 |
|
| Kevin Lippert | |
Kevin Lippert, founder and longtime head of Princeton Architectural Press, died on March 29. He was 63 and had battled brain cancer.
As recounted by the New York Times, the origins of the publishing house date back to 1981, when Lippert was a graduate student in architecture at Princeton University. "He and his fellow students were encouraged to study historical texts. But these books were old, fragile, oversized and cumbersome, and access to them was limited. It occurred to him that if they could be reprinted in smaller formats and made available at a reasonable price, students would happily pay for them.
"And so he gave his idea a whirl. He persuaded the school's librarians to let him take out rare books and copy them; if students had their own copies, he argued, they would not be damaging the originals."
The first book he republished was Recueil et Parallèle des Edifices de Tout Genre (Survey and Comparison of Buildings of All Types), originally published in 1800 by the French architect Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand. But the design--with sheets 20"×26" in a box and priced at $300--was "not very practical."
The second book was Edifices de Rome Moderne by Paul Letarouilly, originally published in 1840, a classic on Roman Renaissance architecture that Lippert published as a 9"×12" bound book. He "hawked them to students for $55 apiece out of the trunk of his car. They sold out immediately," the Times wrote. "Thus was born Princeton Architectural Press." (The house has no official connection to Princeton University; Lippert did receive undergraduate and Master's degrees from Princeton and taught there, too.)
The press expanded beyond reprinting classics to include books on architecture, design and visual culture as well as books on pop culture, memoir & biography, cookbooks, crafts and hobbies, children's books and a range of sidelines, including notecards, postcards, puzzles, journals, stamp sets and games.
Lippert emphasized high quality. In 2004, he told Archinect, "I want people to think if it's one of our books, it's almost certainly interesting, handsome, well edited and well made."
Among Lippert's many interests was history. His 2015 book, War Plan Red, was about secret plans by the United States and Canada to invade each other in the 1920s and '30s. He was also a classical pianist and a computer whiz who ran a tech services company, selling hardware and software to design businesses.