Professional files of designer and printing historian Douglas C. McMurtrie active in Chicago from 1925 until his death in 1944.

The collection includes extensive correspondence concerning McMurtrie’s professional roles at Cuneo Press, Ludlow Typograph Co., the International Association of Printing House Craftsmen, the Historical Records Survey undertaken by the WPA, and the American Imprints Inventory, also a WPA project. There are extensive files concerning his many writings on printing history and design. A few files concern his original design work, including the type face Ultramodern, his work with disabled veterans, his authorship of articles on sexual deviance, his writings and activities around the Gutenberg centennial in 1940, and his role as publisher of a lesbian autobiographical novel, Mary Casal’s The Stone Wall, and other titles through his personal imprint, Eyncourt Press. There are also some files concerning personal and family matters, and a few photographs, mostly portraits of McMurtrie. The most extensive correspondence files concern Frederick V. Carpenter, Luther H. Evans and others at the WPA, Aloys Ruppel, Leslie E. Sprunger of Ludlow Typograph Co., and Norman Forgue of Black Cat Press. McMurtrie also did design work for such publishers as the Caxton Club, Pascal Covici, and Covici-Friede, Inc.

For the most part, the files are in sequences devised by McMurtrie and his various collaborators between 1925 and 1944. The principal exceptions concern biographical information (Series 7), written works (Series 4), design work (Series 5), and printed ephemera (Series 8), which were created during processing. Series 1 is a standard business file containing outgoing and incoming correspondence carefully alphabetized by a secretary or secretaries, apparently at the Ludlow Typograph Co. offices. It was partly rehoused at Michigan State in the 1960s and fully rehoused again at the Newberry in 1998. Series 2 apparently represents materials more haphazardly filed at McMurtrie's home and private offices by a variety of assistants over the years. The most important was Maj. A. H. Allen, who was also McMurtrie's ghost writer on some projects; some of Allen’s personal correspondence is also embedded here. Extensive files on McMurtrie’s work for the Ludlow Typograph Co. (Series 3) and the International Association of Printing House Craftsmen (Series 6) were extracted from Series 1 and 2, which were parallel (and largely duplicative) for these subjects.