Poet Laureate Peter Meinke and Artist Jeanne Meinke Share a Taste of Letterpress Printing at the Tampa Book Arts Studio

Florida’s Poet Laureate, Peter Meinke, and his wife, artist Jeanne Clark Meinke, stopped by the Tampa Book Arts Studio recently to celebrate the publication of their most recent book, Tasting Like Gravity. He and Jeanne got the feel of making a solid letterpress impression by hand on one of the vintage Kelsey platen presses.

Tasting Like Gravity was published this fall by the University of Tampa Press in hardback and paperback editions. It features 35 new poems by Peter, including 22 “Rondeaux for the 21st Century,” with drawings and a cover image by Jeanne. It is Peter’s seventeenth book of poetry, and their sixth collaborative publication with the University of Tampa Press.

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Our commemorative bookmark celebrating the new book’s official debut  reproduces a small apple-tree woodcut by J. J. Lankes, with the opening lines of the first poem in the collection, handset in Kennerley Old Style types designed by Frederic Goudy:

Language

falls around me

like apples from a music tree

tasting like gravity . . .

Tasting Like Gravity is now available

for purchase in paperback and hardback editions.

Christopher Morley — A Life in Books

     Lee Harrer has enriched the TBAS Special Collections Library with another generous gift: his collection of Christopher Morley books and ephemera lovingly assembled over several decades. TBAS associate Sean Donnelly recently brought half a dozen empty boxes to Lee’s home and gently packed the collection for its journey from Clearwater to Tampa. As Sean cataloged the collection, he looked over its many gems with Richard Mathews and Joshua Steward, and they decided the books would make a great exhibit. This tribute to Morley and our friend Lee can now be seen on the second floor of the Macdonald-Kelce Library.

     The most striking thing about the books is their visual appeal, thanks to the fact that Lee bought examples that include the scarce jackets. These jackets from the 1910s to the 1940s reflect the artistic styles of the time. The influence of Art Deco is perhaps the most obvious, but even within that idiom there is great variety. The jackets designed for the books of this popular and prolific author provide a microcosmic glimpse of the entire period between 1919 and 1940.

     Christopher Morley (1890-1957) was a “man of letters” in the classic sense. Over the course of a forty-year career he wrote everything: essays, poetry, novels, short stories, journalism, plays, and biography. His popularity made him a public figure and he used that fame to share his love of literature. He did so as a columnist for the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post; as contributing editor of the Saturday Review of Literature; as one of the founders of The Baker Street Irregulars, the most famous club devoted to Sherlock Holmes; and as editor of two editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

     Beginning with The Eighth Sin, published in 1912 while he was studying at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, he embarked on a prolific career, often publishing more than one book a year. By the time a series of strokes slowed him down in the early 1950s, he had more than 100 books to his credit. Most of them were published by “the trade,” that is to say major publishing houses like Doubleday and Lippincott. Those books are the basis for the part of this exhibit entitled “Between the Wars: Book Jacket Design, 1919-1940.” Eighteen books were chosen to show the range of handsome work done by American publishers during the period. They are in the window display. A complementary selection of books representing Morley's private press publications is on display in an adjacent standing case.

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~ The Display ~

The last title shown in the window display (bottom shelf, far right), Kitty Foyle, was

Morley’s greatest literary success, selling over one million copies. It was also adapted

into an Oscar-winning film that starred Ginger Rogers.

(A portion of the pamphlet accompanying the exhibit is shown below. Included is a catalog of

titles selected for the two parts of the exhibit: jacket designs, and private press publications.)

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Morley’s Private Press Publications 

     Aside from his “trade” publications, Morley is also well-represented as the author of many books published by the private presses of his day. The interwar period was a Golden Age for the American private press movement. Despite the Depression, book lovers found the money to support these independent ventures. Their books are distinguished by the high quality of their printing, their small limited editions, and their distinguished designs. 

     One of Morley’s private press books, In Modern Dress (1929), was an early publication of the Peter Pauper Press. Their books are close to the hearts of the Tampa Book Arts Studio’s staff because one of the best Peter Pauper Press collections to be found anywhere is right here in our TBAS library. The collection was made by J. B. Dobkin and then donated to the Book Arts Studio. The standard reference book on the Peter Pauper Press—The Peter Pauper Press of Peter and Edna Beilenson, 1928-1978—was based in large part on this collection.

     One other title found in the case lies a little outside the scope of the exhibit, but no bibliophile would forgive us for excluding Morley’s paean to bookstores and those who love them: The Haunted Bookshop (Doubleday, Page - 1919). This is a sequel of sorts to Parnassus on Wheels (1917), which introduced the bookstore’s owner, Roger Mifflin.

