by Charlene Lattea

When a paper mill in Wellsburg, W.Va., called the S. George Company closed its doors in 1977, two Pittsburgh businessmen offered to purchase a large inventory of commercial wood and metal engravings that had been used and stored at the plant for almost a hundred years.

It amounted to nine tons, including about 2,500 wood engravings that the company used to print high-quality flour sacks and labels for agricultural products.

Bob Graham and Pat Lee originally wanted to sell the engravings as collectibles or for commercial use. Instead, they recently donated the entire collection to WVU. The GramLee Collection of Early American Commercial Wood Engravings is one of the largest single collections of 19th century American wood engravings known in the United States today.

The gift came after a long working relationship with Cliff Harvey, a professor of graphic design in the Division of Art and founder of the Graphic Design Program at WVU, whom Graham and Lee asked to proof and document the collection shortly after they acquired it.

Coincidentally, Harvey had established a business called Permutation Press in 1973 to experiment with graphic design and letterpress printing and to produce fine limited-edition works.

He catalogued the wood blocks and made proof prints on a 12x18-inch 1907 Albion letterpress and Vandercook proof press in his basement workshop.

"Over and over again, I would drive the interstate from Morgantown to Carnegie, Pa., to either Pat or Bob's home and carefully bring back block after block to my basement press," Harvey said.

"There, for the next two years or so, selected students from my graphic design classes and I pressed new life from 100-year-old commercial engravings."

After printing a series of limited-edition prints, Harvey exhibited and sold them, crisscrossing the United States in the mid-1980s.

He conducted research at the Library of Congress in an attempt to discover precisely when the engravings were made, who the engravers were, and what some of the scenes depicted.

He found that no one had ever published anything on early commercial engraving. He also found proof that some of the engravings had been made from patterns, while others were borrowed or traced from popular advertisements or photographs of the day.

"The engravings provide a visual record of the lives of ordinary people in West Virginia and the United States between 1895 and the turn of the century," he said. "The majority show family gatherings, everyday lifestyles, fashions, tools, modes of transportation such as speeding locomotives and sailing ships, and architecture.

"They also document industrial, social, and commercial art history of the 19th century, showing factories, the production process of flour, famous current events, people such as George Washington, or famous symbols such as the Liberty Bell and the Statue of Liberty.

"They make a bold visual impact that is somewhere between fine engravings and the crudeness of early advertising art."

In 1998, after five years of hand-printing, Harvey completed approximately 50 copies of a private-press book about the GramLee engravings, titled Before Rosebud Was a Sled: Commercial Wood Engraving in America Seen Through the GramLee Collection.

Based on his many years of research, the book examines the art of woodblock engraving in the United States and how it evolved during the 19th and 20th centuries, using the GramLee Collection as an example.

Prints from the GramLee Collection include four actual-size prints of multi-color designs once used on flour barrels, including the Rosebud flour label. Harvey's sidebar commentary in the book provides insight about the images and printing process.

A feature story in the May/June 1999 issue of Print, the graphic design profession's leading national magazine, focuses on Harvey's five-year effort to hand-print the book, as well as his passion for the art of letterpress printing.

"The subject of the book is defunct and the printing method is antiquated," the magazine says. "But book designer Clifford Harvey's passion is timeless."

"I knew that someday I wanted to write, design, print, and bind at least one substantial private press book," Harvey said. "In 1984, as the computer intruded on every waking hour of my professional life, this quest became even more imperative.

"All hand and machine methods can be found in the blocks of the GramLee Collection, including evidence of the application of photographic enlargement and reduction of images," Harvey said. "Two technical intentions I had for the book were to let people see the beauty of the multicolor engravings reproduced in full size, which I did with the barrel labels, and to let the reader see the process involved in printing a multicolor image," he said.

The colors used in the original labels are not known. They were likely printed in variations of yellow, red, blue, and black, but Harvey experimented with different colors.

"To have recreated the originals as they appeared on early paper sacks could have been beautiful, but to unlock the potential held within is more exciting," he said.

