The Work of Stephen Harvard: A Life in Letters (Signed Copy)

Becker, David P.

ISBN 10: 0914630040 / ISBN 13: 9780914630043

Published by Harvard College Library/The Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA, 1990

About this Item

True first edition and not a later reprint. Signed and inscribed as follows: "14 April 93 - For Nancy Cowan, With Best Wishes, David Becker". Nancy Cowan was President of the Baxter Society in Portland, Maine. As new copy in pristine condition. PayPal accepted.

Seller Inventory # 003534

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Work of Stephen Harvard: A Life in Letters (Signed Copy)
• Publisher: Harvard College Library/The Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0914630040
• ISBN 13: 9780914630043
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

Calligrapher, stonecutter, illustrator, and type designer, Stephen Harvard’s art and craftsmanship were rooted equally in the history of the book and the natural world. At his untimely death in 1988, Harvard left both a collection of graphic works and a body of prose that explored his dream of an ideal alphabet, “a perfect, proportionate set of images that shine with a pythagorean light,” a dream that Harvard found as compelling and impossible “as the search for perpetual motion.”

David P. Becker’s lovingly edited and sumptuously illustrated catalog, which won the American Library Association’s 1991 Leab Exhibition Catalog Award for Excellence, bears out Harvard’s conviction that typography, which is at once art and craft, must “strive to satisfy the intelligence and not the intelligentsia.”

About the Author

David P. Becker is the former Assistant Curator of Printing and Graphics Arts, Houghton Library at Harvard College Library, Harvard University.