 | Studies in bibliography |  |
The Art Deco Book in France
The 1985 Lyell Lectures
by
GORDON N. RAY
edited by
G. Thomas Tanselle
Editor's Introduction
When Gordon Ray delivered the Lyell Lectures at Oxford in 1985, he
chose as his subject the Art Deco book illustrations and bindings produced in
France in the 1920s. This topic was not a surprising choice, for he had previously
written magisterial annotated catalogues, largely based on his own collection,
of British illustrated books from 1790 to 1914 and of French illustrated
books from 1700 to 1914. His Lyell Lectures formed a natural continuation
of the latter and gave him the opportunity to express his views on still
another area in which, through his collecting and research, he had become
expert. He accompanied his lectures with 183 slides, the majority of them in
color, and those illustrations are in fact the reason that the lectures have not
been published until now: the expense of producing so many illustrations
was too daunting for the publishers that Ray approached.
Today a happy solution to this problem is available in the form of digital
presentation on the internet, and Ray's work is now being offered in a combination
of printed and electronic forms. The verbal text of his lectures is
printed in the present volume (supplemented by eight plates, showing striking
examples of the work of the major figures discussed), and all of the available
illustrations are being published on the website of the Bibliographical
Society of the University of Virginia, at {http://etext.virginia.edu/bsuva/artdeco}. Numbers placed in the margins of the lectures refer to these illustrations,
which are correspondingly numbered on the website. (The online
illustrations are provided with detailed captions, which are also printed in a
numbered list following the text of the lectures.) One may profitably—and
pleasurably—read these lectures without recourse to the illustrations. But
naturally Ray's incisive judgments gain greater force when one can see what
he is talking about, and the ready availability of the internet to most readers
will, I trust, make the process of viewing the illustrations scarcely more burdensome
volume.
I
As matters turned out, Ray had only a year and a half to live after he
delivered his Lyell Lectures, and they are his last major piece of work. Although
they are not his masterpiece, they are certainly a triumphant and
elegant coda to an astonishing body of work. And they reflect in mature form
the subtlety of judgment and breadth of knowledge that he always displayed.
Most of the audience at Ray's lectures in 1985 would have been aware of his
distinction as a scholar and a collector and would have recognized his eminence
as a statesman in the intellectual and cultural world. I think it is in
order here, therefore, to sketch Ray's life and career, so as to provide present
and future readers of these lectures with some sense of the personal background
from which they emerged.
Gordon Norton Ray was born in New York City on 8 September 1915,
the son of Jessie Norton and Jesse Gordon Ray (who represented an Indiana
limestone company), and grew up on the Chicago north shore, graduating in
1932 from New Trier High School in Winnetka. Looking back, years later,
on his education, he recalled that the excellence of New Trier caused him to
regard some of the courses he took as a freshman at Indiana University as a
disappointment. (He added that his undergraduate years preceded the dramatic
rise of Indiana University under his friend Herman B Wells.) In 1932
his parents had moved to Bloomington, where both the university and their
new company were located: the Independent Limestone Company had been
founded in 1927, with his father as president, to quarry stone from the land
owned by his mother's family. (It was income from this company that later
allowed Ray to build his collections, and he accepted the presidency of it in
1974.)
Ray graduated from Indiana University in 1936 with A.B. and A.M. degrees
in French literature, having been elected to three honorary societies,
Phi Beta Kappa, Beta Gamma Sigma, and Phi Eta Sigma. From Indiana he
moved to Harvard for graduate work in English literature (holding an Austin
Scholarship in 1937-38). After receiving another A.M. in 1938, he settled on
Thackeray as the subject for his doctoral dissertation and went to England
in the summer of 1939 (on a Dexter Travelling Scholarship) to search for material.
Up to that time Thackeray's descendants, respecting the novelist's wish
to have no biography, had denied all access to the great mass of his papers.
But Ray's visit to Thackeray's granddaughter, Hester Thackeray Fuller, came
at a propitious time: the family had decided to select a scholar to work on the
papers, and Ray seemed to Mrs. Fuller the right one. He was promptly appointed
editor of the Thackeray letters and thus became the envy of graduate
students (and their advisers) throughout America. A decade later Richard
Altick, writing his account of the glamor and fascination of literary detective
work, The Scholar Adventurers (1950), called this episode "One of the most
book Ray continued to be a hero to later graduate students.
His work on the letters was inextricably linked with the disruptions of
war. He had arranged for the microfilming of the letters before leaving Europe
at the outbreak of war in 1939, and he performed much of his editorial
work on them (and on the material already in the United States) before
his own entry into military service. First he completed his dissertation on
"Thackeray and France" and received his Ph.D. in 1940; he then stayed on
at Harvard for two years as an Instructor in English (1940-42), assisted in
the summer preceding the first year by another Dexter Scholarship and in the
seventeen months from July 1941 by two Guggenheim Fellowships. By the
time he was ordered to active duty in the United States Navy on 1 December
1942, he had completed his edition of the letters; and he turned his voluminous
manuscript over to his adviser and friend Howard Mumford Jones, who
undertook to read proofs and check references for him. Ray's forty months in
the Navy (to 23 March 1946) included two and a half years in the Pacific
aboard the aircraft carriers Belleau Wood (April 1943-September 1944) and
Boxer (April 1945-March 1946) and service on the staff of Vice Admiral
Donald Duncan; as a fighter director and radar officer, he advanced to the
rank of Lieutenant, earning seven battle stars and a Presidential unit citation.
His war years made a deep impression on him and were the subject of many
later allusions: a model of the Boxer still sat on his office desk at the time of
his retirement. The first two volumes of The Letters and Private Papers of
William Makepeace Thackeray were published by Harvard University Press
in 1945, while Ray was still in the Navy. His discharge in the spring of 1946
allowed him to take over the proofreading from Jones beginning with the
middle of the third volume, and the third and fourth volumes appeared in
1946. This four-volume work was a superb achievement, presenting a vast
amount of new material in a form that still stands as a model of documentary
editing.
