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Binding & Business

a UI Libraries Forum, February 20, 2002

On February 20th Fritz James presented a Forum at the University of Iowa Libraries. The event was titled “Binding & Business” but no one was sure what Fritz would say. No one, not even attending co workers from LBS were sure. Then he began to tell the most amazing story and in an hour and a half, with wonderful grace and whimsy, convinced everyone that it was all true.

He began by acknowledging - for the first time - his great grandfather. This was Ernst Hertzberg. By a slight projection he described the very young boy wandering in the ruins of a medieval scriptorium. It was nineteenth century Germany and boy was swept into a seven year apprenticeship, while he also bred a mysterious attraction to books. Suddenly, at the age of fourteen he decided to go to Chicago. He got a job on the fourth floor over a restaurant and evenings began his own project in book art.

He bound an extra illustrated “History of Napoleon” in twelve, oversize volumes. Meanwhile he married and raised a family of seven. Then in 1904 he took the twelve volume set and his youngest son to the World’s Fair in St. Louis. In an international competition the Ernst Hertzberg set was awarded the gold metal as the finest example of the Art of Book Binding in the world.

Ernst knew exactly what he was doing. The set was sold for $10,000, enough to build a complete empire from his still vivid fantasy. All the children were brought into the enterprise and through hard work and application of a strange Hertzbergian vision the second generation prospered and the bindery became an industry. One of the daughters married Fritz’s grand father bringing the James family into the dynasty. Fred James senior became an expert binder and he taught his son, Fred.

By the time Fritz came along the Hertzberg Bindery was a national industry with success in both high end extra binding and utilitarian library binding. But the Hertzberg vision was still at work and the business was ready for major transition. Fritz first worked in the company under the authoritarian Lawrence Hertzberg, son of the immensely mean Edward. But Fritz admitted that in his youth he felt disconnected with the genealogy and even with his own father who he considered something of book “nerd”.

Fritz, like Ernst, started young. He started with the benches at about eye level because he can remember the cascades of glistening animal glue that accumulated from the edge of the benches. As he progressed Lawrence decided to take advantage of this alert new apprentice. The boss told him to learn every operation and to bring him one good idea every friday for one year. Fritz did this.

Then, suddenly, one day Lawrence asked Fritz if he had a passport. The next day they went to Scotland to examine a new kind of bindery factory that was recovering publishers’ paperbacks. For two weeks, in the endless cold of the Scottish winter, Fritz studied the technology and processes. When he returned he was sent to a little room which was to be the start of the company’s R & D operation. He passed through a purgatory of feeding polyester films through PotDevin cementers and sticking the gummy mess to paperback wrappers. Finally the process started to work and Hertzberg New Method was born. Fritz, at age of 26 years, was sent to Jacksonville, Illinois to set-up and manage the largest library rebinding operation in the country. Fritz still didn’t recognize the strange alure of books or his own heritage....but the connections were at work.

The Hertzberg Iowa operation got started when some charming young librarians in Des Moines were visited by the dashing Ernest and Grover Hertztberg in 1921. The charming young librarians wanted them to return and they did. Fritz’s father and grandfather escaped family feuds in the Chicago operations and joined Hertzberg, Des Moines a few years later. In 1952 the Iowa operation bound its last book and was shifted to supplying materials and products to the library binding industry. This lead to the start of Library Binding Service. After college Fritz joined the LBS company and then in a settlement of family buyouts took on the company himself.

The next day, after family members drove off in Lincolns, he discovered that the company was $176,000 dollars in debt. Turned out, no one ever paid LBS, for months and months and then for years. His first action as CEO was to go to the customer’s office and declare that he would not leave until he was paid or provided a plan for payment. Next Fritz took to the road as a salesman and developed a tactic of “consultive salesmanship” in which he would give free advice in hope of a sale. But nothing happened. Then a real salesman told him that it was necessary to tell the customer that he was there to sell them something. Again Fritz adjusted and the sales started. Next Fritz started a new division, Archival Products to design and produce rehousing materials for the library and archival community. Then he started another division, Corporate Image which designs and produces corporate publications and has re-invented the three-ring notebook. Fritz designed and built new factories that are a pleasure to work in. Window views of restored praire surround the operations. He developed CAD technologies for prototyping foldered publications and invested in a two million dollar four color printing press.

Then one day he wandered into a huge annual used book sale. In the middle of the room he immediately picked up a single book. “My grandfather bound this book!” he said. He took it home and his father immediately said; “You know, your grandfather bound that book.” So Fritz began to consider connections. The whole history of the Library Binding service had been charmed by some kind of underlying vision and an abiding sense of design that Fritz could not, at first, grasp. He, himself, was being guided by some inherent sense of timeless book quality and some underlying appreciation of the skill involved in book art.

True, Fritz is adventuring in a vastly different world of the book than that of the medieval scriptorium where Ernst wandered, but the connections are there and just as vivid. He showed the group at the UI Forum an Ethiopian Gospel that he brought back from Africa while visiting his daughter who is a teacher in Kenya. He pointed out the way it looked and he demonstrated the way it moved and opened. He did this with a completely boy like sense of revelation. He said he sort of knew who wrote it and bound it.

Then he pretended to look out the window of a bus in Africa. “What’s THAT?!”, he asked his daughter. “That's Kilimanjaro.” she said. So he went back and climbed it.

the Forum included an exhibit of Hertzberg company scrapbooks and samplers and examples of fine binding from the Hertzberg Bindery including two volumes of the Napoleon set from the UI Ranney collection. Fritz James has recently donated a large collection of Hertzberg Bindery scrapbooks, company archives, collections of decorated papers and a fine collection of books on books to the Special collections of the University of Iowa Libraries. (an announcement of this gift will soon be released, 02.24.02)