Carl Purington Rollins papers

Collection

Call Number: AOB 9

Scope and Contents

The Carl Purington Rollins papers document Rollins’s career as a master printer, graphic designer, author, and educator. The collection consists of personal and business correspondence; writings by Rollins and others; materials designed and/or printed by Rollins and others; and research files and notebooks. The materials document Rollins’s design and printing work at the community of New Clairvaux (New Clairvaux Press), Dyke Mill (Montague Press), and the Yale Press, as well as his own hand press, At the Sign of the Chorobates.

This preliminary inventory first lists the larger group of material that was given to Yale by the Rollins family in the early 1980s, and preliminarily processed in 1998, and then lists material acquired by purchase in 2002. Oversize material is indicated by Oversize (legal size document box) and Oversize + (folio-size flat boxes). The lack of dates for some material reflects the varying levels of processing of the papers.

Rollins’s library of books related to printing and printing history was given to the Arts of the Book Collection in 1981, and has been cataloged in Orbis, Yale’s online catalog.

Dates

1880-1983

Creator

Rollins, Carl Purington, 1880-1960

Conditions Governing Access

The materials are open for research.

Conditions Governing Use

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Gift of Rollins family members and acquired by purchase.

Arrangement

Preliminarily arranged in twelve series and one addition: I. Correspondence, 1902-1963. II. Writings, 1930-1983. III. Works and Projects, 1900-1963. IV. Awards, Honors, and Events, 1933-1963. V. Book Clubs and Bibliophile Groups, 1902-1965. VI. Presses, 1902-1963. VII. Printers and Designers, 1897-1976. VIII. Paper Specimens, 1877-1942. IX. Type Specimens, 1929-1949. X. Library and Museum Publications, 1910-1962. XI. Photographs and Realia, 1902-1958. XII. Notebooks, 1903-1958. 2002 Addition, 1903-1974.

Associated Materials

The Records of the Yale University Press (RU 554), which are housed in the department of Manuscripts and Archives in Sterling Memorial Library, contain additional Rollins correspondence and documents relating to his tenure at the Press from 1918 to 1948.

Extent

40 Linear Feet (77 boxes)

Language of Materials

English

Catalog Record

A record for this collection is available in Orbis, the Yale University Library catalog

Persistent URL

https://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/arts.aob.0009

Additional Description

Overview

Biographical / Historical

Carl Purington Rollins was born in West Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1880. He attended Harvard University from 1897 to 1900, and worked for the Georgetown Advocate, a small country newspaper. He subsequently worked for the Carl Heintzemann Press in Boston before joining New Clairvaux, a rural Utopian community, in Montague, Massachusetts, in 1903. Rollins taught a printing course in the community’s school and ran the New Clairvaux Press. He left the community in 1904, after losing the sight in one eye, but returned to Montague several years later, and purchased the Dyke Mill. While the New Clairvaux community failed in 1908, Rollins remained in Montague where he had established an arts and crafts cooperative at Dyke Mill where furniture, textiles, and printed works were made and sold. Eventually, the business became a press exclusively, the Montague Press. In 1918, Rollins joined the staff of the Yale University Press and was appointed Printer to the University in 1920. In the course of four decades, he designed more than two thousand books for Yale University Press as well as most of the University’s ephemeral materials. Rollins taught a course in bibliography and established the Bibliographical Press in the University library for student use. He also established a private press, At the Sign of the Chorobates, from which he printed publications including Wine Making for the Amateur (1930). He was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the highest award of the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1941. He received honorary degrees from Yale and was named Printer Emeritus when he retired from the University in 1948. Rollins married Margaret Dickey in 1915, and they had two children, Elizabeth and Caroline. He died in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1960.

A bibliography, The Works of Carl P. Rollins (New Haven, CT: Yale University Library, 1982), associated with an exhibit in Sterling Memorial Library in 1982-1983, and prepared by Gay Walker, is an invaluable source of information on Rollins and his work.

References: Katherine M. Ruffin and Chika Ota contributed to this biographical statement.