Arthur Jaffe’s passion is books. Photo by Tim Stepien
By Ron Hayes
One lazy summer day when he was a boy, Arthur Jaffe wandered over to the Carnegie Library in Butler, Pa., and asked the helpful librarian to recommend a book.
“She gave me a children’s, abridged edition of Robinson Crusoe, and I couldn’t put it down,” he remembers. “That was the book that got me started on reading as a passion.”
He was 7 that summer day, maybe 8.
On May 7, Jaffe turned 90, and the passion for books instilled by that nameless librarian is now the Jaffe Center For Book Arts, 4,800 square feet on the third floor of Florida Atlantic University’s Wimberly Library.
The initial donation of 2,800 books that Jaffe and his late wife, Mata, donated to the library in 1998 has grown to 9,000 titles that celebrate the book as a work of art in itself. A novel told solely in woodcuts, for example. A pop-up book about birds that spreads its wings when opened.
A first edition of Huckleberry Finn wouldn’t be a big deal here; an edition bound to resemble a log raft would be treasured.
At the Jaffe Center, it’s the medium of the book, not its message, that’s honored.
On May 6, FAU awarded Jaffe an honorary doctorate of humane letters, and on May 21, the library hosted “Time Flies When You’re Having Fun,” an open house to mark his retirement and celebrate his life.
“Arthur hasn’t taken a day off yet,” said John Cutrone, the center’s director, greeting a steady stream of Jaffe friends and admirers, “so we always refer to it as his ‘retirement’ with quotation marks.”
Indeed, Jaffe will keep the sunny office behind the exhibition room where he still arrives most mornings. The framed doctorate is on proud display, and so is the 7-year-old boy from Butler, Pa., still twinkling in Jaffe’s eyes when he talks about books.
“I tell people, if you walk out of here today and think about a book the way you always did, you haven’t failed, I have,” he says. “You think a book is a cover, a spine, a front and a back, but that’s not what you see here. We have all kinds of shapes. Books made of aluminum, or wood. Pop-up books are 500 years old! Illuminated books, new printing techniques, books without words you can read — totally read!”
After service in World War II — he was awarded a Bronze Star, and took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy — Jaffe became a partner in his family’s chain of department stores.
“I don’t really know when I began buying books, because I wasn’t thinking of building a collection,” he says. “I was buying books for me. I purchased books because I liked the way they looked, the way they felt in my hands.”
In 1984, the Jaffes retired permanently to Delray Beach. He volunteered at FAU, and when the couple moved to smaller quarters, Jaffe offered the collection to his six children. They relished a book here, a book there, but Jaffe wanted to keep the collection intact. The kids’ loss was FAU’s gain.
At 90, he’s made few concessions to age. He gave up tennis a decade ago and no longer drives at night, but Jaffe’s enthusiasm for new frontiers in the book arts is forever young.
Coffee table books?
“Some are great, truly artists’ books, and some cater to showoffs,” he says. “An expensive chandelier doesn’t just give you light. It says, I can afford that chandelier.”
But surely he has no patience with e-books, that purely functional box for downloading text. Isn’t the Kindle the antithesis of the book as objet d’art?
“It’s another form of book,” he says. “I have nothing against the Kindle, but it has some limitations. You can’t open it, and you can’t compare this page to this page, side by side.”
He doesn’t talk like a man who’s truly retired, without quotation marks. Already, new business cards have been printed. Instead of Arthur H. Jaffe, he’s now Dr. Arthur H. Jaffe, Professor Emeritus.
On the shelf in his office is one of his more recent purchases, an 1884 edition of Robinson Crusoe, illustrated by George Cruickshank.
“I’ve never actually owned a copy before,” he says.
So he’s reading it, the unabridged, adult edition now, while wrapping up a final project or two at FAU.
“Stories On The Skin: Tattoo Culture at FAU” debuted at his “retirement” reception. Completed with Dr. Karen Leader, it’s a photo display of students’ tattoos.
“Fifty years ago,” Jaffe says, “tattoos were considered kind of seedy. Only sailors and prostitutes had them. But did you know that now 45 million Americans have a tattoo? And more women than men.”
It’s simple, really.
“They have messages on their bodies,” he explains, with an eager smile. “I see them as walking books.” Ú
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