The next chapter of Ray's career was set at the University of Illinois,
where he moved as Professor of English in the autumn of 1946 and remained
until the end of June 1960. During the six months between leaving the Navy
and settling in Urbana, he had held a third Guggenheim Fellowship (awarded
in 1945), enabling him to return to Mrs. Fuller's London house for further
work in the Thackeray papers there and in other English collections. The
fruits of this research were a series of distinguished publications on Thackeray:
two editions (a facsimile, with his introduction, of the Morgan manuscript
of The Rose and the Ring in 1947 and a gathering of Thackeray's contributions
to The Morning Chronicle in 1955), a critical study based on the
lectures he delivered at the Lowell Institute in February 1950 (The Buried
Life: A Study of the Relation between Thackeray's Fiction and His Personal
History, 1952), and, finally, in 1955 and 1958, the two massive volumes of his
life of Thackeray (Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846; Thackeray:
The Age of Wisdom, 1847-1863), which constitute—as Bradford A. Booth
masterpieces of literary biography in our time." Ray also wrote
an introduction to Thackeray's Henry Esmond for the Modern Library (1950)
and in 1954 began a long association with another series of classics, serving
for seventeen years as general editor of the Houghton Mifflin Company's
Riverside Series and arranging for the publication of some eighty titles in it
(one of them, in 1960, being his own edition of H. G. Wells's The History of
Mr. Polly). This productivity is all the more remarkable in the light of the
administrative duties he accepted at Illinois, serving as Head of the English
Department (1950-57) and then as Vice President and Provost (1957-60). He
did, however, have three interludes away from Illinois: in 1948-49 (after
spending the summer of 1948 as a visiting professor at the University of
Oregon) he was a Rockefeller Post-Service Fellow and a member of the United
States Educational Commission in the United Kingdom, which established
the Fulbright program; in 1952-53 he was Berg Professor of English and
American Literature at New York University; and in 1956-57 he held a fourth
Guggenheim Fellowship, to begin work on several projects relating to H. G.
Wells (including a biography).
In September 1956, just after that Fellowship began, his father died, leaving
him (his mother having died in 1954) with a large block of Independent
Limestone Company stock and thus a considerably increased annual income;
as a result he declined the monetary part of the Guggenheim award. He was
also in a position to enlarge the scope of his collecting, and he began concentrating
on English illustrated books; but he had already accomplished impressive
feats of collecting, both for himself and for his university. His collecting
had begun in earnest when he was abroad in 1948-49, inspired by the
sight of Michael Sadleir's collection of Victorian fiction (which was for him,
as he said in a 1964 autobiographical essay for The Book Collector, "a revelation").
From then on until the end of his life he made visits to England and
France nearly every summer searching for books; and until 1957 those trips
also produced major acquisitions for the University of Illinois Library. While
he was building for himself notably comprehensive collections of English
and French literature from 1789 to 1914 (including manuscript, as well as
printed, material), he was securing for the university massive archives and
whole collections of books (the papers of two important publishers, Richard
Bentley and Grant Richards, in 1951 and 1952; the Tom Turner library of
8000 volumes of twentieth-century English literature in 1953; and the papers
of H. G. Wells, amounting to 60,000 items, in 1954). Anyone who buys books
by the roomful (as he once did in a shop in Penzance) is bound to achieve
rapid celebrity in the antiquarian book world, and his book-buying trips of
the 1950s have become legendary; but he also added to the Illinois holdings
by the systematic purchase of individual titles, increasing the total by several
thousand volumes each year. These purchases in turn affected his own research:
his interest in H. G. Wells, reflected in his last Guggenheim application,
was obviously related to his bringing the Wells papers to Urbana; and
three books resulted, two of them editions that appeared while he was at
H. G. Wells in 1958) and the third, much later, his biographical study H. G.
Wells & Rebecca West (1974), an account of the love affair between Wells
and West based on Wells's letters to her and Ray's conversations with West.
In 1959 Henry Allen Moe, then Secretary General of the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, offered Ray (with whom, as a four-time
Fellowship recipient, he had become well acquainted) the position of Associate
Secretary General. Ray accepted, made arrangements to move to New York
during the summer of 1960 (his books to be placed on newly constructed
shelves lining the walls of a river-view apartment at 25 Sutton Place South),
and began work at the Foundation on September 1st. Eight months later,
following Mrs. Simon Guggenheim's decision to relinquish the title of President
and Moe's election to that office, Ray was named Secretary General; and
in 1963, when Moe left at the age of 69, Ray was elected president (and trustee)
and thus became on July 1st the second principal administrative officer in the
Foundation's thirty-eight-year history. During the twenty-two years of his
presidency (until his retirement just before his seventieth birthday in 1985),
he saw to it that the Foundation maintained the standards of excellence for
which it had become known, adhering unswervingly to the policy of awarding
Fellowships only to individuals who had significant accomplishments to their
credit and who showed promise of making further contributions. His views on
this matter and many others were expressed in a series of widely read annual
reports, each one an essay characterized by the lucidity and incisiveness with
which he could treat complex issues. In his time the Foundation awarded
$96,000,000 to 8100 Fellows.
Ray's position at the Foundation gave him a vantage point from which to
have a possibly unrivaled view of the scholarly, scientific, and artistic worlds,
and his role as adviser to the learned community grew steadily larger during
this period. Some idea of that role can be suggested by a recitation of the institutions
on whose governing boards he served: the Foundation Center (196268;
vice chairman, 1963-65; chairman, 1965-68), Grolier Club (1963-86;
president, 1965-69), Modern Language Association of America (trustee of
invested funds, 1966-85), Smithsonian Institution (1968-85; chairman, 197085),
Pierpont Morgan Library (1970-86; vice president, 1974-86), Rosenbach
Museum and Library (1972-81), American Council of Learned Societies (treasurer,
1973-85), Rockefeller University (1973-86), New York Public Library
(1975-86; honorary trustee, 1984-86), Columbia University Press (1977-82),
Winterthur Museum (1977-85), and Yaddo (1979-85). This list leaves out
some two dozen other committees, commissions, and advisory boards relating
to higher education and libraries, several of which give him particular pleasure—such
as the visiting committees to the Harvard University Library
(1966-85), the Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1977-86),
and the Lilly Library (chairman, 1979-86); the council of the Fellows of the
Pierpont Morgan Library (1962-66; chairman, 1965-66) and of the Friends of
the Columbia Libraries (1970-86; chairman, 1973-86); and the board of the
American Trust for the British Library (treasurer, 1980-86).
