IDA – Page 4 – Index of Names & Places

About Rex and Pola Stout

Posted on March 13, 2022 | by IDA

Josefine Pola Weinbach Stout, 1902–1984, interior and textile designer.

Rex Todhunter Stout, 1886–1975, “banker, barker, bookworm, bookkeeper, yeoman on the Presidential yacht Mayflower, boss of 3,000 writers of propaganda in World War II, gentleman farmer and dirt farmer, big businessman, cigar salesman, pueblo guide, hotel manager, architect, cabinet maker, pulp and slick magazine writer, propagandist for world government, crow trainer, jumping‐pig trainer, mammoth-pumpkin grower, conversationalist, politician, orator, potted‐plant wizard, gastronome, musical amateur, president of the Author’s Guild, usher, ostler and pamphleteer,”¹ novelist and creator of detective Nero Wolfe.

Rex and Pola Stout preparing barbequed chicken at their home. Photos by Hortense Mendel

Rex Stout’s career was as prodigious as the girth of his most famous creation. A precocious child, he read the bible (twice!) before the age of four. At age 13, he won the Kansas spelling bee championship and entered Topeka High School, where he captained the debate team and was senior class poet.² He skipped college and served in the navy for two years. Then he tried various cities around the country and assorted occupations, including writing stories for pulp magazines, until 1916, when he both married and devised the Education Thrift Service, a savings program for school children. Within a decade, royalties made him financially independent, allowing him to write in earnest and travel to Europe. His first novel (that had not been initially released in serial form) was How Like A God, published by Vanguard Press, which he had co-founded in 1926 to re-issue left wing classics and publish new works that could not get released elsewhere. The Great Depression quashed his fortune and he turned to mystery writing to earn a living. Nero Wolfe made his first appearance in 1934 and his last in 1975, however literature took a back seat during the Second World War, when Stout threw himself into support for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the war effort. As president of the Author’s League, he took a strong stance against McCarthyism.

In late 1931, while Stout was building his self-designed modernist home, High Meadow, on the Brewster, New York-Danbury, Connecticut boarder, he met Pola Weinbach Hoffmann, who ran an interior design business with her husband Wolfgang. A year later, Stout and Weinbach Hoffmann married in a civil ceremony at High Meadow.

Born in Stryj, then Austria-Hungary, Pola Weinbach began constructing fashions for her dolls as a child. Despite the objections of her parents, she left university in Lemberg to study at the Vienna’s Kunstgewerbe Schule. During her four years there, the Wiener Werkstätte accepted many of her designs. She lived in Paris and then Berlin before marrying the son of her former teacher in Vienna and immigrating to New York.

After her divorce from Wolfgang Hoffmann, Stout returned to textile design, helping to pioneer the revival of weaving in the 1930s. She collaborated with leading fashion houses and created collections for textile companies in Great Britain. In 1940, she headed an eponymous division of Botany Worsted Mills. Stout enjoyed the opportunity to design for a wider segment of society: “I like to make American fabrics for American women.”³ She used color theory to design fabrics that could be used in combination with each other and manufactured her fabrics for beauty and durability. In 1946, she formed an independent company, Pola Stout Designs/Pola Stout Colors, with its own textile mill in Philadelphia.

Pola Stout often worked from her second floor studio in the expansive home she shared with her husband and two daughters. “While she is spinning yarns in one wing of their hill-top farmhouse, he is spinning his yarns about Nero Wolfe in another.”⁴ Ismar David and Hortense Mendel visited Rex and Pola Stout at High Meadow, sometime during the 1950s.

About Shaul Tchernichovsky

Posted on March 10, 2022 | by IDA

Shaul Tchernichovsky, 1875–1943, poet and medical doctor.

