The Book Arts Studio housed within the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library is home to a collection of approximately 20,000 photoengraving blocks that capture and preserve a surprisingly rich array of images from a world gone by.
The vast majority of the pieces in the collection were originally part of the collection of the Newcomen Society in North America. Established in 1923, its members were leaders from a variety of fields (industry, invention, transportation, communication, energy, mining, agriculture, economics, banking, insurance, education, and the law). Newcomen Society members addressed gatherings of their peers in talks focused on the history, triumphs, and challenges of their particular enterprise; these talks were held across the US and Canada.
Eventually the Newcomen Society in North America established a physical campus and headquarters in what is now the Philadelphia suburb of Exton, Pennsylvania. The campus, designed by architect Briton Martin, included offices, guest houses, a chapel, a bell tower with carillon, as well as many antique model steam engines. Also located on the campus was the Thomas Newcomen Memorial Library in Business History which housed some 2,700 volumes.
The business model of the Society also included Newcomen Publications, Inc. and an on-site print shop. The print shop produced a long-running series of pamphlets that served to document the presentations given at meetings. The booklets, which were generally paid for by the entity being recognized (the business or organization highlighted in the publication, whose leader had given one of the meeting addresses), were produced using a consistent design strategy for decades, and were illustrated first using both commissioned and antique engravings; later publications were illustrated primarily with photographs. With more than 2,500 institutions and organizations having been honored during the four decades the Newcomen Society was active, the number of commemorative booklets produced by Newcomen Publications, Inc., was significant.
At its height, the Newcomen Society of North America had a membership roll of 17,000. Membership, however, declined significantly in the last part of the 20th century. The campus was sold; the collection of photoengraving blocks came to the University of Utah; the collection of antique engines was auctioned; and the Society officially disbanded in 2007. The organization’s remaining archives are housed in the National Museum of Industrial History located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
The University of Utah’s collection contains other photoengravings and zinc cuts, as well. These likely came from newspaper printers in Salt Lake City (the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News), as well as the University of Utah print shop. The provenance of individual pieces in the collection, however, has not been fully documented.
The images on the physical objects are both photoengravings and line art that were etched onto thin zinc (sometimes magnesium or copper) sheets that were then trimmed and affixed to blocks of wood with small nails. The distance from the base of the block to the highest face of the engraving was calculated to 0.918 inches, the US industry “type high” printing standard.
Cataloging the University of Utah’s collection began in earnest when the Book Arts Studio moved to its current location in the J. Willard Marriott Library in 2009. The engravings are housed in designated galley tray cabinets in the studio. The cataloging process involves cleaning and polishing the metal part of the block (this operation is largely limited to engravings that are extremely dirty, dusty, or appear to be stained or damaged); taking a proof of the image by printing it onto paper on a flatbed press; scanning the resulting proofs; assigning keywords and galley tray addresses to the scanned images; and, finally, adding an inventory number to the physical object.
From 2010-2023, the resulting “Zinc Cut Catalog” information was made available through physical notebooks housed in the Book Arts Studio. Beginning in 2024, the physical catalog will be phased out and the photoengraving catalog eventually made available through the Marriott Library’s Digital Library Collections.
More about this exciting development our next post.
Sources:
Swearingen, John E. The Growth of Standard Oil Company (Indiana): 1889-1964. Princeton, NJ: Newcomen Society of North America, 1964.
“Public Relations: The Newcomers,” Time Magazine, July 21, 1952, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,859909,00.htm, accessed February, 2024
Wikipedia. “Newcomen Society of the United States.” Last modified March 2, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_Society_of_the_United_States
mahala kephart, flutist by training and retired university development administrator, is a long‑time volunteer and student in the University of Utah’s Book Arts Studio. Work on printing and cataloging the photoengraving and zinc cut collection has proven to be a surprising marriage of the analog and digital worlds.