Harvey used a full-sized mock-up, developed on a Macintosh computer, to formulate layouts, develop color ideas, and provide a four-page composition guide.

The edition includes 50 books, each measuring 9 inches wide and 15 inches long. Each book has 80 pages printed in eight-page signatures on 18x15-inch sheets.

Half of each book is printed on Arches rag paper and half on a special paper made with hemp rope fibers by Twinrockers Paper Mill of Brookston, Ind., to symbolize the use of hemp in the original flour sacks made by the S. George Company.

The cover is Dutch bookbinding cloth with a printed proof of one of the collection's 1930s flour sack labels dry-mounted to it. The end papers are a deep blue, the same shade that was used inside the flour sacks to make the flour look whiter.

It took more than 12,000 press impressions for the edition and 55 separate mixed inks. Harvey also hand-bound the books using a flexible-back technique to allow them to open flat.

WVU art students in the Graphic Design Program often use the letterpress, and Harvey feels it is very important to expose students to this kind of printing.

He has also continued to exhibit the blocks and the prints. In 1997 he took them to China during the Division of Art's summer exchange program and in 1998 he exhibited them at the University of Guanajuato, Mexico, where the Division is working to develop an exchange program.

"The art of letterpress printing is enjoying a rebirth," Harvey said. "To provide this resource center at WVU is very important for our students and for the state of West Virginia.

"I hope eventually, if we have a new addition to the Creative Arts Center, that we will have more space to store and exhibit the collection.

"We have part of the storage racks originally used for the engravings, but it would have been very difficult to get all of them before the S. George Company was razed because they were two stories high.

"My concern is to keep the history intact. No one has disputed the fact that this is the largest collection of its kind in the country. The Smithsonian has a large collection, but it is mostly fine art engravings.

"Most wood engraving, unlike its fine art counterpart, has no heroes and little traceable record of its creators or their aspirations. This research hopes to provide some insight into that era through the work these engraver-artists left behind."

The S. George Company

The S. George Company, named for its founder, Samuel George Sr., was known for the paper sacks it made using rag and manila hemp rope fibers that could withstand the stress of shipping and handling.

One hundred years after it opened, the Wellsburg mill was still one of only two companies in the United States that produced flour sacks of this quality.

The company employed 250 workers and produced paper sacks for mills in West Virginia, as well as for flour companies throughout the country, including Pillsbury.

The wood engravings used to print the sacks were cut by unknown engravers beginning around 1895. Most were probably transient craftspeople, working out of New York, Boston, and the Midwest. Some of the blocks contain a circular stamp identifying them as having been manufactured by a company in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.

Typically, the blocks were in three and four-color sets with a key block that registered carefully over colors printed beneath it.

The company had vertical storage racks which held thousands of the wood blocks in slots about an inch wide and 16 inches high. By the time it closed in 1977, however, the S. George Company had begun using metal engravings for printing and found the old wood blocks difficult to store.

According to a former employee of the company, many of the old wood blocks were dumped into the Ohio River during the 1930s.

International Acclaim

Before Rosebud Was a Sled has been in numerous exhibitions including Out of Center at the New York Center for the Book Arts; Pyramid Atlantic's 1998 Book Fair at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it won juror's choice; Booked, at the Art Academy of Cincinnati; the Charles E. Shain Library at Connecticut College; and the Hermenegil do Bustos Gallery at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Guanajuato, Mexico. The book won a $2,000 award of excellence at the West Virginia Juried Exhibition 2000, and was a finalist in the Hertzog Competition at the University of Texas, El Paso.

Before Rosebud Was a Sled is in the collections of the Yale University Rare Book Collection, the Baker Library and Historical Collection at the Harvard Business School, the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, the Wallace Library Cary Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the special collections library at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Clapp Special Collections Library at Wellesley College, the Hunt Library fine and rare book collection at Carnegie Mellon University, Kent State University Library, Olin Library at Cornell University, the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, the University of Texas at El Paso, and the Hamilton Wood Type Museum of Two Rivers, Wisc., as well as in a number of private collections.