Two introductions, a foreword, and a preface are necessary to provide the foundation for By His Own Labor, Cathleen Baker’s biography of Dard Hunter. The reader is stimulated first by Timothy Barrett’s remarks on the why’s of papermaking and Hunter’s preeminent position in the modern history of the craft; then by Maria Via’s introduction to both Hunter in his early Roycroft years and the efforts of Baker; and finally by Baker herself, as she pays homage to the late Patricia Scott who laid the groundwork for this biography. Baker then primes the reader for the text by her account of her own odyssey to produce this monumental biography. The prologues are essential for the Hunter-initiated and the neophyte alike. Dard Hunter would certainly be proud of this book as a physical object, inspired as it was by his efforts and manifested through the collaboration of some of America’s top craftspersons. Red Hydra Press's Steve Miller, according to Baker, “pronounced that this book had to be printed in as traditional a manner as possible” and this set a format of uncompromising standards. Baker was the printer’s devil for Steve Miller as he carefully inked each page on his Vandercook. The printing is superb and the Dante type fits properly into the tradition of Hunter’s books. The handmade paper was formed at Twinrocker (where else?) and caresses the eye and fingertips throughout. The Gray Parrot quarter-binding is an elegant understatement that rests comfortably alongside Hunter’s own large, deluxe volumes. However, the plates are of documentary quality only and not up to the quality of those found in The Life Work of Dard Hunter (Dard Hunter II. 2 vols., Chillicothe: Mountain House Press, 1981, 1983). One must keep the 124 black-and-white and color plates (printed in an accompanying volume) at hand while reading, as Baker includes plate references on about every other page of the 239 with primary text. This biography’s eighteen chapters do not consistently follow the chronology of Hunter’s life. Baker explains, “Because [Hunter] was always involved in a number of concurrent activities, I decided to deal with each significant project from its conception to conclusion.” The text begins with two background chapters that draw the picture of a turn-of-the-century family aggressively following the American dream. Hunter’s father was a newspaper editor in Chillicothe, Ohio, and this business would provide financial support through most of Hunter’s life. The reader will be fascinated by Dard’s late teens and early twenties, when he and his brother (and best friend) Philip went on the road with a “magic act.” Here one sees the seeds of the designer-  craftsman being sown, as Dard’s job was to entertain the audiences with his drawings and paintings. One quickly realizes that Hunter, in Baker’s words, “would not choose a career that required more academic schooling.” He would be a self-made man. The next three chapters delve into Hunter’s years under the influence of Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft Shop in East Aurora, New York (1904-1911). It was with the Roycrofters that Hunter progressed quickly as a designer, with an early interest in stained glass. His love of type and advertising design, as well as furniture and ceramics, bloomed within Hubbard’s vibrant center of American Arts and Crafts. At this time he met and soon married Edith Cornell, an accomplished musician, who would remain his partner and close confidante until her death in 1951. Their atypical marriage forms an interesting yet elusive thread throughout this biography, and the reader’s curiosity about Helen Edyth Cornell Hunter remains somewhat unfulfilled. The Hunters’ extended honeymoon in 1908 took them to Europe, in particular to Vienna. The Vienna Workshops had a major effect on his design career, which affected his later Roycroft work. Dard and Edith would return to Austria and then to England in 1910-1911. In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Hunter was fascinated by the exhibit of hand papermaking equipment. Back in America in 1911, Hunter began his search for the proper location to experiment with hand papermaking, typefounding, and printing. Within a year he and Edith had purchased New York property in Marlborough-on-Hudson, which he thought might be the perfect place to set up his venture. Hunter worked on the Mill House paper mill immediately and soon began his papermaking experiments. These next years witnessed the design and execution of his typeface and by early 1916 he had cut sixty-three punches. Shortly thereafter, Hunter printed The Etching of Figures for the Chicago Society of Etchers, quickly followed by The Etching of Contemporary Life, which Baker calls “the paragon of Hunter’s one-man books.” But it was not Mill House handmade paper used in these small books. The lack of water in the millpond was a constant problem and Hunter was determined to employ only water power. Thus in 1918 the Mill House was sold and in 1919 the Hunters and their two young sons, Dard II and Cornell, moved back to Chillicothe. Soon after their return, the Hunters purchased Mountain House, an 1850s structure that continues to this day as   the Hunter home. (Baker, on the invitation of Dard Hunter III, moved into Mountain House and spent two and a half years there working on this biography.) Hunter continuously wrote about papermaking and watermarks and compiled an extensive collection of papermaking ephemera and a vast library on paper and related subjects. He set up his press in Mountain House in 1922 and published three books over the next five years: Old Papermaking (1923); The Literature of Papermaking (1924); and Primitive Papermaking (1927), which required a trip to the South Sea islands. Baker provides detailed accounts of Hunter’s early writing, printing, and traveling, highlighting Hunter’s persistence and fortitude. In these years he faced a plethora of printing problems, the loss of sight in his left eye, and the death of his mother. Hunter’s dreams of an American hand papermaking mill remained unfulfilled until 1928 when he purchased land in Lime Rock, Connecticut, and shipped much of his papermaking equipment there. Hunter, always the paradigm of craftsmanship, spent a year overseeing the refurbishing of the old pig iron mill. By this point in Baker’s biography, the reader is prepared for Hunter’s business failure. English papermakers arrived at Lime Rock early in 1930 and pulled the first sheet of paper on May 30. The Great Depression, poor management of the mill, poor