Born in Mikhailovka, Russia, to religious parents, Shaul Tchernichovsky received nevertheless a wide-ranging education. He learned Hebrew and Russian as a child and at age fourteen was sent to Odessa to further his education. There, he studied German, French, English, Greek and Latin. By the age of 16, he had published his first poem. He failed to get into a Russian University and went to Heidelberg to study medicine. He completed his medical studies in Lausanne in 1905. After a few itinerant years, he practiced medicine in St. Petersburg. He served as an army doctor during World War I, practiced as a doctor in Odessa for several years, moved to Berlin, where he worked as chief editor for the Stybel Publishing House,¹ and was able to visit the United States and Palestine. During all this, he never stopped writing and publishing his poems and other literary works.

When Tchernichovsky arrived in Palestine in 1931 to edit Mazia’s unfinished The Hebrew Dictionary of Medicine and Natural Sciences, he was already a celebrated poet and translator (into Hebrew) of Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe and other European classic and modern literature. An admirer of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tchernichovsky had translated the American poet’s Hiawatha as well. He lived in Jerusalem for the rest of his life, writing and practicing medicine, standing both inside and outside Jewish literary traditions.

In late 1931, Tchernikovsky, along with Herman Struck and S.A. Van Vriesland, judged the competition for the cover of the Keren Kayemet’s Golden Book V. They found Ismar David’s design “the most original and impressive.”²

About V.V.

Posted on March 9, 2022 | by IDA

Siegfried Adolf Van Vriesland, 1886–1939, Zionist leader.

By all accounts a committed, passionate and practical Zionist, S.A. Van Vriesland had a successful law practice in Rotterdam before he accepted the position of Treasurer to the World Zionist Executive in 1919. Not long afterward,“V.V.,” as his colleagues often called him, immigrated to Palestine, where he sought to establish an orderly, rational Zionist financial system during especially contentious times.¹ In 1927, he was appointed Dutch Consul General. In late 1929, he joined Palestine Potash, Ltd. as general manager, where he again worked to institute sound financial practices. In 1938, he was named General Manager of the Marine Trust, Ltd., and was largely in charge of the Tel Aviv Port. He oversaw significant expansion of infrastructure at the port, but faced crushing problems, at least in part due to the war. Early in the morning on December 4, 1939, a house maid found him in his bed, shot in the head, with his revolver at his side. No message was found.²

S.A. Van Vriesland actively supported the arts in Palestine. A tribute in the Palestine Post, shortly after his death, read: “There are few artists in the country, of the brush or the stage, who will not gladly own how much of their start as individuals or groups they owe to Van Vriesland.” As a judge, alongside Hermann Struck and Saul Tchernikhovsky, of the competition for the Keren Kayemet’s 1932 Golden Book cover, he chose Ismar David’s design as the winning entry.

About the Monson Press

Posted on March 4, 2022 | by IDA

A.L. Monsohn Lithographic Press, later Monson or Monzon Press, founded in 1892. Originally based in Jerusalem, later also with facilities in Tel Aviv and Haifa, the Press closed its doors in 1992.

In 1890, Jerusalem-born Avraham Leib Monsohn, 1871-1930, traveled to Frankfurt to study lithography and painting. He returned two years later with a hand press and, alongside his brothers, founded A.L. Monsohn Lithographic Press in 1892, then the only firm in Jerusalem capable of color printing. At first, the business consisted mainly of decorative souvenir postcards and New Year’s cards, which Avraham himself designed and painted in the prevailing art nouveau style. The purchase of a larger—and automated—press two years later allowed Monsohn to print many more sheets per day and branch out into commemorative placards and announcements for synagogues. The Press received special permission from rabbinical authorities to print for Christian and Moslem clients and was the official map printer for the Ottoman authorities. Greatly helped by their own innovations in gold embossing and offset printing, the firm branched out into advertising and other commercial work for local fruit, wine, candy and cigarette industries. Their client list grew to include the Jewish National Fund, Shemen, El Al and the Israeli government. Monsohn printed the Koren Bible beginning in 1959 from plates prepared by Emil Pikovsky. The Press closed its doors in 1992.

