Lapp Princess Press

A Small Press and Artists' Books from the Late 1970s

October 15, 2007–January 15, 2008

Chuck Close

Keith: Six Drawings

1979. New York, Lapp Princess Press

Writer and art critic Amy Baker founded Lapp Princess Press in 1977. As with other small presses of the period, Lapp Princess’s goal was to create artists’ books that could be purchased by the widest possible audience. Each of the volumes created under Baker’s directorship were issued in editions of 2,000—a very large number for this type of material. They each sold for $3, making them even more accessible.

While the artist was given total freedom concerning the ultimate product, Baker set the format for the Lapp Princess books. Each closed book was to be a uniform six inches square. While some artists maintained a traditional book format of single, uniformly trimmed leaves, others opted to expand the book beyond the six inches, as in Chuck Close’s 64-inch leparello or the even more elaborately folded 18-by-24 inch sheet by David Shapiro and Lucio Pozzi. 

Lapp Princess maintained an ambitious production schedule, issuing twelve books from 1977 to 1979, the year Amy Baker left to become executive publisher for Artforum. Lapp Princess continued for several more years, issuing books in the six-inch square format as well as in other dimensions. 

All of the works shown are from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library, which owns the complete list of Lapp Princess Press publications.