Douglas Crawford McMurtrie (1888–1944)

Douglas Crawford McMurtrie was a nationally renowned typographer, bibliographer, and authority on the history of printing. Over the course of his career, McMurtrie advised on the typographical redesigning of hundreds of newspapers and contributed to over 779 works on the subject of printing. He also helped to form the Continental Type Founders Association and edited the magazine Ars Typographica. While a position at the Cuneo Press brought him to Chicago, he spent nearly two decades as the director of typography at the Ludlow Typograph Company. In addition to his achievements in the field of design, McMurtrie held leadership roles in the rehabilitation movement for disabled children and World War I military veterans. He served as president of the Society for Crippled Children and director of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men. An advocate for the reformation of public attitudes toward disabled people and their full inclusion in society and the workplace, McMurtrie applied his printing expertise to the movement.

Douglas Crawford McMurtrie was born on July 20, 1888 in Belmar, New Jersey to William McMurtrie (1851–1913) and Helen Douglass. His father was a chemist whose agricultural research propelled the sugar beet industry in the United States. From 1906 to 1910, Douglas C. McMurtrie attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During his undergraduate studies, he designed his cohort’s yearbook, acted as the managing editor of the student-run newspaper, and worked as a correspondent for three Boston newspapers. McMurtrie graduated from MIT in 1910 and was then hired by the Pittsburgh Typhoid Fever Commission, where he produced much of its printed materials for distribution.  

His involvement with the Federation of Associations for Cripples began in 1910. From 1912 to 1919, McMurtrie edited the Journal of Care for Cripples and, starting in 1915, served as the president of the organization. His first bibliographic project was a compilation for the Society for Crippled Children entitled Bibliography of the Education and Care of Crippled Children: A Manual and Guide to the Literature Relating to Cripples Together with an Analytical Index.  McMurtrie’s contributions to the rehabilitation movement involved national speaking engagements and the publication of printed materials. In his analysis of McMurtrie’s role in the movement, historian Brad Byrom explains, “As a prosperous businessman in the craft of printing, McMurtrie’s wealth and position allowed him to become a filter through which the vast bulk of information concerning the movement passed.” According to Byrom, McMurtrie was among the most influential advocates in the rehabilitation movement and one of many reformers with professions outside of medicine. “To him, the most important aspect of rehabilitation involved changing traditional attitudes toward disabled people. McMurtrie held the nondisabled primarily responsible for the dependency that characterized America’s crippled population.” McMurtrie and likeminded advocates campaigned in opposition to medical rehabilitationists, including doctors, who fallaciously blamed disabled individuals for their moral weaknesses and pathologized dependency. 

During World War I, McMurtrie was the director of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men which offered physical and psychological rehabilitation, vocational job training, and job placement. The founding of the Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men by the Red Cross in 1917 predates the establishment of the United States Veteran Bureau by four years. While the Institute was formed to help disabled civilians, its initiatives soon focused on the rehabilitation of injured soldiers. By the end of the war, 224,000 soldiers had suffered injuries and approximately 4,400 returned from the war with fully or partially amputated limbs. An estimated forty thousand soldiers were discharged after sustaining psychological trauma, then called “shell shock” (today categorized as post-traumatic stress disorder). According to one 1918 newspaper article, McMurtrie was “considered the American pioneer in the field of re-education for soldiers incapacited as a result of their service, and probably the foremost authority in this country on the subject.” His essay “The High Road to Self-Support” was published by the Surgeon General. The Red Cross Institute published McMurtrie’s compilation A Bibliography of the War Cripple in 1918. According to American studies scholar John M. Kinder, “Under the direction of Douglas McMurtrie, it produced over fifty different pamphlets, broadsheets, and monographs on rehabilitation work within the first year of the Armistice. In 1918, the institute distributed six million copies of McMurtrie’s flyer Your Duty to the War Cripple in New York customers’ utility bills.” 

