George Macy

As the founder of notable presses such as the Limited Editions Club, the Heritage Press, Macy-Masius, and the Reader’s Club, George Macy was a key figure in the introduction of éditions de luxe (luxury artist editions)to American audiences. Macy envisioned projects that challenged artists who were not generally considered book illustrators to push the boundaries of printing, binding, and book design. He produced numerous publications that helped to shape the understanding of modernist books.

Macy studied journalism at Columbia University while editing The Spectator, its campus publication. He started his own business after realizing that American publishers and booksellers were importing fine English books to sell at a profit. On the eve of the Wall Street crash of 1929, he secured funding to start the Limited Editions Club, a subscription service whereby patrons received one copy (out of an edition of 1,500) of a classic or modern text illustrated by leading visual artists and printed on high-quality paper. Despite being constantly short on capital, Macy employed American and foreign artists and illustrators, typographers, designers, printers, and binders.

As well as being beautiful objects, these limited editions created opportunities for visual artists to engage with written works. Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, published by The Limited Editions Club in 1934, featured illustrations byPablo Picasso. Macy met with the artist in Paris and agreed to pay for Picasso’s drawings in cash and print them on cotton paper imported from France, making the objects themselves a concrete manifestation of Macy’s transatlantic network. Macy commissioned Henri Matisse to illustrate an edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1935. Joyce became actively involved in the making of the illustrated edition and discussed the project with the artist via a telephone conversation in August 1934. Joyce approved Matisse’s etchings for the project, which were based on Homer’s Odyssey, along with pencil studies that Macy included in the final publication immediately before the etchings. Among the other artists represented in the club’s catalogue are Valenti Angelo, Jean Charlot, Miguel Covarrubias, Enric Cristòfol Ricart, Fritz Eichenberg, Paul Gauguin, George Grosz, Al Hirschfeld, Everett Gee Jackson, Alexander King, Edy Legrand, Frans Masereel, Stanisław Ostoja-Chrostowski, Boardman Robinson, Norman Rockwell, William Sharp, Edward Steichen, René Ben Sussan, Lynd Ward, Edward Weston, and Edward A. Wilson. In 1935, Macy founded The Heritage Press, which published similar volumes at more affordable prices and with unlimited reprints.

Macy was appointed chevalier, the highest rank of the French Legion of Honor, in 1948. He exhibited his books at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and was the first living publisher to exhibit at the British Museum, in 1952. He was awarded the Gold Medal Award for lifetime achievement from the American Institution of Graphic Arts the following year.