As founder of the Spiral Press, he was a well-known figure in the 20th-century fine-press movement, designing and printing work for prominent clients such as the poet Robert Frost.
Educated in the public schools, he enrolled in Cornell University, but he left his sophomore year to enlist in the military, as did many of his classmates, when the United States entered World War I in 1917.
[2] On sales trips, Blumenthal was first exposed to the work of fine printers and book designers including Bruce Rogers, Daniel Berkeley Updike, and the Nonesuch Press.
To continue his informal education, Blumenthal subsequently found apprentice-type jobs in the print shops of William Edwin Rudge and Hal Marchbanks.
From the start, the Spiral Press found work doing typography, often for large publishers like Henry Holt who ordered designs for dust jackets, title pages, advertising, etc.
Printing and composing were sometimes delegated to outside plants that had higher capacity, but for more exclusive jobs, the Spiral Press acquired production equipment such that Blumenthal could attend to every detail of typesetting, ink, paper, and presswork.
After studying calligraphy and the early masters of type design, he created the Emerson typeface, which he describes as follows: It may not be a versatile, bread-and-butter face; it is perhaps too close to Renaissance classicism, and if time and opportunity had offered, I would have enjoyed a second attempt with a more contemporaneous approach.