1917 Ananda Coomaraswamy became Curator (and later Fellow) of Indian and Muhammedan art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Eric Gill wrote of Coomaraswamy in his autobiography: "There was one person, to whose influence I am deeply grateful; I mean the philosopher and theologian, Ananda Coomaraswamy. Others have written the truth about life and religion and man's work. Others have written good clear English. Others have had the gift of witty exposition. Others have understood the metaphysics of Christianity and others have understood the metaphysics of Hinduism and Buddhism. Others have understood the true significance of erotic drawings and sculptures. Others have seen the relationships of the true and the good and the beautiful. Others have had apparently unlimited learning. Others have loved; others have been kind and generous. But I know of no one else in whom all these gifts and all these powers have been combined. I dare not confess myself his disciple; that would only embarrass him. I can only say that I believe that no other living writer has written the truth in matters of art and life and religion and piety with such wisdom and understanding."

1917 Hogart Press founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

1917 Beaumont Press, London, closed in 1931.

1917 The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded for editorial writing, reporting, history of the United States and biography or autobiography. (Fiction, drama and poetry began to be awarded in 1918).

1917 After graduating from Harvard, Philip Hofer spent a few years in business, then began collecting, in 1917, a wide variety of printed books. He focused on illustrated and decorated books, thus entering into a serious study of book arts.

1918 Carl Purington Rollins took over the manufacturing department of the Yale University Press. Appointed official Printer to the University, Rollins remained at Yale for thirty years.

1918 Book and type designer Hermann Zapf was born in Germany in 1918.

1919 Ovid Press founded by John Rodker in London. Closed in 1920.

1919 Grabhorn Press founded by Robert and Edwin Grabhorn.

1919 Kleukens Presse founded by Friedrich Kleukens.

1920 Golden Cockerel Press, founded by Harold Taylor.

1920 Favil Press founded by P.Sainsbury of London, active until 1961.

1920 Silkscreen technique had been common in China for centuries. After the First World War it was imported, via Japan, into the United States, where it was improved and subsequently it became known in Europe. A fabric screen with a fairly open weave, possibly nylon, is stretched over a wooden frame, and the parts which are not to beprinted through are covered with a varnish. The paper to be printed is placed under the frame and receives the colour when it is drawn across the screen (pochoir, Sieb, setaccio) with a rubber blade called a squeegee. The white areas in the print correspond to those parts of the fabric protected by the varnish.

1921 Poet Richard Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921.

1921 Clarence Kennedy (1892-1972), a “scholar-photographer” taught (Renaissance sculpture) at Smith College from circa 1921-1960. Kennedy began the work out of a need for illustrations with which to teach, but what evolved was a well crafted body of work. He retired from the Smith College art history faculty in 1960. In the 1930s, with his wife Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy, he co-founded the Cantina Press in the basement of their Northampton home. The press published very little under its own imprint, but did much work for Smith College -- invitations, broadsides, and other ephemera.

1921 Cloister Press founded.

1921 Newbery Medal of ALA for the most distinguished book for children.

1922 Nonesuch Press was founded by Sir Francis and Vera Meynell and David Garnett in London, England. Nonesuch Press designs its books on a small handpress, but then has the printing done by large commercial firms, making fine editions widely available at prices affordable to the average person. The press only publishes books that are out of print or do not exist in adequate editions or translations.

1922 Gregynog Press founded by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, Wales.

1922 Officina Bodoni founded at Montagnola di Lugano by Giovanni Mardersteig.

1922 Fleuron Society founded by Holbrook Jackson, Francis Meynell, Bernard Newdigate, Stanley Morison, and Oliver Simon.

1922 First Edition Club founded by A.J.A.Symons and Max Judge.

1922 Leonard Baskin, American, born New Brunswick. Would study at Yale University School of Fine Arts, The New School in Paris, and with Maurice Glickman.

1922 Oxford Bibliographical Society founded.

1923 Time Magazine debut.

1923 Giovanni Mardersteig (also called Hans Mardersteig) established the Officina Bodoni in 1923 in Montagnola, Switzerland. Mardersteig obtained permission from the Italian government to reuse the type matrices of Giambattista Bodoni, a great eighteenth-century printer, and the press was celebrated for its fine work. Mardersteig also became known for his type designs, particularly Dante and Fontana, which were based on fifteenth-century Italian typefaces. The Officina Bodoni moved to Verona, Italy in 1927.

