H. Lawrence Hoffman papers

H. Lawrence Hoffman (23 October, 1911 - 20 January, 1977) was a freelance commercial book jacket designer, illustrator and calligrapher who worked in New York City. He illustrated book covers for over 25 publishing companies, including Popular Library, Pocket Books, Bantam, Macmillan, Free Press, Simon and Schuster, Scribners, Alfred A Knopf, McGraw Hill, E.P. Dutton, Random House, Southern Illinois University Press, Harper and Row, The Viking Press and Indiana University. Over the course of his career, he created over 600 book jacket covers.

He attended the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1934 with a degree from the Department of Drawing and Painting. In his senior year he was awarded the Trustee Post Graduate Scholarship for Fidelity and Ability. He used the grant money from the award to take night classes at RISD in commercial art. He moved to New York City with the $200 he was awarded for winning a competition to design a coin for the 1936 300 year Rhode Island Tercentennial.

He began his career as an Art Director for A.M. Sneider Advertising Company. From 1941 to 1951, he was an Art Director and Partner at Immerman Art Studios. From 1951 to the end of his career, he worked as a free-lance artist and book illustrator. He taught Illustration and Lettering at The Cooper Union from 1960-1967 and at C. W Post University from 1967 to 1976.

When the first American Mass Market paperbacks were published in 1939, Hoffman designed a number of the early book covers Pocket Books. Popular Library, established in 1943, had Hoffman design the covers for almost all of their first 100 paperback books. Hoffman repeated the cover illustration as a smaller line drawing on the title page. After winning a Simon and Schuster competition to design the dust jacket and the 21 illustrations for the 1948 “The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Modern English Prose Translation” by R,M, Lumiansky he moved from the mass market paperbacks to hardcover publications.. The book was selected as one of the 50 best books of the year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

He was an active member of the Typophiles and the Book Jacket Designers Guild.

Hoffman also was a painter and a creator of many whimsical objects. He enjoyed painting owl faces on rocks and leaving them on the beach to watch the reactions as walkers discovered them.

He did much research for historical illustrations and was an avid collector of books, Americana, illustrations, antique maps, Japanese Prints, and Daguerreotypes. The walls of his house, including the bathroom were lined with books.