A new exhibition in the Leonard L. Milberg Gallery of Princeton University's Firestone Library celebrates the founding in 1940 of a unique collection at Princeton, one that showcases the history

and arts of the book through the finest examples of printing, typography, binding, papermaking, calligraphy, and illustration. "For the Love of Books and Prints: Elmer Adler and the Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton University Library" provides fascinating glimpses of the history of the revival of fine printing in early twentieth-century America, and of campus life at Princeton in the 1940s. In addition, many rarely-seen treasures brought by Adler to Princeton, or acquired while he was the Collection's first Curator, are on view: prints by Toulouse-Lautrec (above) and Mary Cassatt, photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, and the fabulously-illustrated Works of Geoffrey Chaucer printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press.

   Co-curated by Rebecca Davidson and Dale Roylance, the exhibition also looks at Adler's early career in the 1920s in New York City, where he founded the Pynson Printers (left), whose manifesto asserted that "we will do no work in which quality must be sacrified to exigencies of time and cost." The cost turned out to be much of his personal fortune (made in his family's clothing business in Rochester, New York, where he was born in 1884), but Adler and his cohorts continued to print finely-designed books through the Depression of the 1930s, and also published The Colophon: A Book Collectors' Quarterly. All the while, he was making friends with such literary and publishing notables as Alfred A. Knopf, Willa Cather, H. L. Mencken, and Bennett Cerf, with whom Adler founded Random House.
   At Princeton, Adler not only created the Graphic Arts Collection, but also conducted seminars for undergraduates in book and print collecting (right), initiated a print loan program to adorn students' dormitory walls, and brought some of the most famous printmakers, typographers, book designers, and photographers of the day to speak and to demonstrate their work for Princeton audiences.

At his death, he left funds for purchasing additional materials for Graphic Arts, as well as a sum for the Adler Book Collecting Prize, for which Princeton students still compete each year.
   The exhibition will formally open May 6, 2001, with a talk on Adler's legacy by Gillett G. Griffin, second Curator of Graphic Arts and now a Faculty Curator at the Art Museum. The talk will take place at 3:00 p.m. in 101 McCormick. The exhibition will remain on view in the Milberg Gallery on the second floor of the Rare Books and Special Collections Department of Firestone Library until October 7, 2001. For more information, contact Rebecca Davidson, Curator of Graphic Arts, at 258-3197, davidson@princeton.edu. 

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