George A. Baer (April 14, 1903 – July 24, 1994) was a German/Swiss/American bookbinder. He specialized in fine leather bindings, including inlays and gold tooling.
Much of Baer's work involved the restoration of old and rare books for both private customers and numerous rare book libraries around the world. His well-established reputation in this field led to an invitation to help restore books in the Florence, Italy libraries that were water-damaged in the devastating 1966 Flood of the Arno River. Mostly working from his private studios, books bound by him were sold to patrons including Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, the President of France, and Pope Pius XII.
Early life and training
George Adolf Baer was born in Hoboken NJ of German parents, who had immigrated to the US in September, 1902, but returned to Germany shortly after George’s birth. George grew up in Wiesbaden, a German city along the Main River, near Frankfurt. He served a three-year apprenticeship at a book binding company in Wiesbaden from 1919 to 1922. As he recounted in a taped interview,” this was not a fine binding establishment”. It involved strictly binding books with cloth covers. After a year working in a paper making factory and teaching bookbinding at an art school, he decided to pursue fine bookbinding. He was accepted at the Berlin School of Applied Arts under the tutelage of Paul Kersten, one of the foremost bookbinders in Germany. On October 25, 1924, at the age of 21, he received his "Meister Brief für das Buchbinder Handwerk"
Teaching career
In addition to learning the art of leather binding and gold tooling, Kersten engaged Baer to assist in teaching at the Applied Arts school. In October 1925 Baer was offered his first independent position at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Kassel to teach bookbinding. In March 1927, Baer had an offer to set up a bookbinding shop and teach bookbinding at the Vallianios Professional School of Lixouri on the Ionian island of Cephalonia in Greece. This was a French school and all instruction was carried out in French, but he was paid in British pounds (180 pounds per year). He spent 3 ½ years there before returning to Germany in 1931.
Life in Switzerland
However, by 1931 the Nazi movement in Germany made it difficult for Baer, whose father was Jewish, to find employment. So, he decided to move to Zürich, Switzerland. Within a few years he set up his own shop and married Martha Lena (Maly) Guyer, a Swiss artist at that time specializing in fabric design, primarily curtains for upscale restaurants. During the next 15 years a number of George Baer’s book covers were designed or greatly influenced by Maly.
In 1941 the Baers with their sons bought a farmhouse in Bassersdorf, a small village just outside of Zürich, where they practiced their respective crafts, tended a large garden, and managed a small menagerie of sheep, chickens, and eventually even a cow. After the war several weekly magazines featured this bookbinder/artist/farming family that by all appearances seemed to have found “the happy life”. Among the problems not mentioned in these articles was the fact that Maly, whose Swiss roots go back to Jakob Gujer (also written as Guyer) in the early 1700s, lost her Swiss citizenship because she married a foreigner, and their three Swiss born children also were stateless. As a result, early in the war, the US-born George Baer contacted the US consulate in Zürich to establish his right to US citizenship. In 1949, being unable to resolve the citizenship issue with the Swiss authorities, George Baer decided to move to the US where the rest of the family joined him in 1951.
Career in the United States
Through Baer’s earlier work in restoring ancient Aramaic letters for Ludwig Borchardt, an Egyptologist in Cairo, he made contact with Prof. Keith Seele at the Chicago Oriental Institute who helped him find a position in the fine binding department of the Cuneo Press. Fine binding was a flourishing art at the time in Chicago with such binders as Leonard Mounteney, Alfred de Sauty, Harold Tribolet, Elisabeth Knerr, George Baer and later William Anthony all active. Among these George Baer was particularly noted for his “bold and imaginative covers, with sensitive use of color”. Baer worked at the Cuneo Press fine binding department from 1950 to 1971, as well as in his own workshop binding books for private clients and restoring books for libraries, especially the University of Minnesota Rare Book room.