This is a difficult task. I agreed to write an introduction to Will Bradley, His Chap Book before I had seen the book’s text itself. Now I have encountered here the gaiety, courage, vitality of this man who romped like a breeze through American graphic arts for several decades—and I feel that my part should be little more than the opening of a door to this perennial springtime freshness.

But still there is something to talk about that he, modest man, hasn’t even mentioned. And that is the impact of his work on his time. It should be talked about, because it is hard to realize today, in our state of emancipation, what a closed and stuffy room Bradley entered—and opened to the sun and air.

Across the Atlantic, the Nineteenth Century was bursting its seams: Morris failing to revive medievalism but startling his world with a revival of fine craftsmanship; Beardsley, the Yellow Book and their avant garde galaxy startling their world in quite a different way; Toulouse-Lautrec spreading modern art in the kiosks of Paris when only a handful knew anything about Cezanne, Van Gogh, Seurat; barriers being demolished everywhere.

In America, these goings-on were known to a few connoisseurs amid a vast indifference. It was Bradley in the Nineties who made the American public stir in its sleep and at least crack an eye. In the next decade he and the many who followed him were well advanced in the lively morning of a day that isn’t over yet.

There were derivative traces in Bradley’s early work—and whose hasn’t?—but when he hit his stride it wasn’t Europe’s leadership he followed. He discovered American colonial typography, bold and free, and from that springboard he took off into a career of non-archaic, non-repetitive, exuberant and exhilarating design. In its way it was as American as the Declaration of Independence. In this field we have never had any more indigenous art than Bradley’s.

He was a native, corn-fed American in another way, too. It was a time when Kelmscott House had set a pattern, and the only pious ambition for a serious typographic designer was to produce meticulous limited editions for equally limited collectors. Bradley may have had some such idea in mind when he started the Wayside Press, but thank God it didn’t work. There was a lusty, democratic ambition in that slight body, and it thrilled him to speak to thousands, even millions, instead of just scores. The turbulent current of American commercial and industrial life appealed to him more than any exquisite backwater.

So he spread his work over magazines, newspapers, the advertising of such houses as the Strathmore Paper Company, his own lively but not limited publications, even the movies. So he enormously enriched our arts; and he smashed more false fronts and took more liberties—successfully—than anyone has done before or since.

Now his retirement has lasted almost as long as his active career. His work has been absorbed into our culture so completely that many of the young men cavorting brilliantly in his wake today are scarcely aware of their debt to him—the pioneer and pacemaker. They should be—he is aware of them: he closes here with chuckling praises of the fine, free-handed job they are doing. There was always a giant’s spirit in this powerful little man, and it’s as strong and generous now as it ever was. My memory is long enough that I can say for all these latecomers, “Thank you no end for everything, Will Bradley.”

Walter Dorwin Teague

New York
May, 1954

Will Bradley, His Chap Book