Lakeside Press was a Chicago publishing imprint under which the RR Donnelley Company produced fine books as well as mail order catalogs, telephone directories, encyclopedias, and advertising.
The Press was best known for its high quality editions for the Chicago Caxton Club as well as the Lakeside Classics, a series of fine reprints.
The business was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, leaving Donnelley to start his again with nothing but his reputation as capital.
[4] The Donnelley company aimed to produce books and periodicals with impressive modern design and mass printed commercial and reference materials.
Donnelly was the official printer for the 1933-1934 World's Fair, "A Century of Progress," which took place on the Lake Michigan lakefront just to the east of the plant.
Donnelley, a Yale graduate and a trustee of the University of Chicago, felt that the recent revival of the ancient practice of apprenticeship was unsatisfactory because unions dominated the rules.
[7] A 1933 pamphlet bragged that the apprentices "learn the ancient craft of printing on the finest of modern equipment" and "are imbued with the conviction that the better they do their work, the more they will earn and the higher they will rise.
As Chicago became home to a northward migration of blacks, the workforce became stratified as non-whites found it hard to attain management positions.
[12] Thomas Donnelley wrote in the introduction to Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the first volume in the series, that "If, in a modest way this volume conveys the idea that machine-made books are not a crime against art, and that books may be plain but good, and good though not costly, its mission has been accomplished."
C. G. Littell, vice president and treasurer, and William A. Kittredge, head of the department of design and typography, organized the campaign.
[16] The best known of the publications in the series was Rockwell Kent's edition of Herman Melville's novel, Moby-Dick, which at that point was not yet accepted as an American classic.
Kittredge commissioned Kent to perform the design and illustrations in 1926, and the book appeared four years later in a three-volume limited edition of one-thousand copies issued in an aluminum slipcase.
[20] in 1929, the company opened the Lakeside Galleries on the eight floor of their newly completed building on 22nd Street, near the shores of Lake Michigan.
From 1930 to 1961, when corporate headquarters were moved, the galleries devoted exhibitions to the works of American and European artists and photographers, as well as to typography and book design.