Carl Purington Rollins papers

Carl Purington Rollins was born in West Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1880. He attended Harvard University from 1897 to 1900, and worked for the Georgetown Advocate, a small country newspaper. He subsequently worked for the Carl Heintzemann Press in Boston before joining New Clairvaux, a rural Utopian community, in Montague, Massachusetts, in 1903. Rollins taught a printing course in the community’s school and ran the New Clairvaux Press. He left the community in 1904, after losing the sight in one eye, but returned to Montague several years later, and purchased the Dyke Mill. While the New Clairvaux community failed in 1908, Rollins remained in Montague where he had established an arts and crafts cooperative at Dyke Mill where furniture, textiles, and printed works were made and sold. Eventually, the business became a press exclusively, the Montague Press. In 1918, Rollins joined the staff of the Yale University Press and was appointed Printer to the University in 1920. In the course of four decades, he designed more than two thousand books for Yale University Press as well as most of the University’s ephemeral materials. Rollins taught a course in bibliography and established the Bibliographical Press in the University library for student use. He also established a private press, At the Sign of the Chorobates, from which he printed publications including Wine Making for the Amateur (1930). He was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the highest award of the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1941. He received honorary degrees from Yale and was named Printer Emeritus when he retired from the University in 1948. Rollins married Margaret Dickey in 1915, and they had two children, Elizabeth and Caroline. He died in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1960.

A bibliography, The Works of Carl P. Rollins (New Haven, CT: Yale University Library, 1982), associated with an exhibit in Sterling Memorial Library in 1982-1983, and prepared by Gay Walker, is an invaluable source of information on Rollins and his work.

References: Katherine M. Ruffin and Chika Ota contributed to this biographical statement.