" [...] In this informal panorama of American fine printing and its practitioners, Mr. Blumenthal has written a fascinating "serch of clarity" from the halcyon days of the 1920's through the 1970's. With a strong sense of the historical forces that have made printing what is today, he tells about the development of his Spiral Press in New York, where he succeeded in producing consistently distinctive style of printing; about his growing education in the graphic arts; about the books he made for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Robert Frost; about tipe, book design, and the changes that came with computerized techniques [...]" --Sol.

Contents: --Tipohraphic years. --Beginnings. --The Spiral Press. --Early years. --The nineteen twenties. --Why printing? --Separation of printer and designer. --The American Institute of Graphic Arts. --Germany and Holland. --Robert Frost and the Spiral Press. --The Colophon. --The depression. --Of tipe and the alphabet. --Emerson type. --Printing on the hand press. --The Limited Editions Club. --What makes fine printing fine. --Printing education. --The Museum of Modern Art. --The public papers and addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt. --The typophiles. --Printer as publisher. --Printing houses and the artist. --World War II. --The Metropolitan Museum of Arts and the Museum Press. --Steuben Glass. --Institutions and fundations. --The Grolier Club. --The Pierpont Morgan Library. --Liquidation and dispersal. --Art of the printed book. --The printed book in America. --The heroic generation. --Exhibitions.