He was also frequently (some three dozen times in the 1960s and 1970s)
asked to speak on ceremonial occasions, such as the opening of important conferences
or the dedication of new library buildings, and some of those addresses—particularly
those surveying the state of the humanities and of the
rare-book world—have become celebrated. All the while, the honors poured
in: election to the Royal Society of Literature (1948), the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences (1962), the American Antiquarian Society (1971), the
American Philosophical Society (1977; vice president, 1986), and the Roxburghe
Club (1982); the award of the University of Evansville Medal of Honor
(1970), the Sir Thomas More Medal for Book Collecting (University of San
Francisco, 1973), and the Joseph Henry Medal (Smithsonian Institution,
1980); and thirteen honorary degrees, from Monmouth College (Litt.D., 1959),
New York University (LL.D., 1961), Syracuse University (Litt.D., 1961), Tulane
University (LL.D., 1963), Indiana University (L.H.D., 1964), Duke University
(Litt.D., 1965), University of California (LL.D., 1968), University of
Illinois (Litt.D., 1968), Columbia University (LL.D., 1969), Northwestern
University (Litt.D., 1974), University of Southern California (LL.D., 1974),
University of Pennsylvania (L.H.D., 1978), and University of Maryland
(Litt.D., 1982).
During his Foundation years, Ray's activities as scholar, teacher, and book
collector continued unabated. He accepted a professorship in English at New
York University in his third year at the Foundation (1962-63) and taught
popular courses there (and directed dissertations) in Victorian literature
every year for the next seventeen, becoming Professor Emeritus in 1980. (He
also spent a summer during this period—in 1969—as Beckman Professor of
English at the University of California, Berkeley.) His generosity to his students,
welcoming them to his Foundation office and offering them the use of
materials from his collection, became widely known, and many of them have
recorded their indebtedness and appreciation. The focus of his own scholarship
in these years, and of the collecting that inspired it, was English illustrated
books of the nineteenth century and French illustrated books and
bindings from 1700 through the 1930s. (At the same time he was impressively
expanding his holdings of literary manuscripts.) By 1976 he was ready to display
the English items, and in March and April of that year the Pierpont
Morgan Library mounted a major exhibition on the subject, drawn almost
exclusively from his collection and accompanied by the publication of his
large volume The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914. Six
years later (from April through July 1982) the Library held a similar exhibition
of his French materials, in connection with which he delivered the
Library's Franklin Jasper Walls Lectures (4, 6, 11 May) and published his
two-volume work on The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 1700 to 1914.
These two exhibitions and their associated publications represent the culmination
of his life as a scholar-collector. There are few collectors of any period
who could provide, almost single-handedly, material of such quality (including
drafts and proofs) for two exhibitions of such breadth; and there are fewer
still who could write about their fields with such scholarly depth and stylistic
scholarship and collecting, are masterpieces of trenchant commentary, revealing
time and again his comprehensive knowledge of the history of book illustration
and his lifetime of reading in the literature that inspired the illustrations.
They are monuments as solid in their field as his Thackeray work is in
Victorian literary study.
To those monuments he was able to add a "small sequel" (as he called it)
that he had long planned: the invitation to deliver the 1985 Lyell Lectures
provided the occasion to survey French Art Deco books, bringing his analysis
of French bookmaking up to the chronological limit of his own collection.
The fortunate timing of these lectures seemed to epitomize the well-regulated
nature of his whole life. He liked order and routine, but there was always
room in his carefully controlled schedule for the entertainments he enjoyed—
such as, in Urbana, his weekend excursions by train to New Orleans; and, in
New York, his quiet hours at the Grolier Club reading booksellers' catalogues
(probably no other member in recent times used the Club library so regularly).
In his earlier years, he was athletic, engaging in basketball, baseball,
handball, bowling, and tennis, and he remained all his life a devoted follower
of sports: in New York he often invited groups of friends to baseball games;
he held a season ticket to the Knickerbockers' basketball games; and he was
known to decline social events in favor of games on television. He was an avid
reader of detective stories (amassing a fine collection of them as a by-product)
and a steady attender of movies; and he apparently remembered them all in
considerable detail, just as he seemed to keep straight the plots and characters
of all the major (and many minor) novels of English, French, and American
literature. His range of allusion was thus astonishingly wide; and, although
he sometimes revealed his impatience with small talk, he was an engaging
conversationalist, alternating anecdotes with pronouncements, bemused detachment
with magisterial gravity. (His obituary in the London Times was
particularly apt in describing him as "a man of solid and authoritative presence,
and of considered and consequential speech.") To some people he appeared
formidable at first, but many have reason to know how approachable
he could be. His formality and reserve, however, often made it difficult for
colleagues and friends to feel that they knew him well, even while they were
drawn to him by his charm, his sense of humor, and his balanced and sympathetic
concern for their problems.
No doubt more people experienced his conversation over a meal than in
any other setting, and his love of good food was probably his best-known diversion.
