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Philip Grushkin (1921-1998) was a major book designer working in New York publishing from the 1940s through the 1980s. He was also art director and vice president at the art publisher Harry N. Abrams where he oversaw art direction of H.W. Janson’s /The History of Art /(1962), among many other works. He taught calligraphy at Cooper Union from 1946 to 1968 and taught book design at New York University from 1948 through the 1970s. He also served as Director of Book Design at the Radcliffe Course in Publishing Procedures, Harvard Summer School.

Biography
Philip Grushkin was born in Brooklyn, New York City, in 1921, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He became interested in book dust jacket design as a teen and began collecting them, those of George Salter (1897-1967), the preeminent American dust jacket designer 1935-1965, his primary interest. He attended Cooper Union college as an art student, studying calligraphy and lettering with Salter, who became his mentor. He graduated in 1941.

Over five decades, Mr. Grushkin designed hundreds of books for publishers including Alfred A. Knopf, Random House, Abbeville and Harry N. Abrams, where he worked as art director during the 1960's when the company came to prominence as a leading art book publisher. He then formed his own company, Philip Grushkin Incorporated, working in a third-floor studio and darkroom in his home, surrounded by airbrush equipment, gadgets, pens, rules and thousands of pieces of paper assembled in piles. His life was literally books, said his son, Paul, noting that some 10,000 volumes lined the walls of the Grushkins' home.

Career
After the war, he began to free-lance as a jacket designer, working for virtually all of the major New York publishers of the time: Alfred A. Knopf; Random House; Harper and Brothers; Harcourt, Brace and Company; Macmillan; and Doubleday; as well as smaller houses such as Farrar Strauss, John Day, and Crown. He became one of the go-to designers at Knopf because the great book and typeface designer W.A. Dwiggins declined to do dust jackets. Grushkin became part of a select group of dust jacket designers that included Salter, Charles Skaggs, and, on occasion, E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Bayer, Paul Rand, and Alvin Lustig.

In 1947 he joined the the fledgling Book Jacket Designers Guild established by Sol Immermann (1907–1983), who, with H. Lawrence Hoffman, produced the jackets for the first one hundred titles published by The Popular Library. The BJDG established a code for dust jacket design, rejecting the poster style in vogue for pulp novels in favor of a descriptive, non-blaring style. But in the mid-1990s, Mr. Grushkin discovered that no publisher would accept a finished book design except on a computer disk. In six months he taught himself how to design full books on a computer.