Philip Grushkin: A Designer’s Archive

Philip Grushkin (1921–1998) was a calligrapher, book jacket designer, and book designer. He studied calligraphy and book design under George Salter at Cooper Union, graduating in 1941. After a stint in the United States Army as a cartographer during the war, he set up as a freelance book jacket designer in New York. In 1956 Grushkin became an assistant book designer to Abe Lerner at World Publishing. Two years later he moved to Harry N. Abrams, Inc., the pioneering art book publishers, where he became art director and eventually vice president. The most famous book he designed while at Abrams was The History of Art by H.W. Janson (1962). Grushkin left Abrams in 1969 and spent the remainder of his life as a freelance book designer and publishing consultant.

This catalogue of the Philip Grushkin archives contains an essay on Grushkin’s life and career and a generous helping of images of his work as a book jacket designer, including roughs, comps and mechanicals. The archives have been acquired by the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. It’ll be a long while until you can get in there to see the collection. This book will whet your appetite and give you one more reason to look forward to the end of the current global pandemic.*

*This description was written in November of 2020.