He made a point of inviting many Guggenheim Fellows to lunch,
sometimes at the Century Association but equally often at a favorite restaurant
(San Marino, La Toque Blanche, La Petite Marmite, Le Chantilly); on
summer trips his visits with book dealers were punctuated at midday by
lunches with Fellows who were spending their Fellowship periods abroad, and
those gatherings at the White Tower, L'Étoile, Le Crillon, and La Tour
d'Argent became part of the lore that Guggenheim Fellows share. Ray was a
tall man, with a large frame, and always handsome, but the trim figure of his
meals. He lived as he wished to until the end, but during his last five or six
years he experienced some of the problems that excessive weight can cause.
When he died of a heart attack in his apartment on the morning of 15 December
1986, his affairs were—characteristically—in order, his will having designated
the Morgan Library as the repository for his collection of manuscripts,
drawings, and some 15,000 books. Few scholars could have had more reason
to feel satisfied with their accomplishments. Gordon Ray left some projects
unfinished, as anyone with a lively mind is bound to do; but he had produced
four major works, which will be read long into the future, and had lived a
life that influenced many other lives, a life that will be a continuing model
and an object of respectful wonderment for those who contemplate a career
in literary scholarship.
II
The story of Ray's Lyell Lectures begins in the autumn of 1981, when the
electors of the James P. R. Lyell Readership in Bibliography at Oxford selected
Ray for the 1984-85 year, a decision conveyed to him by Rosemary
Schwerdt on 5 October. When he wrote his acceptance letter on 29 October,
he indicated his preference for the Michaelmas term (autumn) and said that
his topic would probably be "The Art Deco Book in France"—"but," he
added, "I may change my mind." By the time of their next correspondence, in
July 1983, he had altered his preferred date to the Trinity term (and the days
of 6, 8, 10, 13, and 15 May 1985 were soon thereafter confirmed), but he had
not changed his mind about the content or title of the lectures.
Indeed, he was already working in earnest to prepare himself for writing,
though his general knowledge of the subject was formidable to start with. He
made lists of illustrated books that he should consider, drawing on his own
collection and on information gleaned from reading auction and dealer catalogues
and the secondary literature. He also brought the subject up with
knowledgeable friends: in November 1983, for example, he held productive
conversations with the New York dealer Lucien Goldschmidt and the Boston
collector Peter Wick. His regular lunches with David Kirschenbaum of the
Carnegie Book Shop were as fruitful as always, and his almost daily visits to
the Grolier Club provided opportunities for reading some of the reference
books he did not possess. The knowledge of private collections that he gained
through his network of book-world acquaintances is symbolized by his use,
near the end of his fourth lecture, of a letter of Laboureur's "mounted in a
copy of Le portrait de Dorian Gray owned by a New York collector" (p. 84).
Because his own collection did not include all the books he would need
(as had very nearly been the case with his studies of earlier French and English
book illustration), he began corresponding with curators of some of the
major institutional collections and arranging to visit their premises. Before
making a Foundation trip to California in April 1984, for example, he wrote
to Michael T. Ryan, then Curator of Special Collections at Stanford, to make
arrangements for examining some of the books in the Morgan A. Gunst collection;
he took notes on those books, placing an order for twenty-one slides (five of
which were among those he eventually used).
The following month he corresponded with Ralph Franklin, then director
of the Beinecke Library at Yale, specifying some of the books he wanted to
see in Frank Altschul's collection (having prepared himself the previous November
and December by talking with Franklin and by asking Marjorie G.
Wynne, Research Librarian at the Beinecke and an old friend, to send him
copies of the Altschul catalogue cards). Characteristically, he also asked
Franklin to arrange a lunch while he was there, to be held at Mory's on 24
May and to consist of Rutherford Rogers (head of the Yale library system),
Donald Gallup (the famous curator of the American literature collection),
Marjorie Wynne, and Franklin himself; and he got in touch with Gordon and
Mary Haight, who invited him to dinner on 23 May. He worked at the Beinecke
on 23-25 May, focusing on Altschul's superb assemblage of Schmied
items, though he took notes on other books as well; his resulting order for
slides totaled thirty-five, all but two of which were used in his lectures.
During the summer and fall of 1984 he concentrated on collections in
New York. He had recently become acquainted with Charles Rahn Fry, a
young collector who had been elected to the Grolier Club in 1982 and whose
collection of books illustrated by the stencil process called pochoir had been
the subject of a Princeton exhibition the same year. After the two met at a
Grolier gathering in March 1983, Fry sent Ray a letter listing his favorite Art
Deco pochoir books, and Ray then knew how important Fry's collection would
be for his research. Dinner and an evening devoted to looking at Ray's books
ensued in April, and a month later Fry finished preparing a "distilled" list of
his collection. In August Ray asked Fry to deposit some fifteen volumes from
this list at the Morgan Library, and in the end he used eighteen illustrations
from these volumes. Fry continued to furnish material dealing with pochoir,
and Ray showed his appreciation by giving Fry a copy of Les rencontres de
monsieur de Bréot (1919), with pochoirs by Bonfils that Ray praised in his
first lecture. (Fry died prematurely in September 1990, and his collection was
purchased by the Princeton University Library.)
Later in the summer and in the early fall, Ray explored the holdings of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art (he was at the time a member of the visiting
committee for the Watson Library there), taking special interest in two
volumes illustrated by Barbier and four illustrated by Laboureur. (When the
nine slides he requested were presented to him by William Bond Walker,
head of the Watson Library and a fellow Grolier member, Ray reciprocated
by giving the museum an album of fifty Gavarni lithographs entitled Masques
et visages, par-ci, par-là.) And at the Columbia University Library (where he
was chairman of the Friends), he located two relevant pochoir volumes and
had two slides made from them. During the fall, he also examined in New
York several books held elsewhere: in October the Harvard copy of Verlaine's
Fêtes galantes with illustrations by Barbier was deposited at the Grolier Club
for his use (and from which he had two slides made); and in November five
(which Lucien Goldschmidt had told him about) were deposited at the Morgan
Library for his inspection (and yielded four slides for the lectures).
