George A. Baer

George A. Baer (April 14, 1903 – July 24, 1994) was a German/Swiss/American bookbinder. He specialized in fine bindings, including leather inlays and gold tooling.

George A. Baer
Gerge Baer, 1960s.
Born	George Adolf Baer (1903-04-14)14 April 1903 Hoboken, NJ, USA
Died	24 July 1994(1994-07-24) (aged 91) Chapel Hill, NC, USA
Nationality	USA
Occupation	Master Bookbinder
Employer	Cuneo Press
Spouse(s)	Maly Baer ​ ( m. 1933; div. 1959)
Children	Peter Baer, Tomas Baer, Christian Baer

Much of Baer's work involved the restoration of old and rare books for both private customers and numerous rare book libraries around the world. His well-established reputation in this field led to an invitation to help restore books in the Florence, Italy libraries that were water-damaged in the 1966 Flood of the Arno River.[1] Books bound by him were sold to patrons including Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, the President of France, and Pope Pious XII.

Biography

George Adolf Baer was born in Hoboken NJ of German parents, who had immigrated to the US in September, 1902, but returned to Germany shortly after George’s birth. George grew up in Wiesbaden, a German city along the Main River, near Frankfurt. He served a three-year apprenticeship at a book binding company in Wiesbaden from 1919 to 1922. As he recounted in a taped interview,” this was not a fine binding establishment”.[2] It involved strictly binding books with cloth covers. After a year working at a paper making factory and teaching bookbinding in an art school, he decided to pursue fine bookbinding. He was accepted in 1924 at the Berlin School of Applied Arts as an assistant to Paul Kersten, one of the foremost bookbinders in Germany.[3] There he learned about leather binding and gold stamping. He continued working with Kersten as an assistant teacher of bookbinding at an art school in Berlin. In October of 1925 Baer moved to the Staatliche Kunstgeverbeschule in Kassel to teach bookbinding.[4] In March of 1927, Baer had an offer to teach bookbinding in Lixuri on the Ionian island of Kefalonia in Greece. He spent 3 ½ years there before returning to Germany in 1931.[4] By 1931, the Nazi movement in Germany made it difficult for Baer, whose father was Jewish, to find employment. So, he decided to move to Zürich Switzerland. Within a few years he set up his own shop and married Martha Lena (Maly) Guyer, a Swiss artist at that time specializing in commercial design, primarily curtains for upscale restaurants.[5] During the next 15 years a number of George Baer’s books were designed or greatly influenced by Maly. In 1941 the Baers with their two sons, Peter and Tomas bought a farmhouse in Bassersdorf, a small village just outside of Zürich, where George and Maly practiced their respective crafts, tended a large garden, and managed a small menagerie of sheep, chickens, and eventually even a cow.[6] After the war several weekly magazines featured this bookbinder/artist/ farming family that by all appearances seemed to have found “the happy life”.[7] Among the problems not mentioned in these articles was the fact that Maly, whose Swiss roots go back to Jakob Gujer (also written as Guyer) in the early 1700’s, lost her Swiss citizenship because she married a foreigner, and their three Swiss born children also were stateless. As a result, early in the war, the US born George Baer contacted the US consulate in Zürich to establish his right to US citizenship.[2] In 1949, when marital problems became unbearable, George Baer decided to emigrate to the US where the rest of the family joined him in 1951. Through Baer’s earlier work in restoring ancient Aramaic letters for Ludwig Borchardt, an egyptologist in Cairo, he made contact with Prof. Keith Seele at the Chicago Oriental Institute who helped him find a position in the fine binding department of the Cuneo Press. He worked there as well as for private clients and libraries from his private workshop until 1971 when he retired and moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.[8] George Baer continue working from his Chapel Hill home, binding and/or restoring books for the University of North Carolina Rare Book room as well as for private clients in the region. In addition, he taught bookbinding for several years through the UNC evening college. When George Baer finally retired a second time at the age of 81, he donated his collection of fine bindings and other documents to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library. The books are now housed in the Rare Book Room in the George Baer Collection of Bookbinding.

George Baer as an Artist

When Baer first studied fine bookbinding in the early 1920s with Paul Kersten in Berlin, the designs used to decorate books were very traditional. But, just at this time German art and applied art were being transformed by the Bauhaus movement initiated by the architect, Walter Gropius. This group of artists stressed the merger of function and art as well as simplicity of design. It became Baer’s guiding principle in binding and decorating books. As he pointed out in a taped interview in 1986, Baer said that a book, first of all, has to be well constructed and should be bound so that it can be read – “a well-bound book should last 100 to 200 years”.[2] For this reason Baer did not like the “French method of book binding because they shaved the leather too thin” to make them elegant but at the expense of a considerably shorter life span for the binding. During the late 1920s George Baer abandoned the ornate style of gold stamping and adopted simple and clean modern designs that were inspired by the book’s content. “When I was a student I was told a bookbinder should never read books, otherwise he would not make a living.“ But early on I began my work “by reading the book and getting a feeling for the design type and colors”. Then I reflect “sometimes for months” until I got the idea for the book cover design.[9]

Exhibitions

• Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques, Paris (1937)
• Swiss Landesaustellung, Zurich (1939)
• Traveling Exhibitions in Germany and Sweden (1959)
• Chicago Public Library (1961)
• Kalamazoo Institue of Arts (1962)
• John Crerar Library, then at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago (1965)
• Milwaukee Public Library (1967)

Selected Books Bound by George Baer

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References

1. "Americans Who Helped in the Florence Flood Rescue Effort". Abbey Newsletter (Vol. 20 No. 8). December 1996. Retrieved 5 January 2018.
2. Baer, George (1986). "My Life as a Bookbinder" (Interview). Interviewed by Mary Morrow. Chapel Hill, NC.
3. "Teaching Genealogies of American Hand Bookbinders". Guild of Book Workers journal (Vol. 28 No. 1, 2). 1990.
4. Baer, George, Personal papers of George Baer, Rare Book Room of the University of North Carolina Library
5. "Eine Frau arbeitet für die Wohnkultur". Concett&Huber's Wochen-Blätter. Zürich: Concett&Huber Verlag. April 26, 1941.
6. "USA Bürger Buchbinder und Bauer (US citizen, bookbinder, and Farmer)". Heim und Leben. Luzern: C.J. Bucher AG. July 24, 1948.
7. "La Maison Suisse est celle de La Vie Heureuse". La Vie Heureuse. Paris: La Vie Hereuse:Hebdomadaire de la Femme. April 23, 1947.
8. "Bookbinding/". The Daily Tar Heel. August 2, 1979. Retrieved 5 January 2018.
9. Seitz, Johanna (December 21, 1975). "Master Bookbinder at Work: Every book needs special care". The Chapel Hill Newspaper. Chapel Hill, NC.