Gouache sketch for “Queensboro Bridge” from New York: A Series of Wood Engravings in Colour and a Note on Colour Printing. 

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Creator

Rudolph Ruzicka

Title

Gouache sketch for “Queensboro Bridge” from New York: A Series of Wood Engravings in Colour and a Note on Colour Printing. 

Coverage

New York

Publisher

(Grolier Club)

Date

(1915)

Description

One of the most beautiful books ever issued by the Grolier Club, Rudolph Ruzicka’s New York, published in 1915, is a hymn to the city in masterfully-produced color woodblock illustrations. The Club has long owned a number of the woodblocks used to print the ten full-color illustrations, but in 2014 six of Ruzicka’s original gouache drawings for the series came up at the Paris antiquarian book fair, and the Club moved quickly to purchase them. The drawings are documented in the Grolier Club archives as having been shown to the Committee on Publications as part of Ruzicka’s proposal for the New York book, after which they were apparently sent to Paris, where the illustrations were to be printed. But in the upheavals of World War I the drawings were lost, only to reappear a century later, to add brilliant and appealing detail to the publishing history of this remarkable book.

Source

Purchased in 2014 with Grolier Club Library Harper Funds