Greer Allen: In Memoriam

Designer, critic, pundit and historian, Greer Allen was Senior Critic in Graphic Design at Yale School of Art. He designed publications for The Houghton Library at Harvard, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and a number of other distinguished cultural institutions around the country. From 1972 to 1983, Allen was University Printer at Yale. He later served as Honorary Printer to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

Greer Allen died last week after a short illness. He was 83.

Many years ago when I was a graduate student, I spent four days touring presses and paper mills in Vermont with my 17 classmates and with Greer Allen. It was the end of September, the temperature was already in the low 20s — and those four days changed my life.

As the younger of two daughters raised in cities both here and abroad, I viewed this field trip as little more than an imposed sentence of doom. Long windy roads and cramped motel rooms did little to appease my negativity: I was crabby, I was unimpressed and I was impatient for this ordeal to end.

But after we toured Stinehour, something happened.

We drove, caravan style, to the home of Claire Van Vliet. Book artist, letterpress printer, MacArthur recipient and Philadelphian-turned-Vermonter, Van Vliet lived in a house filled with art and books, surrounded by a big garden filled with organic produce. She welcomed and fed us — all 19 of us — and showed us where she made her work. Here, in the middle of nowhere.

I went to sleep that night warm and, drowsy from the food and the wine, happy in a way I hadn’t been in ages.

The following day, we travelled to an even more remote part of Vermont, where Greer introduced us to a paper restorer who lived on a water-powered saw mill that had been in her husband’s family for generations. Here, the desolate, monochromatic landscape framed yet another life filled with art and books. Our host, also a cellist, had propped her cello in the corner, flanked by two large black labradors sleeping peacefully on the oriental rug. In her studio she showed us rich, Italian kid leathers, Florentine papers, artisinal glues and brushes. While she worked on restotarive bindings for the Folger Library, she listened to National Public Radio, taking breaks to feed the dogs, to play her cello, to fetch her children from school. She was happy and she was busy and she was leading a cultivated life. Here, in the middle of nowhere.

I was twenty-six years old, and I thought: this is how I want to live.

Today, I live in the middle of nowhere. The winters are long and the landscape can be desolate, but here I can have a both studio and a garden. I am a designer with a much richer life than I ever would have had I not taken that trip with Greer Allen. And it is because of Greer that I do.