McMurtrie then worked as a freelance designer and printing broker in New York. His work attracted the attention of Ingalls Kimball, the co-designer of the Cheltenham typeface, who hired him as a general manager of the Cheltenham Press. However, McMurtrie became dissatisfied with the lack of opportunity to create and publish his own designs. In 1917, McMurtrie was hired to be the director of the Columbia University Printing Office but left the position in 1919 when the university sold all of their printing equipment due to insufficient funding and production. Afterwards, McMurtrie became the president of the Arbor Press for two years.

McMurtrie was concerned that popular typographies were beginning to look similar and the variations were becoming smaller. In response to this problem, McMurtrie established a modern printing plant in the countryside of Greenwich, Connecticut in 1921 with the goal of producing high-quality prints without the distractions of the urban environment. Unfortunately, the plant could not produce enough capital to support its productions. He sold it to Condé Nast Publications but remained its manager. During this time, he designed and published his own typefaces, such as the McMurtrie Title and Vanity Fair Capitals, and was a major contributor to the format of the New Yorker magazine. In 1923, McMurtrie left Condé Nast Publications to freelance in New York again.

From 1925 to 1926, he was the editor of Ars Typographica, a periodical that featured prints of many types. McMurtrie was also crucial in the forming of the Continental Typefounders Association in 1925, an organization that encouraged typography exchanges between European nations and the United States. McMurtrie was responsible for the importation of Cochin and Didot. In 1927, he left his position with the periodical and moved to Chicago to become the typographic editor of the Cuneo Press. One of the most notable books he published in 1927 is The Golden Book which compiles the history of printing and was revised in 1938 and renamed The Book.

His time at the Cuneo Press was brief. In 1928, he joined the advertising and public relations departments of the Ludlow Typograph Company. McMurtrie moved to the company because they supported and funded his research and writing endeavors in bibliography. During his tenure at Ludlow Typograph Company, he established himself as a leading historian of typography and published more than five hundred bibliography books, among them the Chicago-themed The First Printers of Chicago: With a Bibliography of the Issues of the Chicago Press, 1836–1850 (1927) and A Bibliography of Chicago Imprints, 1835–1850 (1944). Although he is the only named author of these books, McMurtrie employed several researchers and writers and distributed the workload among them. In 1936, he had planned to write and publish a four-volume history of printing in the United States, but only two books covering the Middle and Southern Atlantic states would be finished. 

In 1936, McMurtrie was invited to direct a Federal Works Progress Administration project that aimed to organize and create archival systems and spaces. Called the American Imprints Inventory, the ambitious federal work relief project endeavored to compile “a comprehensive listing of all early American imprints extant in American libraries, archives, and historical institutions.” 

As director, McMurtrie encountered an array of difficulties that led to his involuntary resignation in 1941. Afterwards, the Newberry Library in Chicago carried on the project and eventually deposited over fifteen million unpublished cards at the Library of Congress. His second involvement with another WPA initiative led to thousands periodical indexes but went unpublished and was later transferred to Michigan State University.

McMurtrie used his personal imprint Eyncourt Press to publish a few pieces of erotica and The Stone Wall: An Autobiography (1930), written by Ruth White Fuller (1864–1935) under the pen name Mary Casal. Considered one of the earliest books in American literature to tell the life story of a lesbian, The Stone Wall is likely the namesake of the Greenwich Village tearoom founded that same year by Vincent Bonavia. The reference to the book title may have signaled that lesbians were welcome there. Later known as the Stonewall Inn, the gay bar and tavern became the pivotal site of the 1969 riots that sparked the LGBTQ liberation movement. McMurtrie’s publication of erotica and The Stone Wall via Eyncourt Press may seem uncharacteristic of his overall design and research practice. However, his series of articles on prostitution and sexuality, with titles such as “Attraction Between Inverts of the Opposite Sex” and “Lesbian Assemblies,” from the 1910s provide some precedent for these interests.  

In 1944, Douglas C. McMurtrie died of heart disease at the age of fifty-six. At the time of his death, he was living at 950 Michigan Avenue in Evanston and working on a book about the European underground press. He was buried in Graceland Cemetery. McMurtrie and his wife Adele Kohler, who were married in 1915, had three children: Havelock Hayden, Helen Josephine Hodgson, and Thomas Baskerville. 

