At half past eight in the morning of 29 June 1926, Ruth Lapham (age 26) married Lee Pierce Butler (age 40) in Chicago's La Salle Street Catholic Apostolic Church, thus merging two considerable book collections that reflected the interests of these two individuals. They had known each other through the Newberry Library, where Pierce was custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printed Books. After completing her B.A. (1918) and M.A. (1919) in history at Northwestern University, Ruth worked from 1920 to 1922 in Newberry's Book Selection and Ordering Department, where Pierce was head. Her "resignation [in 1922] was received with particular regret,"¹ and so it was not surprising that George Utley, Newberry's librarian, rehired her in 1926 upon completion of a year's teaching stint at Hillsdale College and completion of the Ph.D. in American history from Northwestern (1925).

Visitors to the Butlers' residences over the years recall the rooms being filled with books well above one's reach without the assistance of a step stool or ladder. Even Pierce's office at the University of Chicago, where he was professor of bibliographical history from 1930 to 1952, was full of books—books about books, medieval history, philosophy, and theology. In later life, Ruth's interests included long-playing recordings of Russian composers such as Rachmaninoff, while Pierce seemed to enjoy detective stories, although he reportedly "hid them behind the sofa" from Ruth.²

By 1945 the Butlers' collection had expanded to a considerable extent, and they commissioned a bookplate. Not surprisingly, they chose R. Hunter Middleton, a Chicago typographer and family friend, to design a distinctive bookplate, for they recognized the quality of his designs. As Stephen Crook has said: "[Middleton] strove for pure contour and cleanness of line; his letters preserve only what is essential to their form, having no unnecessary parts. Through each of his designs there is a feeling of simplicity, harmony, and unbroken rhythm."³

In the mid-1920s the Ludlow Typeface Company of Chicago hired Middleton, originally to design a version of the fifteenth­century Nicholas Jenson typeface under the supervision of Ernst Detterer. From 1933 to 1971 Middleton served as the first director of typeface design, during which time he created twenty-four families of typefaces extending into ninety-eight series. Most of the faces were intended for use in display printing. The commercial success of the Ludlow firm during the 1940s and 1950s contributed to the international popularity of the typefaces de­signed by Middleton. Some of his most popular faces were Stellar, Garamond, Bodoni, Coronet, and Radiant. Each typeface design challenged Middleton's talents with some aspect of its complexity, but his objective of visual harmony was never sacrificed in favor of commercial productivity.

At a time when many were concerned with the influence of the machine on typeface design, Middleton believed the true purpose of the machine in typeface design was to serve human requirements. Legibility was the most important requirement of the typographer's work, as illustrated by the Butlers' personal book­plate. Middleton recognized the need for human intervention in the design process to redirect the engraving machine's course to ensure visual harmony. He viewed the advent of the engraving machine as a replacement for the hand-cut punch as a means to increase production without necessarily decreasing the artistic quality of the typeface.

Middleton's own private press, known as Cherryburn Press, is best known for its production of two portfolios of Thomas Bewick's wood engravings. Middleton felt that the true quality of Bewick's wood engravings had never been realized in print. It was his objective to right this situation, and indeed he did so with the initial printing of these blocks in 1945. This portfolio contained twenty-four subjects selected from Bewick's A General History of Quadrupeds (London, 1790) and the History of British Birds (London, 1797). In 1970 a second portfolio edition of 100 Bewick engravings was issued for the Newberry Library.

In the mid-1940s the Butlers renovated a stable outside of Paw Paw, Michigan, on land belonging to Ruth's family. Their plan was to retire there eventually and perhaps to open a mail-order bookshop. Those plans, however, were dashed just before Easter in 1953 when Pierce was tragically killed in an automobile accident near Burlington, North Carolina.

Following Pierce's death Ruth decided to disperse most of the collection as gifts to various academic institutions. To identify his books, she commissioned another family friend, James Hayes of the Newberry Calligraphy Study Group, to design an appropriate bookplate for the Pierce Butler Collection.

Hayes received his formal training at the Art Institute of Chicago under Ernst Detterer from 1926 to 1930. After several years as an interior display designer for Marshall Field, he became a freelance calligrapher in 1945. His clients include Johns Hopkins Uni­versity, Oberlin College, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Chicago,⁴ as well as such notables as George Thomas Tanselle. Hayes continues to be active when others would be considered retired.

The largest gift was to the Gregory Library of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. This material was predominately on philosophy, secular and ecclesiastical history, biblical literature and languages, and theology. The gem is a second edition of Cambridge Platonist Henry More’s Antidote against Atheism (London, 1655).

The large collection of reference material including standard bibliographies "was acquired by Chicago's Newberry Library, which then proceeded to sell duplicates."⁵ These were picked up by H. P. Kraus, and those that did not go into his reference shelves were again sold to the public.

The library at DePaul University received the incunabula from the Butlers' collection. Diverse works including fiction, history, and politics and selected texts about the classical period were donated to the Upjohn Library at Kalamazoo (Michigan) College in Pierce's memory.

 

Notes