During the Siege of Jerusalem in 1948, Shimon Baramatz, 1922-1992, grandson of the founder, was temporarily released from military service in order to print posters by Ismar David and Jossi Stern on the newly-purchased Monsohn offset press.

Greetings from Jeanyee

Posted on March 4, 2022 | by IDA

Jeanyee Wong enjoyed making greeting cards for her friends, who in turn saved and treasured them.

Ismar David papers, box 7, folder 169-70, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT. Photographed by Jiageng Lin.

Meine Mutter

Posted on February 22, 2022 | by IDA

After Rosa David arrived in Haifa in late 1947, she lived temporarily in a home for the aged in the Mount Carmel area. As part of a group project, she wrote this poem about her mother, Cäcilie Nothmann Freund, 1845–1915.¹

Wie oft hat man die Mutter schon besungen!
Wie viel ist schon zu ihrem Preis erklungen!
Doch denk an meine Mutter ich zurück,
Die immer nur in andern fand ihr Glück
Mit Ihrem stets empfänglichen Gemüte,
Der stillen Größe, ihrer schlichten Güte,
Mit der sie einem jeden was gegeben,
Der einmal ihr begegnet ist im Leben,
Mit ihren Augen welche immer lachten
Bei Müh und Arbeit, die zwölf Kinder brachten,
Mit ihrem kindlich gläubig frommen Sinn,
Der alles nahm als Fügung Gottes hin,
Mit ihren Liedern, die wir heut noch hören,
Mit ihrer Güte, immer zu versöhnen,
Dann kann ich keine großen Worte finden,
Um das, was sie uns allen war, zu künden
Ich konnte es ihr auch niemals völlig zeigen,
Wie ich ihr war mit ganzem Sinn zu eigen,
Doch ihre Güte lebt, ihr Tun, ihr Wort
In mir als ein erreichtes Vorbild fort.

How often have we sung the praise of mothers!
How often, before, echoed their worth!
Indeed, I think back on my mother,
Who always only found her happiness in that of others.
With her unfailingly open and welcoming nature,
From her quiet grandeur, her simple goodness,
She gave something to everyone,
Who met her even once in life.
With her eyes, always laughing
Through the strain and work that twelve children entailed,
With childlike belief and pious sensibility,
She accepted everything as the will of God,
With her songs, that we still hear today,
With her goodness, always reconciling,
Truly, I cannot find the words,
To express what she was to all of us.
I also could never fully show her
How I embrace her with my whole spirit.
Her goodness, her actions and words
Live on in me as an aspiration.

About M. Pikovsky Ltd.

Posted on February 17, 2022 | by IDA

Michael Pikovsky,1866–1943, and Emil Pikovsky, 1899–1989, father and son printers and publishers in Jerusalem.

After operating in Odessa for more than 30 years, Michael Pikovsky immigrated to Palestine with his two children and re-established his zincography firm in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem. Initially, M. Pikovsky, Ltd. was a surprising addition to the very modest local printing industry and few, beside the Franciscan Order in the Old City, recognized the value of having high quality plates made at home rather than abroad. In order to promote their business, the Pikovskys produced their own illustrated newspaper, HaMizrach. It was the first periodical of its kind in Palestine and, although short-lived, stimulated an appetite for finely illustrated publications in the general public, while clearly demonstrating the skills of the firm for potential clients. As the population and the economy grew, the need for handsome and expert printing both at home and for the Diaspora increased. Services included engraving, letterpress, lithography and offset printing. The Pikovskys developed counterfeit-resistant techniques and the firm became an integral part of the Mandatory government and, with statehood, the government of Israel.

Pikovsky relocated several times, settling in a large building in Rehavia, not far from Ismar David’s studio, in 1935. In a letter from July 1, 1953 to her sister, Helen Rossi mentions “our pal” Pikovsky having met Hortense Mendel in New York the previous year and found her “positively overpowering.”¹ Emil Pikovsky, along with Helen Rossi and ten others, was designated a Distinguished Citizen of Jerusalem on December 31, 1981.

