald Klopfer Dunster House Dwiggins editorial elite Ellis Elmer Adler example expenses figure Firuski Fountain Press Frederic Warde Friede Grabhorn Press hand handmade paper Ideal Book illustrations James John Henry Nash Johnston Kelmscott Kelmscott Press Klopfer Knopf labor Laboratory Press Leaves of Grass letters Library Limited Editions Club literary machine material Moby Dick modern modernist Nash's offered percent Poems Porter Garnett postwar printed book private press produced publishers Pynson Printers Random House readers Rimington Rockwell Kent Rudge Salammbô San Francisco sell style taste tion titles trade books traditional Tschichold twenties typefaces typographic University Updike Weekly William Kittredge Windsor Press York
References to this book
Home-work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature Cynthia Conchita Sugars No preview available - 2004 |