Cary Graphic Arts Collection

The Cary Graphic Arts Collection is a library and archive of books, type specimens, manuscripts, documents, and artifacts related to the history of graphical communication. Located in the Wallace Center of RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), in Henrietta, New York, the Cary Collection contains literate artifacts as old as cuneiform tablets and as recent as computer tablets and e-books, in all comprising some 40,000 volumes in addition to manuscripts, correspondence, printing types and traditional letterpress printing equipment. A recent, newsworthy acquisition is the Albion hand press from the Kelmscott Press of William Morris. The Cary Collection also possesses one of the rare copies (only 440 printed) of the extravagantly produced and illustrated Kelmscott Chaucer of 1896, which the British Library has called "a new benchmark for book design at the end of the 19th century". The Kelmscott Chaucer was hand printed on the Kelmscott Albion press; thus the book, a masterwork of the Arts and Crafts movement, has been reunited in the Cary Collection with the equipment on which it was printed, after 118 years.

The original collection of 2,300 volumes was assembled during the 1920s and 1930s by Melbert B. Cary, Jr., director of Continental Type Founders Association, past president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), typophile, and proprietor of the private Press of the Woolly Whale. In 1969, the books that formed the nucleus of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection were presented to RIT by the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, as a memorial to Mr. Cary. The Charitable Trust also provided funds to support the use and growth of the Cary Collection, which has expanded almost 20-fold since its inception, and now includes materials related to the history of writing, the art of calligraphy, the formats and printing of early books, the design of typefaces, the technology of printing, the practice of paper-making, the art of the book and artists' books. The Cary Collection also includes works by recipients of RIT's Frederic W. Goudy Award for excellence of achievement in typography.

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