Bruntjen, Scott, and Melissa L. Scott. Douglas C. McMurtrie, Bibliographer and Historian of Printing. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979.

Byrom, Brad. “A Pupil and a Patient: Hospital-Schools in Progressive America.” In The New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, 

133–157. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

“Conference to Consider Needs of Disabled Men.” Chattanooga Daily Times, February 16, 1919.

“D.C. McMurtrie Dies at 56; Was Type Designer.” New York Herald Tribune, September 30, 1944.

“D.C. McMurtrie, Noted Designer of Type, Is Dead.” Chicago Tribune, September 30, 1944.

Detterer, Ernest Frederick and Douglas C. McMurtrie. Fine Printing at the Cuneo Press. Chicago: Cuneo Press, 1927.

Douglas C. McMurtrie Collection, Special Collections at the University of Arizona Libraries, Tucson.

Douglas C. McMurtrie Imprints, Special Collections and Archives, Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.

Douglas C. McMurtrie Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.

Heller, Steven. Texts on Type: Critical Writings on Typography. New York: Allworth Press, 2006.

Kinder, John M. Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Kraig, Beth. “Douglas McMurtrie and the American Imprints Inventory, 1937–1942.” The Library Quarterly 56, no. 1 (January 1986): 17–31.

McCaffrey, Frank. An Informal Biography of Douglas C. McMurtrie. San Francisco: Privately printed, 1939.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. A Bibliography of Chicago Imprints, 1835–1850. Chicago: W. Howes, 1944.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. “A Bibliography of Peoria Imprints, 1835–1860.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 27, no. 2 (1934): 202–27.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. A Bibliography of the War Cripple. Compiled by Douglas C. McMurtrie. Publications of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, Series 1, Number 1. New York: Red Cross Institute, 1918.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. Appropriate Typographical Style in Public Health Printing. Greenwich, Connecticut: Condé Nast Press, 1924.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. Bibliography of the Education and Care of Crippled Children: A Manual and Guide to the Literature Relating to Cripples Together with an Analytical Index. New York: Douglas C. McMurtrie, 1913.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. “Intelligent Book Collecting Requires Specialization.” The Paterson Morning Call, March 7, 1940.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. “Locating the Printed Source Materials for United States History.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 31, no. 3 (1944): 369–406.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. “Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft.” The American Historical Review 49, no. 1 (1943): 82–83.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. “Rebuilding of Crippled Host After the War.” The Charlotte News, May 5, 1918.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. “Reducing the Cost of Disability in the Hardware Trade.” American Artisan and Hardware Record 77, no 11 (1919): 26.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. The Duty of the Medical Profession in the Reconstruction of the War Cripple. New York: American Red Cross, 1918.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. The First Printers of Chicago: With a Bibliography of the Issues of the Chicago Press, 1836–1850. Chicago: Cuneo Press, 1927.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. “The First Printers of Illinois.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 26, no. 3 (1933): 202–221.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. “The Medical Professional After the War.” American Medical Association Journal 71 (November 16, 2018): 1663–64.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. The Typography of a Small Newspaper: An Address at the Meeting of the Illinois Press Association. Chicago: Ludlow Typograph Company, 1928.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. Typography of Magazines and House Organs. Chicago: Privately printed, 1935.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. Typography Which Delivers the Sales Message: Proofs of Alternative Settings of the Same Copy to Illustrate a Talk by Douglas C. McMurtrie. Chicago: Ludlow Typograph Company, 1938.

“McMurtrie, Expert on Printing, Dies.” Windsor Star, September 30, 1944.

“Newspaper Composing Room Executives Hear Widely-Known Typography Expert: Douglas C. McMurtrie of Chicago Addresses 52 Members of Association at Semi-Annual Banquet, on Effective Advertising Displays.” Burlington Free Press, May 20, 1940.

“The Future Welfare of Our Men Crippled in the Service.” Morning Chronicle, May 13, 1918.