Overbrook Press records

Overbrook Press was established in 1934 by financier and philanthropist Frank Altschul in a remodeled pigpen on his estate Overbrook Farm, at 356 Riverbank Road in Stamford, Connecticut. Interested in the craft of printing since childhood, Altschul hired Margaret B. Evans as resident designer and compositor; she remained with the press until 1944 and was succeeded by John Lyons. John McNamara served as pressman from 1934 to 1954, followed by Frederick Warns. Between 1934 and 1969, when it issued its last publications, Overbrook Press produced more than 150 limited edition books, pamphlets, and broadsides, plus a wide variety of ephemera, for people, organizations, and events of interest to Altschul, his family, and friends. The press's books regularly won awards for their design and production quality; the texts favored politics, foreign relations, chess, printing, graphic arts, and literature as illustrated by artists including T. M. Cleland, W. A. Dwiggins, William Einstein, Jean Hugo, and Rudolph Ruzicka.

A chronology of the key activities and publications of the Overbrook Press was compiled at the Arts of the Book Collection in 1988; a copy is located in Box 1.

Frank Altschul was born in San Francisco on April 21, 1887, to Charles and Camilla Mandlebaum Altschul; Charles Altschul, an investment banker with the firm Lazard Frères & Company, relocated the family to New York in 1901. Frank Altschul attended Yale University, graduating in 1908, after which he traveled in Europe for two years before returning to New York to start a career in finance with Lazard Frères. He served in the Army in France during World War I, and was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government. Altschul became a senior partner at Lazard Frères in 1943, and five years later chairman of the board of the General American Investors Corporation. He served on the governing committee of the New York Stock Exchange, was a director of the English-Speaking Union, an officer of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the National Planning Association, and was involved with the Council of Foreign Relations for almost forty years. He received honorary degrees from Yale University in 1967 and Columbia University in 1971.

In 1913 Altschul married Helen Lehman Goodhart (1887-1985), a 1907 graduate of Barnard College and a niece of the prominent New York politician Herbert H. Lehman. The Altschuls raised their children Charles, Margaret, Edith, and Arthur at their homes in New York City and at Overbrook Farm, an estate along the Mianus River in Stamford, Connecticut. Edith Altschul (1917-2003) married Robert Claverhouse Graham (1913-1994, Yale 1936), a partner in the James Graham Gallery in New York.

In addition to producing his own, Altschul collected exemplars of fine printing from America and Europe, in particular France. He also formed a library of works related to the typographic arts, including eighteenth- and nineteenth-century printers manuals, type specimens, and bibliographies. His book collections were transferred to Yale University following his death in Stamford on May 29, 1981, where they were divided between the Beinecke Library and the Arts of the Book Collection at Sterling Memorial Library. The equipment from the Overbrook Press was given to Yale University in 1977 by Altschul, and distributed to the Bibliographical Press at Sterling Memorial Library, press rooms in the university's colleges, and other departments on campus.