1923 Dard Hunter founded the Moutain House Press in Chillicothe, Ohio, around 1923. Hunter was a commercial artist who became interested in papermaking. He studied papermaking techniques in Europe and became one of the foremost authorities on the subject, and the Mountain House Press focused almost exclusively on this subject as well. Hunter died in 1966.

1923 Kunera Press, Zilverdistel Press, founded 1910, was renamed Kunera Press in 1923.

1923 Nonesuch Press established by Miss Mendel, David Garnett and Sir Francis Meynell.

1924 High House Press founded by James Masters in Shaftesbury.

1924-1995 Charles Eliot Goodspeed's son George worked at the shop, first as an employee and then as its director for over seventy years (from 1924 until the shop closed in 1995).

1924 Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) moved from Cambridge, England to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to teach at Harvard. Whitehead, born in Ramsgate, Isle of Thanet, England, in 1861, went to Trinity College to study Mathematics in 1880. Between 1910 and 1913, with Bertrand Russell, Whitehead published Principia Mathematica. In 1910, he moved to the University of London (the beginning of his so-called second period); in 1924, he moved to Harvard University (the beginning of his so-called third period). Whitehead’s aim in the second and third periods was to produce a metaphysical system adequate and applicable to the modern scientific world of relativity, quantum mechanics, and biological organisms while also being as consistent and coherent as possible. Process metaphysics sought to illuminate the developmental nature of reality, emphasizing becoming rather than static existence (and also the inter-relatedness of everything): reality as experiential events, not enduring inert substances. [Heraclitus of Ephesus (born circa 540 B.C.) was recognized as the founder of the process approach. His book "On Nature" depicted the world as opposed forces interlocked in constant strife and conflict. Fire, the most changeable and ephemeral of these elemental forces, is the basis of all. "This world-order... is... an ever living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures." Fire is the destroyer and transformer of things and "All things happen by strife and necessity."] Change pervades nature. Reality is the product of processes, a vast macroprocess embracing a diversified manifold of Hegelian microprocesses -- novelty, innovation, and the emergence of new focus. The passage of time leaves neither individuals nor types (species) of things statically invariant. Process destabilizes the world and is the advance to novelty. Whitehead articulated his process philosophy in essentially scientific terms, while Bergson relied more on intuition, indeed a mystical sympathetic apprehension. Process metaphysics makes room for creative spontaneity and novelty in the world, by way of random mutations or purposeful innovation. Process theology invites us to think of God's relationship to the world in terms of a process of influence like "the spread of learning" exerting influence on, and within, the world. Process theologians urge seeing God not through the lens of unchanging stability but with reference to movement, change, development, process..

1925 Bookbinder Arno Werner, born in Germany in 1899 (studied with Ignatz Wiemeler, a disciple of the Arts and Crafts movement in England) arrived in NewYork City in 1925.

1926 Charles Malin (1883-1955), Parisain punchcutter, cut the punches for Eric Gill's Perpetua type in 1926.

1926 Argonau Press, London (until 1938).

1926 The Book-of-the-Month Club founded, selling books at reduced prices by mail and on a subscription basis.

1927 Golden Hind Pres founded by Arthur Rushmore, active until 1955.

1928 Hours Press founded by Nancy Cunard at La Chapelle, France.

Late 1920s The Linweave Association was established in the late 1920s in Springfield, Massachusetts, as a limited editions society. Its manager was Frederick Allen Williams.

1929 George Macy founded the Limited Editions Club in 1929. The Club contracted with private presses to produce limited editions of classics and other literary works, often illustrated by prominent artists. Books were sold to the club's subscribers. Helen Macy was the director of the club from her husband's death in 1956 to 1968, when their son Jonathan took over. The club was sold to the Boise-Cascade Company in 1970; it was was purchased by Sidney Schiff in 1979.