The richest institutional holdings in New York were in the New York
Public Library (an institution, two blocks from Ray's office, of which he was a
trustee), and in November he arranged with Donald Anderle, then in charge
of Special Collections, to see four books illustrated by Laboureur. By the end
of January 1985, as he wrote to Anderle, he was concentrating on the last
lecture, devoted to bindings. On 19 February he made the first of several
visits to the library for the purpose of looking at binding designs, especially
the important album of Pierre Legrain's maquettes in the Spencer Collection
and the bindings that Legrain designed for Florence Blumenthal. His various
visits to the library resulted in a total of twenty-eight slides that he selected
for use in the lectures.
In many ways, however, the most important New York collection for his
purposes was his own. (In the second paragraph of the opening lecture he
refers to Francis A. Kettaneh's collection as the "backbone" of the 1968
Grolier Club exhibition entitled "Art Déco: French Illustrated Books, Drawings,
Bindings, and Objets d'art of the 1920's," described in the Club's Gazette
for June 1969; what he does not say is that his own collection provided thirty
volumes for that exhibition.) During the early months of 1985 he deposited
some fifty of his books at the Morgan Library for photographing by David A.
Loggie (the Morgan's photographer, whom Ray paid directly as an independent
contractor). Ray's letter to Loggie accompanying one batch of books in
March began, "You will begin to think that my needs will never be satisfied."
In all, Ray used sixty-nine slides from his own collection in illustrating his
lectures.
As he was examining books in many locations and making notes on them,
he was also drafting segments of his lectures, so that his judgments would be
written up while the books were fresh in his mind (though his memory for
bibliographical detail was remarkable). By April 1985 his first typescript, extensively
revised by hand, had been retyped by Jean Gaylord, his Guggenheim
Foundation secretary. His text was ready for delivery, though he made a few
revisions by hand on his reading copy of the final typescript, as well as marginal
notations indicating such details of presentation as when the lights should
go off for the showing of slides and back on again.
Ray arrived at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford on Sunday, 5 May, and was
joined that evening for dinner by Alan Bell and his wife. The next morning
he met with the projectionist at the lecture room in the St. Cross Building in
Manor Road before lunching at Wolfson College with Julian Roberts of the
Bodleian Library. At 5 p.m. that day he delivered the first lecture to an
audience of about seventy-five that included such old friends as the scholar
Kathleen Tillotson and the Thackeray heir Belinda Norman-Butler, who—
after the sherry reception that traditionally follows the first Lyell lecture each
year—had dinner with Ray at the Randolph. The festive spirit of the day
was further enhanced by the arrival of telegrams from Charles Fry and
the Lyell Lecturer of twenty years before, who sent him a note later in
the week explaining that he had not felt up to attending.)
The week and a half proceeded smoothly (except for a problem with the
slide projector, necessitating its replacement after the second lecture), and
Ray's characteristically full social schedule surrounded the lectures themselves.
On the days in between the lectures he had lunches with Guggenheim
Fellows who were working in England—on the first Tuesday at L'Étoile in
London and on the other two days (Thursday the 9th and Tuesday the 14th)
at Elizabeth in Oxford. His evenings offered a succession of dinners with
book-world friends—such as Richard and Mary Ellmann on the 7th, Robert
Shackleton (formerly Bodley's Librarian) at All Souls on the 8th, John Carey
at Merton on the 9th, Shackleton again at home on the 10th, and Bent JuelJensen
on the 13th, plus a Bodleian dinner at Wolfson College on the 15th,
after the final lecture and concluding sherry party. (In all, as he wrote to Mary
Woodring of the Guggenheim Foundation on the 16th after settling in at the
Connaught in London, he "was entertained at lunch or dinner at six colleges.")
The weekend after the third lecture was spent in the country seeing
Robert Burchfield at Sutton Courtenay and Colin Franklin at Culham. Visits
to Oxford bookshops filled some of the weekday mornings, and a session at
the Bodleian on the 13th was referred to in his lecture two days later. When
in the fifth lecture he says, "I had better conclude by explaining why I have
not discussed Paul Bonet," he added in the margin, "particularly since I discovered
Monday that the Bodleian contains four splendid examples of his
work given by Albert Ehrman."
At the beginning of that final lecture, according to the notation he had
inserted on his reading copy, he said, "Thanks for the cordial welcome I have
received—and for the attentive reception accorded these lectures." He was
not merely expressing conventional sentiments, for there is good reason to
believe that a great deal of appreciative enthusiasm had been conveyed to
him by various members of the audience. After all, no comparable treatment
of his subject had previously been attempted in English, and the background
he brought to it, as the audience would have recognized, made him an ideal
person for the task. As he put it in the first lecture, "My perspective is that of
a collector who for many years has endeavored to find out as much as he
could about French illustrated books of the last three centuries" (p. 20). Indeed,
he thought of his subject as an "episode in the history of book collecting"
(p. 21), though of course recognizing at the same time "the importance of Art
Deco in the evolution of styles" (p. 20). He had skillfully organized the material
to fit the required five-part structure and to present both a broad overview
and a detailed treatment of a few major figures. The opening lecture
sketches the relation of Art Deco to livres d'art in general and their collecting
in the 1920s, and then it examines what he calls "the anticipations of Art
Deco illustration during the 1910s" (p. 33) in publications relating to design,
fashion, and the theatre and in books illustrated by Robert Bonfils. The next
three lectures are devoted, in turn, to three major artists, George Barbier
(1877-1943). And the final lecture takes up Art Deco bookbinding, focusing
on Pierre Legrain (1889-1929). By the end, listeners had gained (as readers
can now gain) a sense of the movement as a whole, as well as the contributions
of the major figures, the shapes of their careers, and the processes they employed.
Although a considerable secondary literature on the Art Deco book existed
when Ray wrote, it was almost entirely in French, and much of it dated from
the 1920s. Indeed, Raymond Hesse's two general surveys appeared in 1927 and
1928, and the chief catalogue of Schmied's work also came out in 1927; and
the monographs on Barbier and Laboureur in the series "Les artistes du livre"
both appeared in 1929, as did Rose Adler's album of contemporary bindings.
