On this day in 1948 Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher, addressed the members of the Grolier Club in a little talk which he titled “Random Recollections.” It can be said of Knopf that he has more than any other American publisher consistently applied the highest manufacturing standards. The list for which he has been responsible represents trade bookmaking at its best. At a time when the standardization of format is becoming a normal procedure in the trade, Knopf must receive the highest credit for his forthright position.

Discussing his relationships with designers, Knopf said:

“Contact between most type designers—there are very few exceptions—and a trade publisher would usually result in anything but friendship. A trade publisher must appear to a type designer, or to a fine typographer, either as a man who doesn’t know a thing about the latter’s art or as a good enough chap but so restricted by costs, book-trade prejudices, and the like as to be all but helpless! . . .

“I’ve come little in contact with type designers as such. Bill Dwiggins I’ve known and loved and admired for a long time, but Bill never leaves Hingham and I’m lucky if I get to see him there for an hour or two once a year. And, anyway, I don’t know him really—at any rate not chiefly as a type designer. Warren Chappell lives in New York and we do see a good deal of each other. Bruce Rogers, Goudy, Rudolph Ruzicka, Tom Cleland, I know, but I couldn’t fill out a quarter hour with stories by or about them; while for me to talk about their work would be an impertinence.

“I have always tried to support a good designer against a recalcitrant author, and usually it works. It works because the author usually likes what a good designer does for him, but sometimes we have to stand up for the designer and explain to the author that we could no more expect the author to interfere with the designer than we would expect the designer to interfere with the author. . . .

“In 1923 we were laying plans with Mencken and Nathan for The American Mercury and it was only natural to turn over the complete design of the magazine to Elmer [Adler], who also did the initial prospectus and much other printed matter that we got out in connection with it. . . .

“I have lately run across a letter from Mencken, dating back to those days, which reads in part as follows: ‘I have the Adler models for the new department. They look somewhat whorish, but so did Americana when he first showed it to us. I shall follow them.’ . . .

“As for ourselves, the job we’ve done, as I see it, has been to sell reasonably well books by authors some of whom we honestly believe to be among the great ones of our times; to make those books as good-looking as possible; and to prove the fallacy of the remark I heard so often as a young man that so-and-so’s book was too good to sell. Usually it wasn’t quite good enough.”