sales techniques, and a myriad of other factors brought about the receivership of Dard Hunter Associates, Inc., in May of 1931. The gradual and undignified demise of the mill continued until 1955, when the buildings were destroyed in a flood. Using a straightforward, non-iconoclastic style, Baker depicts Hunter as a vulnerable man. She also describes his “penchant for hyperbole” when it suited his needs, and anecdotes of his exaggerations are sprinkled throughout. His writing was colloquial; as he said, “[it is] my homely style, if style I have at all.” But because of his conversational approach, his books read as though he is spontaneously talking to the reader. As Dard Hunter is probably most recognized and acclaimed for his book, Papermaking, The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (Knopf, 1943; 2nd ed. 1947), especially its trade editions, everyone is anxious to read about his pilgrimages that led to the gathering of papermaking data and equipment. Information about his 1933 and 1935 travels must be limited, as Baker barely covers Hunter’s travels through Japan, Korea, and China and his later trips to Indo-China and Siam. With the information from these trips, Hunter wrote two books, published in 1936. Some of Hunter’s voyage to India in 1938 is revealed through a lengthy letter to Edith. Baker ventures away from the technical details of Hunter’s journeys with a poignant account of his meeting with Mahatma Gandhi. The idea for a paper museum can be traced back to Hunter’s Mill House days when he says he started his “collection of books and specimens relating to papermaking, watermarks, typography and printing.” He saw the establishment of a paper museum as his greatest accomplishment. Initially Hunter wanted to locate the museum in Chillicothe, but in 1938 he and Dard II inventoried and moved his massive collection to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the museum opened the following year. Baker includes a fascinating account of the museum and the life of The Paper Museum Press, in Cambridge through 1954, then a brief chronicle of the museum’s move to and activities in Appleton, Wisconsin, at the Institute of Paper Chemistry. In 1993, the Dard Hunter Paper Museum moved to Atlanta and was installed in a prominent position in the Robert C. Williams American Museum of Papermaking (RCWAMP). Today, the RCWAMP has made Hunter’s collection more accessible than ever before. Baker’s By His Own Labor nears its conclusion with a marvelous chapter on Hunter’s last books, those written between 1940 and 1950. After interesting   accounts of the aforementioned Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft and the later Papermaking in Indo-China (1947), Baker provides a splendid narrative on what she calls Dard Hunter’s “magnum opus,” Papermaking by Hand in America, which would be his last. Especially indelible is the imagined vision of Dard and Dard II working together to print this volume, using Dard II’s entire font and paper (four different types!) from Lime Rock. An excerpt from a 1950 letter from Peter Frank, the esteemed binder, testifies to the Hunters’ end product: “I am awed by the work of creation, truly to be a testimonial to the work of             Dard Hunter and his disciple son. It is the BOOK PRESERVATIVE of the history of American Papermaking, a story beautifully told and done into a book of beauty, interest and a charm of its own.” The seventeenth chapter of this biography covers the last fifteen years of Dard Hunter’s life, much of it spent in ill health and accompanied by the deaths of many of his acquaintances and his wife, Edith. It is, therefore, not surprising to read of Hunter’s loneliness and despair. In her final chapter, “In Retrospect,” Baker brings the reader into the present by discussing Dard Hunter’s legacy. This is a quick run-through of some important papermakers in the second half of the twentieth century with a brief and justifiable history of Twinrocker. Kathryn and Howard Clark’s talented young protégés who have continued the hand papermaking tradition are covered with further discussions of contemporary artists who use paper as an expressive medium. Three appendices follow the text and cover “Papermaking by Hand: Materials and Techniques”; “Molds and Watermarks Associated with Dard Hunter”; and a descriptive bibliography. These appendices make this biography more valuable from a didactic standpoint. The reader should take careful note of Baker’s advice to use the chronology tucked between the appendices and sources. The decision to handle Hunter’s life by following each activity through to the end as opposed to stepping along in a purely chronological   style is awkward at times. This reversion between some chapters temporarily throws off-balance the reader, who is forced to navigate between each chapter’s theme and its sometimes unchronological position in the text. Dard Hunter was deeply concerned that a common aesthetic through craft was being lost in his modern world. In an excerpt from a 1930 letter to Dard II, Hunter wrote about his frustrations over paper from his Lime Rock Mill: The whole project, from start to the present, has been a task that at times I would have given up had I not had the intense interest in the development of a handmade paper mill in America. There are always things to discourage one and you will find as the years come that each little difficulty must be surmounted with calmness and determination. It never does to let any hardship get the better of you. I want to see good paper turned out of the mill and after that is accomplished I fear my interest may be relinquished as I care more for surmounting difficulties as I do for the every day humdrum after a thing has once been placed upon a firm and commonplace footing. Hunter’s rambling thoughts often turn to seeing the bigger pictures and this introspective quote may partially explain how he was able to forge ahead through so much adversity. Many in our esoteric community of “paperphiles” have been aware of Cathy Baker’s decade-long effort, with all its sacrifices. After I finished the book, I went back and re-read her preface. Brava! Baker did what she intended to do and has produced a work that eloquently and succinctly clarifies Dard Hunter’s complex life, start to finish. She has carefully mixed humorous anecdotes from Hunter’s life with the necessary, yet tedious day-to-day frustrations of a perfectionist. Baker exposes the inevitable foibles of Hunter the man, yet preserves the image of Hunter the luminary.