1929 F.O. Matthiessen (1902-1950), having taught at Yale from 1927 to 1929, taught at Harvard 1929 to 1950 (In 1950, he jumped from a twelfth-story window in a Boston hotel shortly before he was to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee). Matthiessen was born in Pasadena, California. After his parents' divorce in 1915, Matthiessen lived on his grandparents's farm in Illinois. He later attendend boarding school in Tarrytown, New York and, toward the end of World war I, joined the Canadian Air Force. He entered Yale in 1919 (he was an active Christian Socialist), graduated in 1923 with many honors, and then became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, receiving a B. Litt. in 1925. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard, before becming an instructor at Yale (1927-29), then professor of American literaure and criticism of poetry at Harvard (1929-50). An influential teacher, he was liberal in politics, deeply religious, and incisive in literary judgements. His books include: Sara Orne Jewett (1929), a lesbian author; American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), a monumental work which discussed the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, gay author Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and gay poet Walt Whitman; and The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950). He signed many a left-wing petition. He seconded the nomination of Henry Wallace for president in 1948. His last book, From the Heart of Europe, was an honest if ineffectual testimony for communicating across the Iron Curtain even as it was coming down. He taught at Harvard University until his premature death by suicide (he jumped to his death from a twelfth-story window of a Boston hotel on April 1, 1950, shortly before he was to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee).

1930 Boar's Head Press was founded by Christopher Sandford in 1930 (the press would close in 1936).

1930 The First issue of The Colophon appeared in 1930. The magazine continued to be published until 1940 (1948-1950: New Colophon).

1931 Raven Press founded at Harrow Weald, London, by Robert Maynard and Horace Bray.

1932 Jackson Holbrook's The fear of Books was published in 1932.

1932 Boston Typothetae renamed Boston Typothetae, Inc.

1933 With the rise of the Nazis, Count Harry Kessler Kessler left Germany for France in 1933.

1933 Fritz Eichenberg came to the United States in 1933, and was sought after to illustrate the works of Poe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Dylan Thomas, Georges Bernanos, Turgenev, Carl Sandburg, and others.

1933 Yale University Press book designer (and Arts and Crafts movement devotee) Carl Purington Rollin, with Theodor Sizer, an art historian, and one Dr. Keough, a Yale librarian, began to offer a course in fine printing, typography and book design at Yale called "The Art of the Book." The course was offered through the library, although it was under the auspices of Art History, and it was attended mainly by students from Yale. The course was made available to students on an irregular basis between 1933 and 1948.

1933 Philip Hofer served as curator of the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library.

1934 Philip Hofer became the first assistant director of the Morgan Library in New York (1934-1937).

1934 First bookseller's catalog devoted exclusively to detective fiction as a collecting specialty. According to Otto Penzler, in his "Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection," this was the 1934 catalogue of London dealer George Bates entitled "Murder-Catalogue the Seventh of Rare and Interesting Books Illustrating the Development of the Detective and Mystery Story.".

1934 Thomas Merton came to America, attending Columbia University. He graduated in English in 1938, worked there one year as a teaching assistant, then got his Masters degree in 1939. He then joined the Roman Catholic Church and taught at St Bonaventure for two years.

1935 Heritage Press, in New York City, organized as a subsidiary of the Limited Editions Club by George Macy in 1935, began producing Limited Editions Club reprints.

1935 The Oxford Lectern Bible was printed by Bruce Rogers (Rogers used his Centaur type).

1935 Nazi bookburnings.

1935 The Dolphin, an American journal about the making of books, published (until 1941).

1936 The Cantina Press founded in Northampton, Massachusetts by Smith College Renaissance scholars Clarence and Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy. [See David P. Bourbeau: Out of the Cellar: A Garland for Cantina. http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/publications.htm].

1936 Fritz Kredel and his family fled Germany for the United States. In America, he continued to flourish as a woodcut artist and illustrator for many well-known publishers, including the Limited Editions Club.

In 1936, the Boston bookshop Goodspeed's moved to 18 Beacon Street. In 1937, Charles Eliot Goodspeed told of his bookshop, Goodspeed's, in the book Yankee Bookseller.

1937 Les Pastorales ou Daphnis et Chloe was published, with woodcuts by Aristide Maillol, in 1937.

1937 Ray Nash began teaching the GraphicArts workshop at Dartmouth College. Nash was a mentor to both David R. Godine and Rodney Stinehour.

1938 The newly appointed librarian of Harvard University's library, William Jackson, asked Philip Hofer to head up (to be the curator of) Harvard's Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, at the Houghton Library, the the first such department in the country. Hofer spent the next forty years building one of the finest graphic-arts-in-the-book collection in the nation. The collection had strong fifteenth- and eighteenth-century Italian holdings, but also included groups as divergent as Chinese block prints and illuminated manuscripts. He also assembled a livres de peintres collection which began with Goya and ended with contemporary artists.

