fiction.wikisort.org - Writer

Hellmut Otto Emil Lehman-Haupt (1903-1992) was born in Germany but lived and was schooled in a number of different countries, including England and Turkey. After his doctoral studies, he spent time as a rare book dealer and later museum curator in Germany before moving to the United States in 1929.[1]

Early life and education

Hellmut Emil Lehmann-Haupt was born in Berlin in 1903. His father was a professor of ancient history and his mother a playwright, his interests in books developed form an early age. He attended the Universities of Berlin, Vienna and Frankfurt majoring in the fine arts and eventually received a Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt in 1927.[2]

Career

After his doctoral studies, Lehmann-Haupt spent time as the assistant curator at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz from 1927 to 1929. In 1929, Lehmann-Haupt moved to the United States, where he started working for the Encyclopedia Britannica as an indexing editor and proofread for the New York editorial house Marchbanks.[3] In 1930, he was named curator of the rare book department of the Columbia University Library, and in 1938 he was appointed assistant professor of book arts in the School of Library Services. In 1939, he was an assistant professor of book arts in Columbia's School of Library Service.

During World War II, Lehmann-Haupt served in London (1944-1945), first as a deputy chief of the German Policy Desk of the Office of War Information, and then as psychological warfare officer at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). Lehmann-Haupt also studied what effects such stringent Nazi control of the arts had on society, and was the first to analyze and classify the records of the SS Ahnenerbe, which revealed the extent of Himmler’s archaeological activities in Poland and the USSR.[4] The subject was also explored in his book, Art Under a Dictatorship (1954). After the defeat of Germany, Lehmann-Haupt was transferred to Berlin, where he served as a civil arts liaison officer for MFA&A and then as art intelligence officer.

In 1950, he became chief bibliography expert for rare book and a manuscript dealer H. P. Kraus. Among his achievements with Kraus concern was the authentication and catalogue description of the Constance Missal, a written record of Masses celebrated in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Constance, Germany, that was printed some years before the first Gutenberg Bible. The missal was acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library. In 1954 and 1955, Lehmann-Haupt taught at the Pratt Institute. From 1965 to 1967 at the Yale University, and from 1969 to 1974 at the University of Missouri [5] On March 11, 1992 Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt died in Columbia, Missouri of congestive heart failure. His papers are conserved in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Selected Bibliography

• The Book in America (1939)
• Art Under a Dictatorship (1954)
• The Life of the Book: How the Book is Written, Published, Printed, Sold and Read (1975)
• The Gottingen Model Book: A Facsimile Edition and Translations of a Fifteenth-Century Illuminators' Manual (1979)

Prizes and awards

• Gutenberg Prize of the International Gutenberg Society and the City of Mainz (Germany, 1980)[5]

References

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