The award, for distinguished contributions to fine printing, read: “_Because_ he has for seventy years been a source of creative inspiration in all the varied arts to which he has put his mind and hand; _Because_ he found American printing at the end of the last century in a dreary condition, held up to it the examples of the early colonial printers, revived the simplicity and dignity of Pickering and caused to flourish again the use of Caslon and the other old style types; _Because_ he created a wealth of new ornamentation and by his own demonstration introduced many original uses of ink, paper and bookbinding; _Because_ he redesigned the American magazine and gave to it the charm of a new outer garment with each appearance; _Because_ he cast the illumination of his talents upon the art of the poster, the children’s book, and even the motion picture; _Because_ his great direct aid and even greater inspiration have been acknowledged by many American typographers, including such leaders as Frederic W. Goudy, W. A. Dwiggins, Oswald Cooper and T. M. Cleland; _And finally_ because he has not ceased to be for the printers of our day, as for those of two previous generations, an inexhaustible fountain of kindly encouragement and new discoveries.” Despite their glow, these words spell a clear appraisal of this man’s talents and graphic spirit. Ahead of his times, Mr. Bradley proved a pace-setting pioneer whose work was so fresh that its vitality is as measurable in the specimens of Strathmore and ATF, as in the Hearst periodical pages. Particularly when compared with that of his contemporaries, as Walter Dorwin Teague points out in his perceptive introduction. Mr. Bradley was born in Boston in 1868. His father, a newspaper cartoonist, died when he was eight. Four years later his mother moved to Ishpeming, a small iron-mining town in northern Michigan. Here, he became a printer’s devil on the local newspaper. The brief chronology of events in his legendary career (pp. 92-96) reveals pertinent details of the early years as art department apprentice with Rand McNally, Chicago map-makers, and as free-lance artist. He soon won recognition for his cover designs and drawings for _Harper’s Weekly_ and _The Inland Printer_, and posters for Stone and Kimball’s _Chap Book_. In 1895 he returned to New England to set up his Wayside Press in Springfield, Mass. He was twenty-seven then, had just designed his first sample book for Strathmore, and developed publishing plans for _Bradley: His Book_. Volume one, number one was dated May, 1896; the subscription price, one dollar the year. The cover was a poster treatment of a tree on a grassy hilltop; the frontispiece was by Edward Penfield, himself the subject of a lead article. Center spread pages, decidedly in the Kelmscott manner, were devoted to a poem by Harriet Monroe, with a floriated border surrounding the text in caps. The body type was the ATF version of the Morris Golden face.