Awards
American Alliance of Museums: First Prize for Publications Design Competition, 2020
Communication Arts (CA) Design Annual: Books, 2020
Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL): RBMS Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab Exhibition Catalogue Awards, 2020
AIGA: 50 Books | 50 Covers Winner, 2019

Nineteen Nineteen

Edited and with contributions by James Glisson and Jennifer A. Watts

Designed by Content Object: Kimberly Varella, Design and Art Direction; Nikki Roach, Assistant Designer; Lisa Doran, Project Manager
Casebound Hardcover, 260 pages
Publisher: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-87328-268-0
Dimensions: 7.325 × 10 in.
Separations: Echelon Color, Santa Monica, CA
Printing: Permanent Printing Limited, Hong Kong


Race riots. Labor strikes. Women’s battle for the vote. The aftermath of the Great War. The transformative events and harsh realities of the year 1919 still reverberate a century later.

Nineteen Nineteen, published to accompany a centennial exhibition of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, explores the institution and its founding through the lens of this single, tumultuous year. The fully illustrated catalogue features works from The Huntington’s vast collections of books, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and art, many of them never exhibited or published before.

Highlights include German propaganda posters, labor manifestos, personal mementos from suffrage campaigns, firsthand chronicles of World War I, and the papers of T.E. Lawrence (better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”). Artworks by Abraham Walkowitz, John Singer Sargent, Joseph Pennell, Earl Horter, and David Bomberg respond to the unsettling experience of modern life and to a postwar world desperately trying to piece its shards back together.

“This beautifully-designed catalog is an innovative, fresh take on the 'anniversary celebration' model, setting a new standard for this kind of exhibition and catalog. This catalog celebrates a distinctively wide range of material, weaving narratives about the library's founders with broader sociopolitical events in surprising and compelling ways. The quality of the publication is high and the interpretation is remarkably interrogative and thoughtful.” —Leab Awards Committee

Photography by Ian Byers-Gamber
Text excerpted from the Huntington Library