Ismar David produced graphics, stationery and signage for the Pikovskys.

Jerusalem Siege Posters

Posted on January 28, 2022 | by IDA

Yossi Stern and Ismar David working on posters in Jerusalem, 1948. *Ha Magen*, August 27, 1948.

When the United Nations adopted its Partition Plan for Palestine on November 29, 1947, designer Ismar David was studying printing methods in New York. Some contemporary observers believed that Jerusalem would remain exempt from open hostilities, but sporadic fighting broke out in the city almost immediately. David cut short his intended 10-week stay in America to return to Jerusalem, landing at Lydda Airport on January 12, 1948.

The escalating situation in Jerusalem demanded an efficient means of communicating with a multilingual populace and of galvanizing public sentiment and so, the Haganah organized a graphic department with David at its head. Twenty-five-year-old Yossi Stern, a freshly-baked Bezalel graduate and winner of its Hermann Struck Prize for Outstanding Student, Tel Aviv-based Emmanuel Grau, Eliyahu Price, and Gabriella Rosenthal filled out the rest of the team. Working out of David’s studio on Keren Kayemet Street, the group produced designs for stamps, stationery, maps, various periodicals and interior spaces, all at an astounding pace and while attending to their own civilian defense obligations.

David designed a graphic identity for the Haganah, a blue shield with the Israeli flag waving above the ramparts of Jerusalem, and used this bold, new emblem as the focal point for the first of a series of posters, printed on paper shipped from America with the help of Helen Rossi and her sister Zelda Popkin.¹ Posters that followed, for the Haganah and for its affiliates, like the Mishmar ha-Am (People’s Guard), covered admonitions to be careful or to keep calm (with an illustration by Stern), and the perils of curiosity or spreading rumors (both with Stern’s illustrations). David’s water poster graphically distilled—in two water drops—the city’s dire need for conservation and the vulnerability of the Ras-el-Ain pipeline, which was, in fact, damaged by a mine on April 8, 1948.

Most of these works were printed on the only offset press in town, newly installed at A.L. Monsohn Lithographic Press in the Old City. The Haganah had to grant leave to Shimon Baramatz, grandson of the founder and only trained offset operator, to work the press.² When combat or lack of electricity made offset impossible, David used a silk screen setup in his studio. A series of silk-screened Biblical quotations, often printed on the verso of earlier posters, were doubtless meant to strengthen resolve at a time when morale was likely even lower than the supply of paper.

The siege in 1948 was a desperate time for all the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Ismar David recalled having to consider if it was worth going through a neighborhood known to have snipers in order to find a tree rumored to have edible leaves. Nevertheless, these posters, made under the most demanding circumstances, were sophisticated, technically well-executed, often witty, and graphic in the best sense of the word. They had an impact even long after their initial appearance.³ Authors Zelda Popkin (Quiet Street, 1951), Harry Levin (Jerusalem Embattled, 1950), and John Roy Carlson, a pen name of Arthur Derounian, (Cairo to Damascus, 1951) mentioned them in their books. Incidentally, that hand in Haganah poster #2 is a photograph of David’s own.

In the spring of 2022, the Coffee Gallery at 25 Chlenov Street in Tel Aviv pays tribute to the efforts of Ismar David and his colleague Yossi Stern with an exhibition of a collection of these 1948 works.

About Pat and Henry Thoma

Posted on November 20, 2021 | by IDA

Patricia Cahir Thoma, c.1930–2009, art director at Houghton Mifflin & Company.
Henry Francis Thoma, c.1909–1983, Harvard professor and editor at Houghton Mifflin & Company.