In Memoriam: J. B. Dobkin

J. B. Dobkin—Librarian, Bookman, Man of Letters—1922-2018.

Friends and associates of the Tampa Book Arts Studio share a profound sense of loss with the passing of J. B. Dobkin, Chief Librarian for the Tampa Book Arts Studio’s Special Collections Library and a major donor of books and early printed leaves to our research collections.

Known to friends and colleagues as “Jay,” Joseph B. Dobkin made significant contributions to major research libraries, printing history, local history, and genealogical research collections during his 96 years of life and learning. 

Jay was born in New York City in 1922, but his family moved to Daytona Beach in 1925, where his father bought a small apartment building on the ocean and opened a business on Beach Street there called Fashion Frocks. A few years later, his father purchased a large clothing business in Charlotte, N.C., and he expanded into fashion wholesale as well as retail operations, maintaining business interests in both North Carolina and Florida. Jay grew up in the two locations, though he attended schools mostly in Florida. He graduated from Fletcher High School in Jacksonville Beach, completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Florida, and joined the Naval Air Corps in 1942. After the war, he left the service and worked with his father's businesses for a time, but soon started his own consumer finance company in Charlotte, expanding it into thirty loan offices in North and South Carolina. 

His father died when Jay was 40, prompting him to reexamine his own career choices. He knew the business world was really not for him. He loved reading and the world of books. He sold his businesses and returned to graduate school to earn a degree in Library Science. Building on his strong knowledge of history, literature, and art, he found he was able to work with special collections and rare books in ways that highlighted their strengths, extended their depth through acquisitions, and made them accessible to scholars. His professional library career included an impressive range of leadership positions, with appointments as Assistant Director in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Toronto, Canada; Director of Special Collections at the University of Florida, Gainesville; Director of Libraries at Arizona State University, Tempe; and Special Collections Librarian at the University of South Florida, Tampa, where he served from 1974 until he retired in 1988.

He also served for many years as Executive Secretary of the Florida Historical Society, has been both President and Vice President of the Florida Bibliophile Society, Chairman of the Pinellas County Public Library Cooperative Board, and President of the Largo Library Foundation. He was also a founding board member of Konglomerati Florida Foundation for Literature and the Book Arts, a pioneering book arts studio in Pinellas County that was funded as one of only five regional literary centers in the country by the National Endowment of the Arts. (Konglomerati’s letterpress equipment and printing collections are now part of the Tampa Book Arts Studio.)

A folio leaf from “The Golden Legend” 

printed and published in 1488 by

the German printer Anton Koberger, one
of more than 500 early printed leaves
donated by Jay Dobkin.

After retirement, Jay volunteered at the Largo Library and built the genealogy collection there into one of the largest in Florida. He also served as a volunteer archivist at Heritage Village in Pinellas County and worked tirelessly to organize and add to its collections. At the same time, he served as Chief Librarian of the Tampa Book Arts Studio Library Collections at the University of Tampa. He advised and guided us in building our special collections, and he sought out, acquired, and donated more than five hundred rare printed leaves, from fifteen-century incunabula to examples of the work of nearly every major sixteenth-century printer in Europe. He also presented the Studio with his Peter Pauper Press collection of books and ephemera, and he continued to add materials to complete it, making that collection at the University of Tampa one of the best in the world. The collection formed the basis for his 2013 reference book with Sean Donnelly, The Peter Pauper Press of Peter and Edna Beilenson, 1928-1979: A Bibliography and History. He also published numerous articles on juvenile literature—particularly boys’ series books—in collecting magazines and bibliographic publications. He co-authored or edited Spain in the New World: An Exhibition of Books, Maps, and Manuscripts (Arizona State, 1972); American Boys’ Series Books, 1900-1980 (University of South Florida Library Associates, 1987); and a popular booklet that was widely distributed and highly valued among amateur book collectors, A Non-professional’s Guide to Book Values (1976).

Jay always enjoyed sharing stories and anecdotes involving his most famous relative, his great-uncle Sholem Aleichem, whose fiction formed the basis for the popular musical Fiddler on the Roof. Aleichem’s will contained detailed instructions to family and friends with regard to burial arrangements and how to observe his yahrtzeit. He told his friends and family to gather, “select one of my stories, one of the very merry ones, and recite it in whatever language is most intelligible to you. . . . Let my name be recalled with laughter,” he said, “or not at all.”

This was Jay's own attitude. He always closed his emails, “BE HAPPY!”

Jay passed away peacefully at his Largo home on Tuesday, April 24, 2018. He will be deeply missed. 

This framed tribute from the Florida Bibliophile Society was presented to Jay in 1987 upon his retirement as Director of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Florida.  It recognizes his “support and encouragement to students of the book, wherever he found them,” his achievement in raising his collections “to national prominence,” and his “legacy of pride and a standard of excellence,” all principles he sustained in helping to build the Tampa Book Arts Studio collections.

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Photograph of J. B. Dobkin courtesy of Carl Mario Nudi