Edouard Benedictus Prints Collection
”Multi-talented in the field of graphic design, Edouard Benedictus [1879-1930] was a [French] painter, book binder and fabric designer. He created beautiful albums of textile and wallpaper designs in the Art Deco style using pochoir coloration. His folios include Variations, 1924; Nouvelles Variations, 1925; and Relais, 1930.” Leonard Fox, Ltd. http://www.foxrarebooks.com/benedictus.html.
Two groups of Benedictus prints have been transferred from the Lake Forest (town) Library, July 2008, where at least one originated with Alfred E. Hamill (d. 1953), president of the Library Board in 1931 when the current building at 360 E. Deerpath was opened. Hamill was patron of book arts and related craftspersons from the 1920s to the 1950s. 6,500 volumes of his notable private library here in Lake Forest were given by Mrs. Hamill to the College’s library in 1955.
Of the two groups of prints transferred from the LF Library, only one is identified by his handwriting in it as having originated with Hamill. But he also is a likely source of the second group, bound in a volume but with no printing. This may in fact have been bound up by Hamill for his own library and subsequently given away.
All of the plates are perforated wholly or in part with dots making up the letters of “Lake Forest Public Library,” all in sans serif caps.
Group 1.
Benedictus / Abstract colour designs written in black ink in Hamill’s hand, 65 plates written in pencil in another hand. 29 Oct 1937 Gift Aldis, written in pencil in the inner bidning margin. A lending card in the book shows that this first was borrowed form locked case storage in 1938. The plates are mounted on thick, porous blue paper, standard letter size, and mounted in a black leather ring binder, one on each side of the sheets. “Aldis” would refer to the two-generation Aldis family, with its estate on the east side of Green Bay Road, between Deerpath and Illinois. By then living there were Graham and Dorothy Keeley Aldis, he in the family’s Chicago real estate business and she a novelist and author of juveniles.
64 of the Art Deco style plates, as described at the Lake Forest Library, “appear to be hand-printed with watercolor or tempura paint.” The prints, with one to three per page, range in size within to letter size format of the binder pages.
The last print on slightly different blue stock is a page-scale color photograph (rounded at the top) of a Madonna and Child, artist unidentified of the early Italian Renaissance period, perhaps.
Group 2.
[apparently Benedictus colour prints], II.27.49 written in pencil on flyleaf, apparently when acquired by the Lake Forest Library.
12 larger format, bound in quarter leather boards, 36 cm. x 27 cm., again mounted on the same distinctive, thick, porous blue paper. The seventh one is missing, its page empty. 2 smaller such prints, as in the first group, one mounted on the front cover and one as a bookplate on the interior of the front cover. Again these all are in the Art Deco style. The small color print on cover is surrounded by tooling in gilt. Again the larger prints are perforated or cancelled by the words “Lake Forest Public Library.”
There is no indication of the source of this volume, received at the Lake Forest Library a decade after the first group. Hamill is known to have had bound many books for his own collection.
Arthur H. Miller
Archivist and Librarian
for Special Collections
July 31, 2008