The Work of Stephen Harvard: A Life in Letters

by David P. Becker

Overview

Calligrapher, stonecutter, illustrator, and type designer, Stephen Harvard’s art and craftsmanship were rooted equally in the history of the book and the natural world. At his untimely death in 1988, Harvard left both a collection of graphic works and a body of prose that explored his dream of an ideal alphabet, “a perfect, proportionate set of images that shine with a pythagorean light,” a dream that Harvard found as compelling and impossible “as the search for perpetual motion.” David P. Becker’s lovingly edited and sumptuously illustrated catalog, which won the American Library Association’s 1991 Leab Exhibition Catalog Award for Excellence, bears out Harvard’s conviction that typography, which is at once art and craft, must “strive to satisfy the intelligence and not the intelligentsia.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780914630043
Publisher:	Harvard
Publication date:	03/31/2005
Series:	Houghton Library Publications , #7
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 10.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

David P. Becker is the former Assistant Curator of Printing and Graphics Arts, Houghton Library at Harvard College Library, Harvard University.

Table of Contents

1. Foreword

2. Introduction

3. Acknowledgments

4. Paragraphs on Life and Letters by Stephen Harvard

5. Exhibition Checklist

SH as designer

6. Books

7. Invitations, Posters, Broadsides

8. Decorated Papers and Devices

9. Type Designs

10. SH as Stonecutter

11. SH as Author

12. SH as Draftsman and Illustrator

13. Published Writings

14. Catalogue of Inscriptional Stonework