- Dard Hunter - The Printer's Printer.
- "The Progress of man through the myriad centuries may be divided into three dominate fundamental steps, or stages, of development, each transition extending through periods of hundreds or even thousands of years. Theses stepping-stones in the growth of man may be categorically classified under these broad headings: Speaking - Drawing - Printing.
- -Dard Hunter, Papermaking The history and technique of an ancient craft
- Dard Hunter (1883 -1966) was a financially independent at the turn of the century. It is hard to trace the source of the young man's wealth, but this freedom gave him the means to pursue printing as few modern printers have.
- When a job is produced today, we depend on a host of suppliers, manufacturers, and collaborators. The infrastructure of materials and services we require ranges from type design to binding equipment and from presses to paper.
- Dard Hunter excluded most of these preferring to take on the entire assignment himself!
- Early on in his career he became an "apprentice renaissance man" at the Roycroft Shops of Elbert Hubbard. There he mastered a number of crafts. Everything from stained glass to metal working drew his interest. What he attempted he accomplished. But it was paper making and printing that captured his love. (later, he would write a classic work on Papermaking.) In his early twenties he became the chief craftsman in Hubbard's East Aurora, New York art colony. He did or oversaw much of the work that made the Roycrofters famous in the Arts and Crafts movement that replaced the Victorian period of design.
- Dard Hunter was not entirely content at East Aurora. On occasion he would take off to Europe or elsewhere to study some new discovery or technological development. Finally he decided to undertake a master work. He would produce a book entirely on his own.
- He found an old fort on the Hudson River and restored it to his needs. There was a water mill on the property which he rebuilt. He wrote a manuscript for a book and then set out on a solo effort to print the book. He designed the type, cut and cast the type and then set it. He made plates for his own hand drawn initial letters in the classic style. He made the individual sheets of handmade paper and printed it on a hand press. Next he tanned leather for the covers, designed the bindings and bound the book. Today, at least one of the copies remains at the Smithsonian Institute.
- But the most unique and bizarre of all of Hunter's publications was related in Freeman Champney's 1968 biography , "Art and Glory: The story of Elbert Hubbard".
- "One of Dard Hunter's Roycroft assignments also became a notable conversation piece. A young widow arrived at the Inn, to stay while a one copy edition of a memorial volume to her late husband was produced. Dard had one week to inscribe the material by hand on heavy vellum. The widow said she would supply the binding material herself and in due course she produced a rolled parcel from her trunk. The booklet went forward to the bindery, but Dard's professional curiosity was eating at him, and he finally asked what sort of animal had produced leather of such delicate grain. He had asked and he was answered: . . . 'tanned skin from the back of her late husband.' The book was completed, and the widow left. Word came later that she had remarried and the Roycrofters speculated on 'what a strange felling the second husband must have had when he saw the memorial book lining on the drawing-room table and perhaps thought of himself as Volume II.'"
Copyright (C) 1997 by Frank Granger
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