Scituate-born Patricia Cahir worked at Houghton Mifflin for 44 years, starting as a secretary, holding “top design posts in the educational division” and retiring in 1996 as a company vice president. She was highly regarded by her colleagues, who acknowledged her as an innovative and demanding boss, and as a mentor as well. She was one of the first two women to be inducted into Boston’s Society of Printers and served as its president.¹ In 1976, the Bookbuilders of Boston awarded her its highest honor, the W.A. Dwiggins Award, as someone who “has given ‘something extra’ to her job … in terms of talent, brilliance, integrity, devotion, or helpfulness to others.”²

In 1957 Cahir married Henry Thoma, who had joined Houghton Mifflin in 1946 as an editor and served as chief of its college textbook division from 1963 until he retired in 1974. He was known as an “editor’s editor who set standards of excellence that his successors are constantly challenged to emulate.”³

Ismar David worked with Patricia Cahir and Henry Thoma, beginning in 1957. Their first project was A Survey of European Civilization. They worked closely, planning which historical motifs to use for the thirteen chapter openings for the book and consulting on technical details. Mrs. Thoma counted herself “practically breathless in anticipation of receiving your sketches soon. I know they will be such a tremendous addition to the book.”⁴ Two months later she would write, “Your finishes arrived last week and we are as pleased as we expected to be with them. In fact they will be transmitted to the printer as is and those suggestions in typography you sent will be incorporated with the text. It is certainly a pleasure to receive an assignment prepared with the thoroughness that this one was.”⁵ For his part, David wrote, “I should like to say here that I have found all of your suggestions extremely helpful and feel that they have improved the pages.”⁶

Letter from Patricia Cahir to Ismar David

Letter from Ismar David to Patricia Cahir

Two letters between Patricia Cahir and Ismar David, detailing some of their work in September 1957.Ismar David papers, box 3, folder 65, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT.

Ismar and Hortense David and Pat and Henry Thoma enjoyed a cordial relationship. Ismar David wrote to Pat Thoma, “My greetings to your husband and kind regards to you both. I hope that next time you are in New York you will have a little more time so that my wife and I can meet you for dinner and/or the theatre.”⁷ A few months later, Pat Thoma wrote to Ismar David, “It was delightful to see Mrs. David the other day. We had a pleasant and gay luncheon with lots of fine conversation. The only thing that might have added to the occasion would have been your company with us.”⁸

About Houghton Mifflin

Posted on November 14, 2021 | by IDA

Hoghton Mifflin & Company, Boston-based publishing firm.

The history of Houghton, Mifflin & Company goes back to mid-nineteenth century, when Henry Oscar Houghton bought into a prominent Boston printing firm, eventually relocating it on the Charles River and renaming it Riverside Press. George Harrison Mifflin became a partner in 1872, by which time the firm had entered publishing without much success. Various mergers ensued and in 1880, under the weight of considerable debt, the two men restructured their business to form Houghton, Mifflin & Company. In 1882, they established an educational department and inaugurated the Riverside Literature Series, which published American classics with study guides for schools. Despite a spotty track record with literature, by 1921 Houghton Mifflin was the fourth largest educational publisher in the U.S. In the 1950s, after steady growth in their educational books division and the acquisition of related educational testing enterprises they were going very strong indeed.

In August 1954, Ismar David showed his portfolio to Connie Coyle at the offices of Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston and, at her suggestion, mailed her photostats of his work two weeks later. However, it was not until 1957 that he received his first commission from the firm. His assignment: J.B., a modern retelling of The Book of Job by poet Archibald MacLeish.

Houghton Mifflin was in a hurry and David made sketches for the jacket, endpapers and title page while on vacation in Rockport. Katharine R. “Jimmy” Bernard reiterated her instructions in a letter, sent to David in care of the Masons: “…we want some rough sketches of ideas for an endpaper decoration and a title page…The designs should avoid being either too biblical or too poetic.”¹ The sketches were approved on July 22, with changes requested for the endpapers: “The endpaper was also approved of, with the exception of the background, which looks more like the biblical background than “J.B.”’s circus tent. We thought that by eliminating the distant city and mountains and the bushes in the foreground, leaving merely the lines running horizontally across the pages, it could be made applicable to both the biblical and the book settings.”² David met Bernard in Boston the following Friday, July 26th, and was able to send the finished work on August 3. Ironically, after the initial rush to get the artwork done, publication was delayed because of extensive author’s alterations.

