Ellen Mazur Thomson–New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, September 1997.–232 p.: ill.–ISBN 0-300-06835-2 (cl., alk. paper); LC 96-52342.
In 1922, designer William Addison Dwiggins wrote an article concerning the state of American graphic design, chronicling the advances in reproduction technology, aesthetic changes in the printing industry, the development of the mass media, and most significantly, the recognition of a new profession: graphic design. Neither Dwiggins, then, nor Ellen Mazur Thomson, more recently, presumed this to be the beginning of the profession itself, but simply an attempt to define the growing field of commercial artists, typographers, photographers, printers, publishers, and other crafts men and women who had not yet created for themselves a professional identity. Little had been written before Dwiggins and little has been added until now.
In The Origins of Graphic Design in America, 1870-1920, Thomson uses the words and documents of the period to chronicle the organization of graphic art professionals in the United States. She begins with an overview of the technological changes in the nineteenth century printing trades which led to a rapid succession of new specializations and career choices for the artists it employed. Scientific developments of photography and later photo-mechanical reproduction transformed the advertising business. Linotype and Monotype machines allowed for the growth of mass market publications. Thomson then focuses on the tumultuous fifty-year period spanning the turn of the century in which American commercial artists began organizing themselves into professional associations. Ideas were exchanged publicly in trade journals and design magazines. Clubs such as the Graphic Group, who met for lunch and a lecture every two weeks at the National Arts Club, not only form the prototype for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, but transformed the look and feel of visual communications across the country. Although the book deals specifically with the United States, European trends such as the British Arts and Crafts Movement are examined for their influence on the development of American aesthetics. Special emphasis is placed on the history of women in the graphic design industries, something often overlooked in the standard histories of William Morris, Henry Lewis Johnson, and W.A. Dwiggins.
The strength of this books rests in Thomson’s reliance on primary source material for her study, undoubtedly a result of her previous work, American Graphic Design: a Guide to the Literature (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992). Serial librarians will be particularly impressed with her attempt to list every trade journal of the period, successfully following a multitude of title changes, merges, and subsidiaries. Throughout the book, Thomson skillfully handles the enormous variety of professions involved with the visual arts such as advertising, book publishing, typography, and printing; which is in itself one reason for the lack of cohesion among graphic arts professionals. A simple index leads the reader quickly to people, institutions, and publications in the chronologically organized text. It is not surprising that a bibliography is excluded, for there have been few similar histories of the graphic arts profession. Philip Meggs’s standard source, A History of Graphic Design (New York, N. Y.: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), is an international survey from the Renaissance to the present and only briefly covers the period Thomson examines in this volume. It is sufficient that copious notes lead the reader to a wide variety of outside sources.
The major criticism this reader has with The Origins of Graphic Design is with the design of the book itself and this may have been a problem of budgetary constraints. Although there are numerous illustrations, they are all dully printed in a similar fashion giving the book a sleepy, grey feel. It was a vibrant period with many great artists contributing to commercial design, yet one would never know it from browsing this volume. Hopefully, the scholarship of Thomson’s study will convince a future publisher to present her work in a livelier format.
Julie Mellby
Harvard University
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