The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 48, July 1944 - April, 1945 Page: 409
617 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Texas Collection
translations of all the known fifteenth century documents in which the
name of Johann Gutenberg occurs.
To the history of the press in the United States, McMurtrie made
numerous and valuable contributions. With the assistance of Albert H.
Allen, who was associated with him in this work after 1927, he began
the publication of histories of the press in the several states of the Union,
with bibliographies of their early imprints. In most of the areas which
he studied, McMurtrie was literally a pioneer, untiring in his search for
materials for the history of the early press in regions in which no earlier
typographic historian had ever worked. He planned a comprehensive sum-
ming up of his researches in a work, for which four or five volumes were
outlined, entitled History of Printing in the United States, the first work
on this subject since Isaiah Thomas, in 1810, published his History of
Printing in America. Volume II, covering the middle and southern At-
lantic states, was all that was published of McMurtrie's History. This
volume appeared in 1936. The other projected volumes were postponed be-
cause another enterprise, of great importance to McMurtrie's History,
claimed his interest and attention.
This other enterprise was the American Imprints Inventory, a project
of the WPA, which aimed at nothing less than the listing, in thousands
of American libraries, of every title printed and published in the United
States within certain date limits. These titles, listed by innumerable WPA
workers, were assembled at the central inventory office in Chicago, and
from the material thus collected there were published, 1937 through 1942,
thirty-four volumes, many of them under McMurtrie's direct editorial di-
rection, containing the titles, with the libraries in which copies were to
be found, of early regional imprints. After the WPA had been discontinued,
this work was resumed in 1943 by the Bibliographical Society of America,
with financial aid from the Rockefeller Foundation. Douglas McMurtrie
up to the time of his death was editor-in-chief of the Bibliographical So-
ciety's enterprise.
The enormous quantity of material collected by the American Imprints
Inventory, much of which would have remained otherwise undiscovered,
will make it possible for some other scholar at some future time to com-
plete McMurtrie's unfinished History of Printing in the United States.
But without McMurtrie's unflagging zeal and enthusiasm in promoting
the collection of this material, such a history would have remained im-
possible.
In 1943 McMurtrie became keenly interested in a new direction, not un-
related to his interests in typography and printing --the underground
press of Europe in the Nazi-occupied countries. He published several ar-
ticles and had made the beginnings of a book on the subject.
The multiplicity of his interests in printing and related subjects is
measured in a recently published bibliography of his printed contributions
on printing and its history in the United States and elsewhere, on typog-
raphy and printing practice, on type design and type-founding, on bibliog-
raphy and bibliographical practice, and on a variety of historical subjects.
The list contains around five hundred titles.
Dr. Walter F. McCaleb, now in Cleveland, Ohio, has written
the following letter 'regarding the beginnings of the Association:409
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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/m1/453/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.