Dissertation Information for David Walker Mallison NAME: - David Walker Mallison
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science
SCHOOL:
- Columbia University (USA) (1976)
ADVISORS: - Terry Belanger
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Phyllis Dain - Susan Otis Thompson - Lowell A. Martin - Ray L. Trautman
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: HENRY LEWIS BULLEN AND THE TYPOGRAPHIC LIBRARY AND MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN TYPE FOUNDERS COMPANY
Abstract: The American Type Founders Company (ATF Company), founded in 1892 and based in New Jersey, quickly became the world's largest producer of foundry type. Its Library and Museum, developed and maintained during the period 1908-1936 by its librarian Henry Lewis Bullen, was equally celebrated. Its over 17,000 holdings are available to scholars today in various divisions of the Colombia University Libraries. The ATF Library included one of the most complete collections in existence of type specimen books, material relating to and books on the history of printing and examples of alphabets of all countries, a collection of Frankliniana, the rare Canon Missae as well as sixty-eight other incunabula, and literature relating to printers and printing in most languages, including many non-Western ones.
This study of Henry Lewis Bullen and the Typographic Library and Museum of the ATF Company breaks into five parts: (1) the background, formation, and early years of the ATF Company; (2) the life of Henry Lewis Bullen to 1908; (3) Bullen and the ATF Library , 1906 to 1923; (4) Bullen and the ATF Library, 1924 to 1936; and (5) the official establishment and housing of the ATF Library at Columbia University.
The amalgamation in 1892 of twenty-three type foundries into the ATF Company was caused by a combination of merchandising problems and technological changes, principally the rapid increase in the use of the Linotype which cut sharply intro the sales of foundry type. Conditions in the business world continued to affect the ATF Company and, eventually, the Typographic Library and Museum.
Bullen's early life appears Dreiser-like in its rise from printer's apprentice in Australia to tramp printer in the Midwest to salesman and advertising manager in Boston and New York to conviction for embezzling from the United Printing Machinery Company in 1905. He quickly re-established himself and was back at work by 1908 with the ATF Company, by which he had been employed earlier, from 1892 to 1899.
In a pseudononymous essay in 1906 Bullen proposed that the ATF Company establish a company library devoted to the printing and type founding arts. His suggestion was approved and expanded by Robert W. Nelson, president of the ATF Company. Bullen devoted nearly all the remaining years of his life to developing a typographic library without equal in the world. He bought judiciously and had a masterful way of obtaining donations of various kinds. Throughout these years as ATF librarian he was deeply concerned with educating America's printers, particularly in informing them of the great heritage of the printing past enshrined in his library. To accomplish his goals, he mounted elaborate exhibits including a coat-to-coast travelling show, he wrote many articles on the history of printing, and he planned and thought courses about printing history on both the trade school and the university level. It was in this spirit that he longed for the removal of his library to an education institution away from a business corporation, although the ATF Company had been extremely generous with funds during the library's first eighteen years. This goal was nearly accomplished as part of a plan for a Graphic Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After 1926 the ATF Company's business reverses cut the support of the library and eventually made its sale mandatory, but negotiations with several institutions proved fruitless. As the Depression threatened the existence of the ATF Company itself, the tone of Bullen's correspondence alternated between optimism and cynicism. During these later years Bullen sold many duplicate copies of the library's holdings. After several years of negotiations between the ATF Company and Columbia University, the library was placed on deposit at Columbia in September 1936. Bullen's health soon declined sharply, and he died in April 1938.
During the years the library was on deposit at Columbia University (1936-1941), the collection was inventoried and values in preparation for the possible purchase. After buying the collection in 1941, Columbia University treated the Typographic Library in various ways: from 1941 to 1948 it was available for users in rooms of its own, in 1948 the collection was moved into the Special Collections stacks, in the early 1950's an ambitious plan to make the library the nucleus of a Graphic Arts Center failed, and in 1954 the holdings were dispersed into sections of the Columbia University Libraries.
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MPACT Scores for David Walker Mallison A = 0
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calculated 2008-01-31 06:01:48
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