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The Candide Collaboration:

A Pair of Gifts

KENNETH A. LOHF

y If ^HE course of printing history can be traced through a
succession of landmark books, each of which was the re¬
sult of a successful blending of the individual talents of
prinrer, illustrator and publisher. One need cite only a few in¬
stances during the modern era to uphold the conviction: the com¬
bined geniuses of William Morris and Sir Edward Burne-Jones
produced the sumptuous Kelmscott Chaucer; T. J. Cobden-San-
derson and Emery A\'alker, the magnificent Doves Press Bible;
and rhe Grabhorn brothers and \^alenti Angelo, the monumental
Grabhorn Press \\'hitman. The artist and illustrator Rockwell
Kent, Elmer Adler and the Pynson Printers, and the fledgling
New York publishers, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, likewise
combined their respective talents in the late nineteen-twenties to
produce one of the most attractive volumes in the history of
American printing—Voltaire's Candide.

On January 29, 1927, Publisher's Weekly announced a new
publishing firm formed by Cerf, a 1920 graduate from Columbia
College, and Klopfer, a New York businessman, to be called
Random House, a name which caine from a determination to
"publish anything they like—at random." Along with Adler, foun¬
der in 1923 of the Pynson Printers and supervisor of the manu¬
facture of books at the new publishing house, they planned at the
outset to devote their combined energies to the creation and dis¬
tribution of books of typographical excellence. Candide, rhe novel
WTitten by a philosopher to satirize the creed of optimism, was
chosen as their first collaboration, and as the first book to bear the
Random House imprint. Adler was to be responsible for the com-

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