Jerry Kelly – författare

From Bushville: "The game is a fine construct. Its trace through anyone's life can range from a youthful diversion to a full-blown career, a tender small-fingered grasp to a deep muscular understanding. It provides a focus and a way to express the physical self in a physical world. I've played every moment of every game in my life as an amateur in the best sense of that word--doing something I love just for the love of it. The roots of that soulful effort run as deep as my earliest memories, measuring them. And possibly, yours likewise."To play baseball is to become part of the game. One need not be a megabuck star to live baseball as a participant, to figure into its geometry and its drama. The friendly exertions of amateur play lie at the heart of the sport, comprising the wellspring of its professional levels.Here viewed as a pastime through the eyes of a lifelong amateur player, baseball unfolds as an experience of motion and time and senses--the work of muscle, the textures of wood and leather, the warmth of sun, the scents of a grassy field. In the timeless continuity of the game can be glimpsed part of baseball's singular appeal: the lively tension between the momentary and the eternal, what is over and what is never over. The interwoven essays making up Bushville are a poignant reflection upon the pursuit of what is essentially a ball, but what is crucially human as well.

This Grolier Club catalogue reproduces 100 of the most beautiful, finely printed books produced during the 20th century, arranged in chronological order. The idea of one book a year, on average, seems almost presumptuous. Yet one must begin somewhere, and celebrate the chosen, rather than lament the many left unsung. The catalogue gives a glimpse of how the generations of the past century displayed knowledge and taste in raising printing to an art. Introductory essays by the authors.

Martin Hutner and Jerry Kelly present the hundred greatest printed books of the twentieth century.A typophile’s delight, every book is illustrated in fine line duotone, many in color, and the captions that accompanied the original Grolier Club exhibit have been transcribed intact.It is noteworthy that only two books in the survey were printed by offset; the rest are all letterpress. And although America is strongly represented, there are also selections from Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Wales and Switzerland.

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.”

Roughly fifteen years after Gutenberg printed the first substantial book in Mainz in 1455, Nicolas Jenson of Venice produced what has been universally recognized among the most beautiful typefaces ever created. Based on the humanistic calligraphy of the Renaissance, an even and infinitely various set of lowercase letters that had evolved from the Carolingian minuscules of the ninth century, Jenson’s types were a miracle of proportion and evenness of color. In the late nineteenth century, it was imitated by Morris in his Golden Type of 1892 (far too heavy), and in the next by Cobden-Sanderson with his Doves Type, Goudy with his Deepdene, and Hunter Middleton with his Eusebius.But it was really not until Bruce Rogers, following his stint at the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he first attempted a version of the type in his Montaigne font, tackled the challenge of creating a roman equal to (and in some ways surpassing) the Jenson original. The proof of his success is that it has been used, and held in high esteem, ever since.The story behind the type, the many permutations through which it went, the myths that accrued and surrounded it are all exposed in this fully documented account of the type's genesis and development. Often and justly called "the noblest roman of them all," the book has been designed and set in a digital version especially created by Jerry Kelly who, along with co-author Misha Beletsky, have unearthed, mined, and refined a trove of typographic history to create the definitive history of what many consider the most beautiful typeface created by an American in the last century.

An indispensable guide to hundreds of important modern versions of earlier typefaces, presenting clear and concise discussions of origins, permutations, and contemporary digital availability.For typographers, revival type forms an integral part of their font repertoire. Older classics such as Baskerville, Garamond, and Bodoni are imbedded fonts in standard operating system collections and continue to serve their users well, being the trusted go-to tools of the best professional designers.Yet all revivals are digital interpretations of lost originals. In almost every case, there is, and has to be, considerable selection, revising, and re-formatting involved. The nature of such work is little understood or appreciated.The definition, application, and use of type revivals has been neglected until now. No one selecting a typeface, or using type, should be without Jerry Kelly’s Type Revivals.

Published to accompany the 2019 Grolier Club exhibition Alphabet Magic: A Centennial Exhibition of the Work of Hermann & Gudrun Zapf, Herman Zapf and the World He Designed is the first comprehensive biography of Hermann Zapf (1918–2015), whom Robert Bringhurst has called "the greatest type designer of our time, and very possibly the greatest type designer of all time.” Informed by Jerry Kelly’s scrupulous research at the Hermann Zapf archive in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and at the Cary Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and enriched by his decades of conversations with Zapf and his associates, this fascinating account of Zapf’s life details his experiences with type companies, printers, publishers, and colleagues. It also explores Zapf’s modern design aesthetic and engagement with the staggering technological advances of typography during the twentieth century. Featuring rarities and never-before-seen works and photos, Herman Zapf and the World He Designed features definitive lists of Zapf's type designs and major calligraphic works. It is not, however, merely an in-depth appreciation of Zapf's work but also an insightful consideration of his work in relation to his life.