1939 Boston Typothetae, Inc. changed name to Graphic Arts Institute of Massachusetts, Inc.

1939 A workshop fire destroyed the Village Press, the press of Frederic and Bertha Goudy. About 75 of Goudy's designs were destroyed when the plant burned down. Goudy authored The Alphabet (1918), Elements of Lettering (1922), and Typologia (1940).

1939 Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Columbia University curator of rare books, was a visiting lecturer at Smith College. For several years he taught the undergraduate course, The History of the Making of Books as a Work of Art.

1939 Victor Hammer, born in Vienna on December 9, 1882 (trained at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts) moved to the United States in 1939, teaching first at Wells College, Aurora, New York. Hammer arrived at Wells in the fall of 1939, having left his press, tools and type in Austria. The college purchased an iron handpress for his use, and Hammer established the Wells College Press in 1941. Many Wells students created books under the Wells College Press imprint in Hammer's class, Book Design in Practice. As printer, Hammer designed his own wooden hand press, based on an early Italian example at the Laurentian Library in Florence. He designed his own typefaces, patterned after the uncial letters in medieval calligraphic forms and also cut the punches for this type himself. He set, printed, and bound his books, occasionally illustrating them with engraved decorated initials or portraits. Among the titles printed by Hammer during his Aurora years were works by William Carlos Williams, Stephane Mallarme, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Hammer created his most well-known and beautiful typeface while at Wells, the famous American Uncial.

1939 The Hampshire Bookshop, founded by Marion E. Dodd and Mary Byers Smith in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1916, sponsored the first of several annual Northampton Book Festivals in 1939. This first festival included a luncheon to honor local writers, programs on assorted book genres. There were also arts and crafts demonstrations and ongoing displays.

1939 In Cummington, Massachusetts (birhplace of William Cullen Bryant) Katherine Frazier had founded the Playhouse in the Hills in 1923. In 1930 the Playhouse in the Hills had been incorporated as the Cummington School of the Arts, its curriculum based on the era's Progressive Education Movement (Frazier's mission for the school was "To integrate life and art under the influence of nature.") In 1939, Frazier enticed writer Harry Alvin Duncan, her former student (who'd afterwards pursued a Master's Degree in English at Duke University) to come to Cummington as a faculty member of the Cummington School for the Arts. Duncan had plans of teaching English. Frazier acquired a printing press, intending that Duncan should establish a self-supporting press. Frazier arranged for the 22-year-old Duncan to be apprenticed to a hand-printer named Ned Thompson at nearby Hawthorne House. (In a 1991 essay, "Cross Purposes," Duncan described the "ponderous presence" of an 80-year-old Taylor iron hand press).

1940 Kurt Vonnegut, born to fourth-generation German-American parents (his father an architect) on November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, in 1940 (after graduatung from Shortridge High School) was studying biochemistry at Cornell University. Writing for the Albany New York Times Union, staff writer Doug Blackburn ("New York State of Mind," December 17, 2000) reported "Vonnegut's high school did something almost unheard of today: It published a daily newspaper, The Echo. It was where he got hooked telling stories.... Soon, a bigger adventure beckoned: World War II."

1940 Barry Moser was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. "Moser grew up in a segregated Chattanooga, in a house bought by his father, Arthur Boyd Moser—a man of wealth in the midst of the Great Depression, who gambled heavily at Chicago clubs protected by mobsters with machine guns. Arthur and his wife, Billie, lived well while many of Billie’s family members struggled. Brain tumors caused Arthur’s death when Barry was only 10 months old and his brother was a newborn, leaving Billie with a nice house and furnishings and not much more. Some comfort was provided by Billie’s best friend since childhood, Vernita Gholston, who lived across the street. Their relationship was somewhat unusual for the time; Vernita was black. As a child, Moser absorbed a lot about Billie and Vernita’s relationship. He recalled a story Billie told about playing with Vernita as a little girl in the back of Billie’s family-owned general store. Billie’s teenage sisters asked if she wanted to go to see a movie. Both little girls were very excited about going, but the older girls told Vernita she could not come along. 'But then, with a jolt of sudden inspiration, Vernita got up and ran back to the storage room. She turned on the light and threw off the lid of the flour barrel. She climbed up on to a stool, leaned over as far as she could and stuck her little face into the flour. With the white dust making her black eyes all the blacker, she asked "Now can I go?" ' [Moser] admits that as a very young child he was afraid to take Vernita’s hand when they were getting on the city bus together. He cried and refused, finally admitting to Vernita, 'I’m scared that black will rub off on me.' During his college years, Moser made his only visit to Vernita’s home. That one encounter revolutionized his feelings about his own home, seeing it for the first time from Vernita’s vantage point, from her home on a hill. He had heard a lot of family lore about the importance of his heritage. 'From Vernita’s porch I could see nothing of that deluded and self-important history,' Moser says. As Vernita fixed iced tea with sugar and lemon, Moser also realized Vernita’s home gave her a view of not only his house but also the whole neighborhood in its natural setting. 'I couldn’t see much sky from my house,' Moser says. (From "Work of Art," by Cindy Carroll, in the University Tennessee Alumnus magazine, Volume 81; Number 1: Winter 2001).

