Twelve issues of PM complete with original covers and all inserts bound into a single decorated cloth volume by the craftsmen at the Composing Room in an edition of 400 copies. Blue cloth boards with leather gilt spine label. Publishers Index for Volume 2 laid in. Boards quite worn and bumped and spine label worn and chipped. Back cover of the September 1935 issue [no. 13] not bound in [as issued], otherwise all 12 bound issues are in near fine condition.
A unique opportunity of own a collection of PM when it was becoming the leading journal for American Graphic Design and a clarion for the Avant-Garde Immigration to the United States.
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. NYC: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, No 1: August 1935. Original edition. Slim 12mo. Cloth-woven cover with Electrotype Bronzed Plaque attached. Decorated endpapers. 32 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Multiple paper stocks. Covers cloth-woven with a Bronzed plaque showing Pied Piper of Hamelin mounted to front panel.
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: P-M [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, No. 2.: October 1935. Original edition. Slim 12mo. Stencilled Nat Karson cover in 4 colors with a tipped in woven label. 32 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements.
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: P-M [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, No. 3: November 1935. Original edition. Slim 12mo. 4-color similetone process wrappers by Georges Schreiber. 32 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Multiple paper stocks.
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, Number 4: December 1935. Original edition. Slim 12mo. Sheet fed Gravure Cover. 32 pp. Decorated endpapers. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Multiple paper stocks. Cover by Robert Lawson.
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: P-M [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, No. 5.: January 1936. Original edition. Slim 12mo. Hot press stamp of Bruce Roger's printers mark on embossed yapped wrappers. 48 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements.
[Lynd Ward] Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, No. 6: February 1936. Original edition. Slim 12mo. French-folded Japanese Paper wrappers printed in one color. 32 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Multiple paper stocks. Cover is a wooden engraving by Lynd Ward on Natsume 4006 by Japan Paper Company, reproduced by electrotype by Herald-Nathan Press, Inc.
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, No. 7: March 1936. Original edition. Slim 12mo. Thick Lithographed perfect bound and sewn wrappers. 48 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Multiple paper stocks. Covers are Lithographic printed original designs by featured artist and author Lucian Bernhard.
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, No. 8: April 1936. Original edition. Slim 12mo. 4 color process cover by some guy named Van Gogh. 36 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Multiple paper stocks.
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, No. 9: May 1936. Original edition. Slim 12mo. 5-color lithographic wrappers by George Salter. 56 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Multiple paper stocks.
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, No. 10: June 1936. Original edition. 16mo. Printed stapled wrappers. 28 [4] pp Illustrated articles and trade advertisements. Photogelatine 2-color cover by Joseph Sinel.
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: P-M [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, No. 11.: July 1936. Original edition. Slim 12mo. Tipped in portrait on embossed yapped wrappers with paper from the Japan Paper Company. 64 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements.
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 2, No. 12: August 1936. Original edition. Slim 12mo. Offset litho cover by Dora Abrahams. 32 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements.
[12] 5.5 x 7.75 volumes with 476 pages of articles and trade advertisements. Issue highlights include:
Lynd Ward (1905 – 1985) studied theory of design, art history and teaching methods at Columbia University. He spent a year at the State Academy for Graphic Arts in Leipzig, Germany studying with Hans Mueller, Alois Kolp and George Mathey. Ward is known for his wordless novels told entirely through dramatic wood engravings. Ward's first work, God's Man (1929), uses a blend of Art Deco and Expressionist styles to tell the story of an artist's struggle with his craft, his seduction and subsequent abuse by money and power, and his escape to innocence. Ward, in employing the concept of the wordless pictorial narrative, acknowledged as his predecessors the European artists Frans Masereel and Otto Nuckel. Released the week of the 1929 stock market crash, the book was the first of six wood engraving Ward novels produced over the next eight years, including: Madman's Drum (1930); Wild Pilgrimage (1932); Prelude to a Million Years (1933); Song Without Words (1936); and Vertigo (1937). He was a member of the Society of Illustrators and The Society of American Graphic Arts. He won many awards including the Caldecott Medal, the Library of Congress Award and the Limited Editions Club SIlver Medal. He retired in 1974.