At the same time, David had begun a new project for Houghton Mifflin, the third edition of A Survey of European Civilization, for which he would design a cover and thirteen complicated chapter openings, combining his own line drawings, photographs and text. The job necessitated research and leg work on David’s part, including visits to the New York Public Library picture collection and the United Nations in search of source material, and even found him negotiating picture rights with a photographer, whose office was one block away from his in midtown Manhattan. David worked well with Patricia Cahir in the Educational Art Department and her colleague, editor Henry F. Thoma, who became her husband later that year. Their business correspondence is frank, but written with warmth, respect and mutual admiration. Hortense Mendel typed the letters on her husband’s behalf and lent them a fair amount of her effervescent style. David enjoyed working on the project. He sent Pat Thoma four examples of different treatments or techniques, including two using scratchboard, for consideration. About the finished drawings, he wrote: “My problem was to, insofar as possible, follow the spirit of the period and yet have all of the drawings relate to each other in feeling and technique. … I have borne in mind, too, that the offset process tends to soften lines and I have drawn these illustrations accordingly.”³

In early 1958, as work continued on European Civilization, J.B. finally appeared. Everyone was pleased with the result. In addition there was “great enthusiasm” and an “enormous amount of excitement stirred up here [in New York] about the book itself.”⁴ (J.B. won a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1959.) The Davids were very keen on getting extra proofs of the illustration for the endpaper because “a number of people have asked us for proofs for their files” and “Ismar would also have liked to show it in some exhibitions in which he is being included.”⁵ Jimmy Bernard did her best to help. In the end, the Davids got the cut from Houghton Mifflin and had the illustration printed on rice paper, giving it to friends and colleagues, Paul Standard, Mort and Millie Goldsholl and Pat and Henry Thoma, among them.

David again worked with the Thomas on cover and endpapers for Basic Principles of Speech. The initial cover sketch was rejected, “The cover has not come off so well unfortunately. Almost everybody agreed it might be wiser to omit the impression of the lips.”⁶ An abstract design (minus anatomical references) proved an acceptable and dynamic solution, along with the endpapers, a montage of famous speakers and the authors’ seven basic principles. In late spring 1958, Henry Thoma wrote to David:

Dear Mr. David:

This is just a word to say how delighted I was with your work on both the Sarrett-Foster-Sarett BASIC PRICIPLES OF SPEECH and the Ferguson-Bruun SURVEY OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION. Both are extremely handsome books, owing no little to your contributions. I have also seen the beautiful job you did for our Trade Department on MacLeish’s J.B. It has real distinction.

Sincerely,
Henry F. Thoma

Letter from Henry Thoma to Ismar David, Aprill 11, 1958. Ismar David papers, box 3, folder 65, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT.

David received more commissions from Houghton Mifflin: A History of Art (1959), Children’s Anthology of Literature (1959), illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg; The Changing Soviet School (1960), Introduction to Religious Philosophy (1959), Novels in the Making (1961), Poems in the Making (1963), Theatre and Drama in the Making (1964), series design for Riverside Editions; and series design for Riverside Studies in Literature—which, temporarily at least, used one of David’s Photo-Lettering alphabets. But those first three projects came at a significant time in his career, when he was trying to establish himself in the United States. They showed the variety he was capable of and the enthusiasm and intensity with which he approached his work. Finally, the J.B. endpaper and its reception may represent a breakthrough of sorts in the development of his linear style.

In February of 1974, David was pleasantly surprised to receive a check for the re-use of his signet for Riverside Books. Art director Roy H. Brown wrote on February 12th: “The device that you designed about ten years ago for the Riverside Editions holds up well, so much so, in fact, that we plan to use it further. Of the various devices that have served to identify the Company over the years, yours seems to capture the combination of tradition and modernity that we are seeking.”

Letter from Roy H. Brown to Ismar David, July 3, 1974. Ismar David papers, box 3, folder 65, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT.