Early Years
On his father's side, Hamady is descended from Lebanese (Druze) immigrants who founded a prominent grocery store chain in Flint, Michigan. His mother was an Iowa-born physician (a pediatrician and, later, a psychiatrist). His parents' marriage fell apart during Hamady's childhood, resulting in his being raised by his mother, with the support of his paternal grandfather (his beloved Jidu (grandfather)), Ralph Haatoum Hamady, whom Hamady has described as "a wonderful man who came to America as a teenager in 1907".
After high school, Hamady studied art at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan (BFA 1964), and at nearby Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA 1966). While still an undergraduate, concurrent with a visit to his relatives in Iowa City, Iowa, he was introduced to book artist Harry Duncan, who was a teacher at the time at the University of Iowa (Iowa City), and an important contributor to the revival of interest in letterpress printing. During that visit, Hamady saw for the first time a finely printed handmade book, in the tradition of the Kelmscott Press of William Morris, and the Private Press Movement. Soon after, in Detroit in 1964, while still an undergraduate, he founded his own press, which he named The Perishable Press Limited. And then, as a graduate student at Cranbrook, he launched the Shadwell Papermill, by which he contributed to the experimental use of handmade papers.
Read more about this topic: Walter Hamady
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.”
—Richard Eberhart (b. 1904)
“Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)