1940 Alan Kay was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. Shortly after, he moved with his family to Australia where he lived the first few years of his life. Amid World War II, the Kays would return to the United States. Kay, whose mother was a musician and an artist, would be a proficient guitar player and a soprano soloist in his grade school choir.

1941 Thomas Merton entered the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky. The Trappists, called more formally Cistercians of the Strict Observance were an extremely strict monastic order, devoted to communal prayer, private prayer, contemplation, study, and manual labor. They vowed not to speak except in praise of God (when not singing in chapel, they were silent). Though Merton was a Trappist monk, he was also a novelist, poet, and outspoken social critic who oscillated between engagement and solitude, hope and despair. Merton critiqued the United States as a "warfare state" in which the convergent interests of big business, the military, and the wealthy dominated and dictated national policy. Toward the end of his life, Merton developed an interest in Buddhist and other Far Eastern approaches to mysticism and contemplation.

1941 Harry Duncan, at the Cummington School for the Arts, printed his first book having the Cummington Press imprint, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, by Wallace Stevens. After World War I, Duncan would be joined at the press by Paul Wightman Williams. First-edition books published by Duncan included Robert Lowell's Land of Unlikeness; Five Prose Pieces, by Rainer Maria Rilke; a short story, Blackberry Winter, by Robert Penn Warren; Allen Tate's The Winter Sea (1944); Williams Carlos Williams's The Wedge (1944).

1942 ILAB International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) founded.

1942 While studying at Yale University, Leonard Baskin acquired a great enthusiasm for the art of letterpress printing. The school had an old-fashioned printing shop (courtesy of Yale alumnus August Heckscher, philanthopist, supporter of the book arts in New England, and eventual New York City Commissioner of Parks), where Baskin learned to set and ink type by hand. He spent hours exploring the collections of the Sterling Memorial Library, where he came across this line from John Milton's Paradise Lost: “and Black Gehenna call’d, the type of hell.” Baskin took the name Gehenna, Hebrew for Hell, for the private press he was beginning to imagine (many of the colloquial terms for printing made reference to devils, hell and “the black art”). Baskin produced his first book bearing the Gehenna imprint while still at Yale.

1942 Smith College in Northampton was host to an international conference on typography, organized by Art department professor-photographer-typophile-Renaissance-scholar Clarence Kennedy.

Between 1943 and 1979, donor Lessing J. Rosenwald (1891-1979), former chairman of Sears, Roebuck & Co., presented to the Library of Congress a collection of 2,600 rare illustrated books, including an enormous two volume illuminated manuscript known as the Great Bible of Mainz. Produced in 1452, this book is thought to have influenced motifs and ornamentation used in the design of Gutenbergs 42-line Bible, printed in the same year (1452). Other treasures included Prolemy's Cosmographia, William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the only known copy of the first edition of the English version of the Lohengrin legend, The Knight of the Swan, and the only ilustrated book published by Manutius, Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

1943 Though he considered himself a pacifist, Kurt Vonnegut left college in January 1943 to enlist in the Army. Writing for the Albany New York Times Union, staff writer Doug Blackburn ("New York State of Mind," December 17, 2000) reported Vonnegut's saying, "'The First World War was about absolutely nothing, but then a just war came along,'' he said. "I was young and in good health and I was ready for it. I wouldn't have missed it for anything.'' ["His infantry division was stationed on the German border," Blackburn reported, "assigned to deplete Hitler's forces. There were countless casualties when the Germans attacked in December 1944. Vonnegut was captured and taken prisoner. He spent the next five months in Dresden and was there during the heaviest Allied bombing raids. 'I was born hating war, I think. I never thought war was a good idea,' Vonnegut said. 'But the second World War had to be fought, and I was proud to have fought in it. Civilization was in terrible danger and blood had to be shed to save it'. The experience gave Vonnegut material for 'Slaughterhouse Five' and other books, but he did not immediately start writing fiction when the war ended and he was freed. He married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Cox, and returned to newspapers, covering police and crime in Chicago."