Bruce Rogers (1870 - 1957) studied art at Purdue University in Indiana. He worked for a breif time as a newspaper and book illustrator before moving to Boston to become designer at Modern Art magazine. He joined the Riverside Press of the Houghton-Mifflin Co and worked there from 1896 to 1912. He is known as one of America's greatest book designers mostly through the many books designed after leaving Riverside Press. He was a consultant to the presses at Oxford University and Harvard. He designed the typeface Centaur, based on Jenson's 15th century roman face. The face first appeared in the magazine The Centaur and was originally designed for the Museum of Modern Art. His greatest work was done in England when he designed the Oxford Lecturn Bible, also set in Centaur.
Thomas Benrimo (1887 - 1958) was self-taught as an artist and worked in a frame gilding shop and as a billboard painter before leaving the west to come to New York. In New York, he worked for Lee Lash Studios and then became a scene painter at Gates Morange doing work for such shows as the Zeigfeld Follies. He left scene painting to become an illustrator and he was published in several magazines. He taught advertising and design at Pratt Institute from 1935 to 1939. After leaving scene painting he began designing sets for the theatre and doing advertising work. His clients included Atlas Cement, Exide Battery, Mack Trucks and the Aluminum Company of America. His work appears in the Fort Worth Art Museum, Museum of New Mexico and the Denver Art Museum.
George Salter (1897 - 1967) designed his first book jacket in Berlin in 1927. In 1930 he began teaching and was head of the department of commercial art at the Hoehere Graphische Fachschule in Berlin. The Reichskulturkamer declared him persona non grata in 1933, so Salter emigrated to America and began working almost immediately designing book jackets for Alfred A. Knopf. Salter also designed magazine covers for Mercury Publications, of which he was art director from 1939-1958. Salter's life and work bridged two continents and cultures, and spanned the severest political turmoil of the 20th century. Through a tumultuous life, nothing halted his tireless and brilliant design work. Classic Book Jackets tells Salter's story and describes the innovative design thinking he brought to his design students (including his designation of seven different jacket types that are still valid today). It includes more than 200 reproductions of his finest works, and a complete catalog of his jackets, designs, layouts, and lettering jobs for the book trade.
Joseph Claude Sinel (1889 - 1975) was born in Auckland, New Zealand where his father ran a stevedoring operation. He attended the Elam School of Art, then started work as an apprentice in the art department of Wilson & Horton Lithographers, working at the New Zealand Herald from 1904-1909 and studying under Harry Wallace. After a stint in England, he returned to New Zealand and Australia working as a freelance designer, then moved to San Francisco in 1918, where he first worked in advertising, then in 1923 started his own industrial design company in New York City. In 1936, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Sinel claimed to have designed everything from "ads to andirons and automobiles, from beer bottles to book covers, from hammers to hearing aids, from labels and letterheads to packages and pickle jars, from textiles and telephone books to toasters, typewriters and trucks." Although he is perhaps best remembered for his designs of industrial scales, typewriters, and calculators, he also designed trademarks for businesses such as the Art Institute of Chicago, created book jackets for Doubleday, Knopf, and Random House, and for many years designed publications for Mills College. He taught design in a number of schools in the United States, and in 1955 became one of the fourteen founders of the American Society of Industrial Designers (which later merged with other organizations to form the Industrial Designers Society of America). Sinel is sometimes said to have coined the term "industrial design" around the 1920s in the USA. Sinel denied the paternity of this term in an interview in 1969. "... that's the same time [1920] that I was injecting myself into the industrial design field, of which it's claimed (and I'm in several of the books where they claim) that I was the first one, and they even say that I invented the name. I'm sure I didn't do that. I don't know where it originated and I don't know where I got hold of it."
PM magazine was the leading voice of the U. S. Graphic Arts Industry from its inception in 1934 to its end in 1942 (then called A-D). As a publication produced by and for professionals, it spotlighted cutting-edge production technology and the highest possible quality reproduction techniques (from engraving to plates). PM and A-D also championed the Modern movement by showcasing work from the vanguard of the European Avant-Garde well before this type of work was known to a wide audience.
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