YOUR COLUMBIA RECORDS PERSONNEL LIBRARY
John Alcorn
Seymour Chwast
Paul Davis
Milton Glaser
Andy Warhol
From 1960 to 1962 Art Director Eric Miles assembled a stable of top illustrators for a multi-volume, in-house project for the Human Resources Department of Columbia Records. Andy Warhol was hired, along with Push Pin Studio artists John Alcorn, Paul Davis, and Milton Glaser, to enliven a series of booklets outlining corporate benefits offered to Columbia employees.
Your Columbia Records Personnel Library—four booklets housed in a custom slipcase—was finally published in 1962, but only after the Warhol booklet was rejected by Columbia’s Human Resources Department as “too fey.” The entirety of the Warhol press run was trashed by Columbia, and Pushpin Studio’s Seymour Chwast was promptly hired to design a replacement edition.
The Personnel Library set won an AIGA award in the 1963 Design for Printing and Commerce competition, with the submitted set subsequently placed into the AIGA archives. The archived set does not include the Warhol booklet.
Columbia Records Designer Lawrence Miller worked with Warhol and the Pushpin artists and designed the format and layout of the Personnel Library set. Miller retained some work samples from this project, with his handful of salvaged Warhol brochures representing the entirety of the surviving copies.
We are proud to offer this archive documenting the troubled history of the Personnel Library, featuring a complete set of booklets illustrated by John Alcorn, Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis, and Milton Glaser, housed in the Publishers slipcase, a copy of the rejected Warhol booklet, as well as a paste-up proof of an unrealized version of the Chwast replacement booklet.
Andy Warhol [Illustrator]: MAJOR MEDICAL EXPENSE INSURANCE. [New York: Columbia Records, n. d., 1962]. Slim square quarto. Thick textured stapled wrappers printed in two colors. 12 pp. Benefits brochure with 6 uncredited illustrations by Andy Warhol printed in two colors. Spine slightly rubbed and stressed around the staples, and faint edgewear. A very good example of a previously unrecorded Warhol document. Of singular rarity.
Reid Miles [Art Director] and Lawrence Miller [Designer]: YOUR COLUMBIA RECORDS PERSONNEL LIBRARY [slipcase title]. [New York: Columbia Records, n. d., 1962]. Publishers paper covered slipcase printed in three colors. Edges lightly worn and nicked, but a very good example designed to house the 5.75 x 5.75 stapled booklets by Alcorn, Chwast, Davis, and Glaser booklets.
John Alcorn [Illustrator]: YOUR FUTURE IS SOUND WITH COLUMBIA RECORDS. [New York: Columbia Records, n. d., 1962]. Slim square quarto. Thick textured stapled wrappers printed in one color. 32 pp. Benefits brochure with 7 uncredited illustrations by John Alcorn printed in one and two- colors. Center leaf neatly detached and laid in. A very good archive example of a scarce Pushpin piece.
Paul Davis [Illustrator]: LIFE INSURANCE PLAN. [New York: Columbia Records, n. d., 1962]. Slim square quarto. Thick textured stapled wrappers printed in one color. 12 pp. Benefits brochure with 6 uncredited illustrations by Paul Davis printed in one and two- colors. A nearly fine archive example of a scarce Pushpin piece.
Milton Glaser [Illustrator]: COLUMBIA RECORDS 1960 PENSION PLAN. [New York: Columbia Records, n. d., 1960]. Slim square quarto. Thick textured stapled wrappers printed in one color. 12 pp. Benefits brochure with 7 uncredited illustrations by Milton Glaser printed in two colors. Uncoated page edges lightly toned. A very good archive example of a scarce Pushpin piece.
Seymour Chwast [Illustrator]: HOSPITAL AND SURGICAL INSURANCE. [New York: Columbia Records, 1962]. Slim square quarto. Thick textured stapled wrappers printed in two colors. 16 pp. Benefits brochure with 6 uncredited illustrations by Seymour Chwast printed in a single color. A fine, fresh archive example of a scarce Pushpin piece.
Seymour Chwast [Illustrator], Lawrence Miller [Designer]: HOSPITAL AND SURGICAL INSURANCE. [New York: Columbia Records, 1962]. Pasted up composite brochure maquette. Six custom [and rejected] illustrations printed on rubber cemented sheets stapled, and trimmed for presentation. Rubber cemented cutlines loosened with one example missing, and interior leaf loosley laid in. Vintage rubber cement staining, but a singular example of this working document and presentation proof.
From Pushpin's web site: "Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser and Edward Sorel founded Push Pin Studios in 1954. The studio rapidly gained an international reputation for innovative design and illustration. Push Pin's visual language [which referenced culture and literature] arose from its passion for historical design movements and helped revolutionize the way people look at design."
This collection represents the only known complete 5-volume set of Your Columbia Records Personnel Library, with the inclusion of the rejected Warhol booklet making it unique. The Chwast maquette is merely lagniappe.
The rejected Warhol brochure includes no publishing information, but Warhol’s upward trajectory as an in-demand Commercial Artist has been well documented, as has his deep and abiding love of the feline form: “Andy Warhol couldn’t think of anything much to say except that he has eight cats named Sam, when asked for a character portrait, despite the facts, most of them gleaned elsewhere, that: he studied painting and design at Carnegie Tech in home-town Pittsburgh; came to New York in 1949; found Vogue, Glamour, and Harper’s Bazaar, among others, very pleased with such blotting-paper drawings . . . and won an Art Director’s Club medal for a drawing he did for the Columbia Broadcasting System.” — Interiors Cover Artists, Interiors and Industrial Design July 1953
This booklet represents an anomaly in Warhol’s storied commercial illustration career: a piece that was rejected —albeit lately—by his client, and a true rarity with an unsurpassed provenance.