1944 Wellesley College introduced the course Book Arts Laboratory, taught by Hannah French.

1944 Bremer Presse destroyed by bombing.

1944-1947 Many members of the World War II generation of American historians and literary critics served in the U.S. military, the Office of Strategic Services, or the Office of War Information. In contemplating, from those vantage points, the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism, in its Nazi and its Stalinist incarnations, they came to believe not only that there was something idiosyncratic about the American experience, but also that such national distinctiveness could best be explained by contrasting America's economic, social, political, and cultural development to what had gone on in the rest of the world.

"I am a veteran of the Second World War. That was considered a "good war," but I have come to the conclusion that war solves no fundamental problems and only leads to more wars. War poisons the minds of soldiers, leads them to kill and torture, and poisons the soul of the nation." -- Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus at Boston University, from his commencement address delivered at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia on May 15, 2005.

1944 Xerography (Xerox copies) invented.

Educator, author, and scholar of the American Transcendental Movement Kenneth Walter Cameron, born in 1908, received Bachelors and Masters degrees from West Virginia University in 1930 and 1931, a Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree from General Theological Seminary, New York, in 1935, when he was ordained an Episcopal priest. He received a Ph.D. from Yale in 1940. Cameron taught English at North Carolina State University from 1938 to 1943, teaching English Composition and a course titled "The Bible as Literature." During World War II, he taught an English course through the Army Specialized Training Program. After teaching briefly at Temple University, he settled at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Cameron also served as archivist and historiographer of the Diocese of Connecticut. Cameron's self-published books (huge tomes printed via the newest print technology, Xeroxing [photocopying]), were elaborate and intricate scrapbooks exuberantly arranged -- often almost anarchically arranged -- pre-dating the formats and operations of not only a computer's multiple windows, but also the hypertext links of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

1945-1947 Librarian Eunice Wead (1902 graduate of Smith College) -- having retired from the University of Michigan as curator of rare books and professor of the library school 1926-1945 -- taught a course at Smith College from 1945 to 1947, The History, Technique, and Art of Book Production.

1946 Lance Hidy, freelance designer of posters and books and co- founder of the Godine Press, was born in Portland, Oregon in 1946.

1947 Graphic Arts Institute of Massachusetts, Inc. (formerly Boston Typothetae) changed to Graphic Arts Institute of New England, Inc.

1947 Alfred North Whitehead died at the age of eighty-six in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1947. Whitehead, the preeminent Process philosopher, saw God in cosmological terms as an "actual occasion" functioning within nature, reflective of "the eternal urge of desire" that works "strongly and quietly by love," to guide the course of things within the world into "the creative advance into novelty." God is interdependent with the world, and developing with it. Quantum physics dovetailed neatly with process metaphysics. Quantum theory teaches a physical thing is itself no more than a statistical pattern -- a stability wave in a surging sea of process. The so-called enduring "things" come about through the emergence of stabilities in fluctuations. Modern physics envisions very small processes (quantum phenomena) combining in their operations to produce standard things (ordinary macro-objects).

1947 Writing for the Albany New York Times Union, staff writer Doug Blackburn ("New York State of Mind," December 17, 2000) reported, "His older brother, Bernard, a scientist with General Electric, helped recruit him to come to the Capital Region. From 1947 to 1950 Vonnegut lived in the Schenectady County hamlet Alplaus and was a public relations writer for GE. 'Believe it or not, GE was a wonderful company to work for, and we had genuine news to report, good news for the world,' Vonnegut said. 'I was proud to work for GE. The only reason I left was that I could make more money writing short stories.'... Bernard, who died in April 1997 at age 82, would spend the rest of his life in the Capital Region. He was recognized internationally for his part in the discovery of cloud-seeding techniques and spent much of his career at the University at Albany's Atmospheric Sciences Research Center. Kurt had his brother cremated and his ashes scattered over Mount Greylock in the Berkshires, where Bernard had first experimented with cloud-seeding by tossing salt from a twin-prop plane in an effort to determine what caused precipitation.

1947 Frederic W. Goudy (born in 1865, the year that Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published) died in 1947.