The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 48, July 1944 - April, 1945 Page: 408
617 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
"Check List," we had from McMurtrie a warm letter of con-
gratulations, expressing his appreciation of the service the
Quarterly was rendering.
The following account is condensed from a sketch written
by Albert H. Allen:
DOUGLAS CRAWFORD MCMURTRIE
Douglas Crawford McMurtrie was born in Belmar, New Jersey, on
July 20, 1888. At the age of eighteen he entered the Massachusetts In-
stitute of Technology. Here type, printing, and publication grew to be
his chief interest. In New York he launched himself as a free-lance de-
signer and producer of printing. Successively he was general manager of
the Cheltenham Press; director of the printing office of Columbia Uni-
versity, 1917-1919; president of the Arbor Press, 1919-1921; general man-
ager of Conde Nast Press, 1921-1923; president of Douglas C. McMurtrie,
Inc., 1924-1926; director of typography for the Cuneo Press, 1926-1927;
director of advertising and typography for the Ludlow Typograph Com-
pany in Chicago, 1927 to the time of his death.
While he was more interested in good usage of type faces than in de-
tails of type face design, the Ultra-Modern (McMurtrie) type face family
was produced by the Ludlow Typograph Company in 1928 on McMurtrie's
initiative and under his direction.
Wherever printing is done, not only in the United States but also abroad,
the influence of Douglas C. McMurtrie has been felt through his in-
numerable contributions to printing trade journals and in books and
monographs. Outstanding among his books is the volume entitled simply
The Book: the Story of Printing and Bookmaking, first published in 1927
as The Golden Book and reissued under its present title in 1937 with its
text carefully revised and in large part entirely rewritten. This work,
now in its third edition-the seventh since its first appearance as The
Golden Book, is quite generally accepted as the most authoritative history
of printing and book production.
Douglas McMurtrie was in constant demand as a speaker before or-
ganizations of printers, advertising men, publishers of newspapers, and
others interested in the use of type. He took advantage of the opportunity of
every such public appearance to preach his gospel of good printing. To Mc-
Murtrie, fine printing did not mean "arty" printing, and he had not
much sympathy with the production of "beautiful" books solely for the
sake of "beauty." His slogan was "fitness for purpose," which meant the
expert use of appropriate type faces, skillfully arranged and properly
printed, to serve the purpose of conveying most effectively a message in
printed words.
His years of enthusiastic devotion to printing aroused in McMurtrie
an almost equal enthusiasm for the history of printing. He was indefatiga-
ble in the gathering of material that concerned the history of the press,
from its beginnings in the fifteenth century down to relatively modern
times. An outstanding contribution which he made in the field of research
concerning the invention of printing was the publication in 1941 of his
volume The Gutenberg Documents, the only work which presents English408
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 48, July 1944 - April, 1945, periodical, 1945; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth146055/m1/452/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.