The First Flowering: Bruce Rogers at the Riverside Press, 1896-1912

Probably no book designer of the twentieth century has had more written about him, his work, or his life than Bruce Rogers. He was, as his primary biographer Joseph Blumenthal observed, the ultimate artificer of the book. His career as a working designer spanned six decades, but arguably his finest (and certainly his happiest) years were spent at Cambridge’s Riverside Press where he took over from D. B. Updike in 1896 and where he remained until 1912, overseeing his own department and designing at least sixty titles for Houghton Mifflin’s list of Riverside Press Editions.

This small and elegantly produced volume contains an essay by Jerry Kelly outlining Rogers’s tenure at Riverside, a checklist of all the work he executed there (for Houghton Mifflin as well as others), and twenty pages of reproductions displaying the full range of BR titles, specimens of printing that-as he later wistfully remarked- give me a definite satisfaction.