By Lawrence Kreisman

You often fall in love with something without really knowing why— it speaks to you and the dialogue continues to enrich your life whether or not you figure out some logical reason for it. Picking up a book from Elbert Hubbard's Roycroft Press has that effect on me.

I was drawn to the Roycroft books not so much by the bindings— number of contemporary publishers did similar work— but by the remarkable graphic images by Dard Hunter that lay between the covers. Hunter (1883-1966) excelled as a designer, craftsman, printer, typographer and papermaker. While a near contemporary of such progressive graphic designers as Boston poster and typeface genius Will Bradley (see Style 1900, Winter 2011-12), English-born New York artist and illustrator Louis Rhead, and Bay Area publisher Paul Elder and artists Arthur and Lucia Mathews, Hunter nonetheless forged his own design path. It would be hard to find another American graphic artist whose work compares.

Hunter's chief success was in adapting avant-garde European design ideas into a graphic design vocabulary that was accessible to the American mainstream. He was drawn to the designs of German and Austrian artists and craftspeople who rejected traditional art in favor of non-historicist approaches. These pioneers of modernism combined the fluid lines of Art Nouveau with simple geometry and the controlled, limited use of embellishments in architecture, interiors, products for the home, and printed matter… Subscribe to read the entire article.

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