Clément-Janin's work on illustration and Crauzat's on bindings came shortly
thereafter, in 1931 and 1932. A few significant works (like Carteret's extensive
treatment of book illustration in 1946-48 and the basic catalogue of Legrain
in 1965) did appear later, but not in sufficient quantity to affect the generalization
that much of the writing important for Ray's purposes (both in periodicals
and in books) had appeared more than half a century earlier. As for
writing in English, the 1976 memoir of Schmied by the California printer
Ward Ritchie stands out as a possibly unique instance of a specialized book in
English on a French Art Deco book artist. Ray points out at the beginning of
the last lecture that Victor Arwas in his 1980 Art Deco gave only passing mention
to illustrated books, though he did pay attention to binding—a fact that
symbolizes the treatment of Art Deco illustration in English.
Ray's lectures show a mastery of the secondary literature through 1984
(including dealers' and auction-house catalogues), and his surviving notes indicate,
not surprisingly, that he had read considerably more material than he
referred to in his text. But, as he says in the first lecture, his main source was
"of course" the books themselves. His judgment of those books is what makes
his lectures important, and would have made them important even if there
were not such a shortage of wide-ranging studies written with the perspective
of time, especially in English. The stately movement of the lectures makes
the choice of books seem almost inevitable, but in fact the ones he selected
were the product of a long process of surveying hundreds of books, as his many
handwritten lists and notes reveal. Given the very limited edition-size of most
of the relevant illustrated books and the uniqueness of individual bindings,
the task of locating the material he needed to see was a challenge; and the
fact that his remarks rest on such a broad base (including original drawings,
special printings, and maquettes) is in itself a significant accomplishment. His
final choices and his critical discussions of them reflect a keen eye, trained
over many years. If he does not engage in formal analysis as much as one
might expect, his characterizations of artists' styles do reflect an understanding
of (and include commentary on) the technical processes they were employing.
And he never loses sight of the fact that he is dealing with book-related
art: he is always alert to the differing effects of vignettes (surrounded by text)
as opposed to full-page plates, and he regularly considers whether a given
or purely abstract).
He also brought to his subject a thorough knowledge of French literature
(having received Bachelor's and Master's degrees in it), enabling him to make
perceptive comments about the match in certain instances between literary
work and illustrator; and knowing the place of each illustrated scene in the
structure of the work being illustrated allowed him to evaluate the artists'
choices of scenes to depict. He was able to say, for example, that the verbal
works selected by Laboureur were "invariably idiosyncratic, usually laconic,
and often ironic" (p. 68) and that Laboureur's illustrations for Colette's
L'Envers du music-hall were "as bleak as his author's text" (p. 76). Similarly,
he could point out that Barbier's designs for Verlaine's Fêtes galantes "are
full of fantastic touches without warrant in the poet's text" (p. 42), and he
could generalize that Barbier was largely "a decorator rather than an illustrator"
(p. 44). With Ray's background, Barbier's designs for theatre costumes
took him back to a passage in Gautier's Mlle. de Maupin (p. 42).
Schmied, he realized, "abandoned representational illustrations" for Vigny's
Daphné, since the novel's primary concern was "the metaphysical speculations
which filled the Emperor's mind" (pp. 57-58). His fluency in French
served him well in another way, too, for it permitted him to use his own
smooth translations of any comments he wished to quote from these artists or
from writings about them. His translations are careful (occasionally interspersed
with bracketed English words to show what he had inserted or
bracketed French ones to show what he had translated), but they are never
pedantic or awkward. He did leave a few quotations untranslated, if he
thought the French phrases were significant in themselves or if the passages
were from poetry—but apparently he translated even those when he delivered
the lectures, for handwritten translations of them were added to his reading
copy.
Ray's wide reading was of course not limited to French literature and
the other works chosen by Art Deco artists, and his discussions are enlivened,
and illuminated as well, by various asides and allusions. The way of life of
Schmied and his "entourage" reminds him of that of Mr. Wardle and his
family in The Pickwick Papers (p. 61). Laboureur's depiction of a luxurious
hotel in Valéry Larbaud's 200 chambres, 200 salles de bain causes him to
speculate on what Laboureur might have done with Arnold Bennett's Imperial
Palace, published three years later (p. 81). The combined work of
Laboureur and André Gide in the 1929-30 edition of Les caves du Vatican
conveys the kind of "light-hearted mood" that would have resulted "if Eric
Gill had undertaken to illustrate Stevenson's New Arabian Nights" (p. 82).
And when he finds Schmied's vignettes in one of J.-C. Mardrus's translations
from the Arabian Nights "oddly reminiscent of Bewick in placement and
conception" (p. 64), he is drawing on his knowledge of English illustration of
an earlier time; or when, speaking of a binding on Daphnis et Chloé, he notes
that "Legrain's aggressive geometry clashes radically with Bonnard's cloudy
drawings" (p. 97), one knows that he has Bonnard's whole career in the back
French illustration). He also calls to mind how other artists had illustrated
the same works as the artists he is concentrating on: his discussion of Laboureur's
designs for a 1930 edition of Maeterlinck's La vie des abeilles contrasts
them with Carlos Schwabe's illustrations for a 1908 edition of that work
(p. 82), and he compares Laboureur's burins for the 1927 edition of Giraudoux's
Suzanne et le Pacifique with the engravings of Jean-Gabriel Daragnès
in the 1928 edition (p. 83). Earlier he had noted that Barbier's illustrations
for Les liaisons dangereuses were "as comprehensive and effective" as any
since those of Monnet and Gérard for the 1796 edition (p. 45).
