Dard Hunter

Dard Hunter was active in the Arts and Crafts movement, Hunter created and championed many other types of handmade arts and crafts, publishing his own guides, such as Things You Can Make. He experimented with pottery, jewelry, stained glass windows, and furniture. He also founded a correspondence school, the Dard Hunter School of Handicrafts.

The recorded working language is English. Elbert Green Hubbard is recorded as an influence. Places of work recorded in the authority are Chillicothe and Marlboro. Work by Dard Hunter is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Distinctions recorded are AIGA Medal.

• Name — Dard Hunter • Birth Name — William Joseph Hunter • Born — 29 November 1883 • Birthplace — Steubenville, Ohio, US • Died — 20 February 1966 • Place of death — Chillicothe, Ohio, US • Resting Place — Grandview Cemetery (Chillicothe, Ohio) • Known for — papermaking, printmaking, paper art • Illustration — Dard Hunter, self-portrait in watermark • Illustration — Front of the Mountain House in Chillicothe

• Illustration — The Gomez Mill House, home to the Hunter family during the 1910s Hunter was born and raised in Steubenville, Ohio, where his father published a gazette and ran a printery. From 1900 to 1903 he attended The Ohio State University. He began his career in East Aurora, New York, with a job at Roycroft, the Arts and Crafts company of Elbert Hubbard. In 1908, Hunter married Edith Cornell, a pianist he met at Roycroft, and the couple honeymooned in Vienna, a location inspired by Hunter's interest in Josef Hoffmann. Hunter returned to Europe to study papermaking in Italy, and was graduated from Vienna's Royal-Imperial Graphic Teaching and Experimental Institute (K. K. Graphische Lehr und Versuchsanstalt). The couple went to London in 1911, where he worked as a commercial designer with Norfolk Studios. An exhibit at the London Science Museum provoked his interest in papermaking. In his exploration of primitive and early papermaking, he would travel to East Asia and Pacific locales such as Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. In 1912, they returned to the United States, and Hunter bought and moved into the Gomez Mill House near Marlboro, New York. He built a small papermill there, and crafted his first books on papermaking. Handmade paper was not being produced in America at the time; it had to be purchased from Europe. His English papermaking appliances were three centuries old, and were operated by a wooden water wheel. Over forty-six years, he wrote twenty books about papermaking, eight of which were hand-printed. In 1919, the Hunter family returned to Ohio and purchased the 1852 "Mountain House" in Chillicothe, which had been built for German winemakers. Hunter used a wing joined to the house for his letterpress printing studio, named Mountain House Press, where he produced eight handmade books, authored twenty books on the topic of papermaking, and was an active publisher between 1922 and 1956. In 1958 he published his autobiography, My Life with Paper. The year 1930 saw production start in a commercial one-vat mill, in a former iron foundry on the Salmon Fells Kill in Lime Rock, Connecticut, he had purchased and started transforming in 1928. It represented an expenditure, all told, of close to $35,000, about $488,000 in 2017 value. Although operating until 1933, it was a financial failure. Hunter opened the Dard Hunter Paper Museum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939, which he considered his greatest accomplishment. It was moved to the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1954. The Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking now comprises most of the collection of the Institute of Paper Science and Technology, on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Hunter was a Rosenbach Fellow in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania.