Document Type
Article
Date
4-1971
Keywords
Folio Society, lithographs, Charles Ede, printing, Syracuse University Special Collections, illustrations
Language
English
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature
Description/Abstract
In 1969 the George Arents Research Library at Syracuse University acquired the personal archives of Charles Ede, founder and designer of the Folio Society of England. The archives include all the books published by the Society between 1947 and 1967, a complete run of the periodical The Folio and some manuscript material. The Folio Society was founded in 1947 to produce well-designed editions of classic texts at minimal cost. Its beginnings in post-war austerity determined its continued production of handsome but not over elaborate books. As the founder of the Society said, "The real challenge, we felt, was to equate good design with the mass production techniques of the machine age." This is a revolutionary idea in book making. Printing itself, both of texts and of illustrations, was a revolutionary idea; but when machines were created to set type, print and bind books, all jobs formerly done by hand, the aesthetic ideal still looked back to the fifteenth century just as the fifteenth century printed book itself looked backward to manuscripts.
Recommended Citation
Rainey, Susan, "The Folio Society: Handsome Books At Minimal Cost" (1971). The Courier. 82.
https://surface.syr.edu/libassoc/82
Source
local input