His prose throughout has the directness and clarity that were traits of all
his writing. There is a deceptive simplicity to his statements, for their lack
of grammatical complexity never suggests superficiality. Indeed, only a deep
knowledge of the subject could lead to such unhedged assertions as calling
Schmied's Daphné "the Art Deco book par excellence" (p. 57) or describing
Barbier as "the most haunting of Art Deco book artists" (p. 35). Knowledge of
all of Barbier's work leads to identifying costumes that "belong to Barbierland
rather than to history" (p. 40). There is a formality in Ray's writing that
mirrors the formality of his personality, but his sense of humor and his wry
amusement at human foibles are also in evidence here. He characterizes the
Cercle Lyonnais du Livre, for instance, as a group "whose members would not
have appreciated any radical departure from the conventional" (p. 56); he
describes a statuette of a naked dwarf in one of Barbier's drawings as "dissipated
yet vestigially fashionable" (p. 38); and he remarks on the interest
shown in "almost any elaborately decorated binding of the 1920s, no matter
how inferior its quality" (p. 85).
Ray's lectures, in short, are authoritative, perceptive, elegant, and witty.
They were polished by the time of their delivery, and Ray did not feel that
they required any further work. While still in Oxford (on 13 May 1985) he
sent a note to J. P. W. Roper (Rosemary Schwerdt's successor as secretary of
the Lyell electors), indicating that he would give his typescript to Julian
Roberts after the final lecture. "I regard it," he said, "as being in publishable
form." Although the text was indeed in publishable form, the cost of producing
the numerous illustrations was too much for the three publishers Ray got
in touch with during the eighteen months before his death—though he was
aware of only the first two rejections (from Oxford University Press, which
had the right of first refusal, and from Dover Publications, which published
the 1986 reprints of his catalogues of English and French illustrated books),
for the letter of rejection from the London office of Yale University Press was
dated two days after his death.
If Ray were publishing these lectures today, he might perhaps add a
few references to publications that have appeared since 1985, such as Sylvain
Laboureur's four-volume Catalogue complet de l'oeuvre de Jean-Émile Laboureur
(Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1989-91), Mauro Nasti's Schmied
(Venice: G. Tamoni, 1991), and Yves Peyré and H. George Fletcher's Art
Deco Bookbindings: The Work of Pierre Legrain and Rose Adler (New York:
at the New York Public Library drawn primarily from the Bibliothèque
Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, which Ray had visited and refers
to in the fifth lecture. He might also cite a substantial Legrain exhibition
catalogue, Pierre-Émile Legrain (Paris: Galerie Jacques de Vos, 1996) and
some of the numerous exhibition catalogues devoted to Laboureur, as well as
general works like Alastair Duncan and Georges de Bartha's Art Nouveau and
Art Deco Bookbinding: French Masterpieces, 1880-1940 (New York: Abrams,
1989) and Roger Devauchelle's La reliure: recherches historiques, techniques
et biographiques sur la reliure française (Paris: Éditions Filigranes, 1995).
And he might mention the catalogues of some of the many notable post-1985
auctions of Art Deco books, such as the long series of Hôtel Drouot catalogues
(beginning in 1991) devoted to the collections of the illustrious publishercollector
Henri M. Petiet, who died in 1980 (and who published one book,
Toulet's Les contrerimes, that turns up four times in Ray's slides); or the Hôtel
Drouot sale of books from the Succession Paul Bonet on 1 June 1990; or the
two sales at Sotheby's in New York on 2 June 1995 and 25 June 2001, drawn
from the holdings of a New York collector (who wishes to remain anonymous)
and containing splendid examples of the work of the figures discussed in Ray's
lectures. Ray thought that prevailing prices were high in 1985, noting that
Parisian dealers had set their prices "as usual at a point just below that at
which no customer would consider buying" (p. 20); and surely some further
sarcasm would have been forthcoming as he contemplated the higher levels
(sometimes reaching well into five figures) that have since been achieved.
But it is hard to see anything substantial that he would have felt the need
to revise. His judgments grew out of the examination of such an extensive
array of books that he is unlikely to have encountered others (however much
he may have admired them) so absolutely compelling as to have demanded
inclusion in preference to examples already selected. His work has not been
superseded as a compact and reliable survey. And the quality of his evaluations
will give these lectures a secure place in the future study of their
subject.
Sources, Treatment of Text, Acknowledgments
Sources. The surviving papers relating to Ray's work on these lectures fall into
five categories: (1) correspondence with officials at Oxford, friends, and librarians—
the last group of letters including some of the lists of books he wished to see and some
of his orders for slides; (2) holograph notes made at libraries and at home while
examining primary and secondary material, along with holograph lists of books and
preliminary drafts of scattered paragraphs; (3) a partial first typescript, with extensive
holograph revisions; (4) multiple copies of the final typescript, including the
one annotated for use in delivering the lectures, which shows that the last illustration
and the associated comments were added at a late stage (six of the small revisions
made on that copy were actually incorporated into the typing of most of the other
surviving copies—a situation reflecting the fact that the typing had been done on a
magnetic-card typewriter and that small alterations could therefore be made without
the need for retyping the unaltered text); (5) photocopies, occasionally annotated,
of secondary material. As Ray's literary executor, I have all these papers in my possession
at present. The slides that Ray used in the lectures, except for ten that are
apparently lost (1.6, 1.9, 2.6, 2.12, 2.33, 3.13, 3.16, 4.40, 5.1, and 5.20 in the list of
illustrations below), are now the property of the Pierpont Morgan Library, where
Ray's entire collection of books, manuscripts, and art is housed. Ray's own comments
on his sources appear in the lectures on pp. 20-21 and 89-90. In my introduction, I
have incorporated, as section I, a slightly revised version of the biographical sketch
that I originally wrote as part of the introduction to a collection of Ray's essays,
Books as a Way of Life (New York: Grolier Club and Pierpont Morgan Library,
1988), a volume that includes a checklist of Ray's writings.
Treatment of text. I have followed the text of the final typescript as revised in
Ray's hand for delivery, with two classes of exceptions. (1) I have not accepted those
revisions clearly intended only for oral delivery, such as those aimed at speeding up
the reading (deleting first names, shortening titles, omitting dates) and those with
direct reference to the occasion (such as thanking the audience or noting his visit to
the Bodleian, both of which I have quoted in the introduction above). (2) I have
made some four dozen alterations of my own, only ten of which go beyond the correction
of typographical errors or the adjustment of formal features for consistency:
I have substituted "A year" for "Two years" at 23.28, "before these words were published"
for "however" at 24.26 (in order to recognize the discrepancy between the
date at the end of Clément-Janin's text and the printing dates of the two volumes
as given in the colophons), "several" for "six main" at 25.15, "former" for "latter"
at 32.27, "leaves" for "pages" at 59.25, "vignette" for "plate" at 63.25, "the last" for
"these" at 79.11, and "fewer" for "less" at 22.26 and 84.10; and I have inserted "these"
at 82.29. The documentation remains in the form Ray used, except that arabic
numerals have replaced roman and some inconsistencies have been regularized—
primarily his inconsistent citation of page numbers (sometimes in parentheses in the
text and sometimes in footnotes that consisted solely of page numbers where no author
or title reference was needed: all such page references are now in the text). The
list of secondary works cited and the list of illustrations have been added; they do not
exist in any form in Ray's papers.
Acknowledgments. Gordon Ray would have wanted to thank the Oxford officials
who handled the arrangements for his visit (including Rosemary Schwerdt and
J. P. W. Roper) and the staff members of libraries where he worked, including Julian
Roberts (Bodleian), the late Kenneth A. Lohf (Columbia), the late Robert L. Nikirk
(Grolier Club), Colta F. Ives and William Bond Walker (Metropolitan Museum of
Art), Anna Lou Ashby, Paul Needham, and Charles Ryskamp (Morgan), Donald
Anderle (New York Public Library), Michael T. Ryan (Stanford), and Ralph Franklin
and Marjorie G. Wynne (Yale)—as well as Eleanor M. Garvey and Roger E. Stoddard,
who arranged for a Harvard book to be deposited at the Grolier Club for his
loan of many books and for other kindnesses, including a reading of the typescript;
to Dr. Jack Eisert for the loan of five books; to the late Lucien Goldschmidt for much
advice and for reading the typescript; and to the late Jean Gaylord, his secretary at
the Guggenheim Foundation. No doubt he would have acknowledged still other
persons whose help I am not aware of.
My own thanks go, first of all, to the following institutions and individuals for
permission to reproduce—on the website of the Bibliographical Society of the University
of Virginia and (in several instances) in the present volume—the images made
from material in their collections: Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript
Library (Jean Ashton); Houghton Library, Harvard University (Hope Mayo); Pierpont
Morgan Library (Charles E. Pierce, Jr.); New York Public Library (David
Ferriero, H. George Fletcher, and Thomas Lisanti); and Stanford University Library
(Roberto G. Trujillo and Sean Quimby). I also thank Dr. Jack Eisert for permission
to reproduce four illustrations from books in his possession. For help with questions
regarding permission or citation, I thank Eileen Sullivan (Metropolitan Museum of
Art), Rebecca Warren Davidson (Princeton University Library), and Vincent Giroud
and Ellen Cordes (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University—
which, through the good offices of Vincent Giroud, provided newly scanned images
to replace Ray's slides). (For the specific illustrations that come from each source, see
the index to the list of illustrations below; more detailed credit lines accompany each
image on the website and each plate in this volume.) For generous assistance of various
kinds, I wish to record my indebtedness to Anna Lou Ashby, John Bidwell,
Justin Caldwell, Stephen C. Massey, Constance McPhee, Paul Needham, and J.
Fernando Peña. Finally, I give particular thanks to four individuals at the University
of Virginia who played major roles in helping this work reach publication:
Matthew Gibson and Cindy Filer Speer of the Electronic Text Center, who oversaw
the careful transfer of the slide images and captions to the Bibliographical Society's
website; Elizabeth Lynch, assistant to the editor of Studies in Bibliography, who—
in addition to her usual expert proofreading and checking—performed the tasks of
matching each slide with its discussion in the text, verifying the vertical and horizontal
orientation of each image on the website, locating further information about
many of the books from which the slides were made, and writing a preliminary draft
of the list of illustrations; and David L. Vander Meulen, editor of Studies in Bibliography,
who gave his characteristically detailed and perceptive attention to this
work.
Plates in This Volume
(following page 24)
PLATE 1. Robert Bonfils, plate from Modes et manières d'aujourd'hui, 9e
anné, 1920, [1922] (1.18). Reproduced from Charles Rahn Fry's copy, now in
the Charles Rahn Fry Pochoir Collection, Princeton University Library.
PLATE 2. George Barbier, plate from Albert Flament's Personnages de
comédie, 1922 (2.16). Reproduced from the original in the Elisha Whittelsey
Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
PLATE 3. François-Louis Schmied, text and vignette from Histoire de la
princesse Boudour, translated by J.-C. Mardrus, 1926 (3.24). Reproduced from
the original in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University.
PLATE 4. François-Louis Schmied, plate from La création, translated by
J.-C. Mardrus, 1928 (3.30). Reproduced by permission of The Pierpont Morgan
Library, Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987.
PLATE 5. Jean-Émile Laboureur, plate from Jean Valmy-Baysse's Tableau
des grands magasins, 1925 (4.27). Reproduced by permission of The Pierpont
Morgan Library, Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987.
PLATE 6. Pierre Legrain, lower doublure in his album of maquettes, 1929
(5.26). Reproduced by permission from the original in the Spencer Collection,
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
PLATE 7. Rose Adler, upper cover and spine of binding (1931) on Tristan
Bernard's Tableau de la boxe, 1922 (5.37). Reproduced by permission from
the original in the Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor,
Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
PLATE 8. François-Louis Schmied, upper cover of binding on Le cantique
des cantiques, translated by Ernest Renan, 1925 (5.45). Reproduced from the
original in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
| Studies in bibliography | |