Peters had also approached Clifton Hadfield, a Boston illustrator. We three formed the initial design studio of Leverett A. Peters and Associates, with Leverett Peters as business manager and salesman; Clifton Hadfield as illustrator; and I became the associate responsible for graphic design for the first year of the studio’s existence. The configuration made a lot of sense to me. My language reservoir was still very small, and I did not know the history of Boston studios or the major players and design buyers as Peters did.

Also, I grew up in a time when design studios did not want to sever relationships with illustration. Whatever assignments came to the door had to be skillfully managed and produced. Clifton Hadfield was very talented.

After the first very successful year, on the basis of Leverett A. Peters’s business plan, the staff was expanded way beyond any feasible financial reality: a secretary; a salesman on salary, not commission, who brought in few or no new clients, a traffic manager, a well-educated designer who was to police the flow of projects to assure accuracy, fidelity, delivery dates, and adhesion to budget concerns, and two inexperienced junior designers, who had to be trained. There were not enough projects to support the exorbitant increase in unnecessary overhead. Office space was also doubled.

Accounts were Badger Industries; Cornell University Press; Deck House, Inc.; Simmons College; Harvard University; Stanmar Leisure Homes; Oxford Paper Company (photographs by Herbert Matter), WGBH Boston, Henry Sawyer Printers, Daniel Printing and others.

The business management style of Leverett A. Peters became the bone of contention for my leaving. Clifton Hadfield had already severed his relationship with us on the same grounds. Mr. Peters had the bad habit of making arrangements with clients for pay in advance of completion of many projects. Sometimes the moneys were already spent before a project had completed its cycle. Therefore no moneys could be expected to come in. To have cash at hand, Peters would collect social security fees from the staff, but would not forward those to the IRS, leaving everyone vulnerable.

The demise of the studio had a lot to do with creating a deficit without ever having the ability to recover. A few years after I left, the studio dissolved. It is my guess, because Peters was considered a very ethical person, suppliers gave him room, as he always wanting to eliminate his debt, but the early deficit was moved forward every year without ever creating any solvency. There is one rule for life, one does not spend money one does not have!

A large portion of studio projects for our office was generated by the book publishing industry and its art directors, editors, and art buyers. At the beginning, our studio benefitted strongly from designing dust jackets, covers for paperbacks, front matter, and full guts for hard cover books for several Boston publishers. It kept our studio and the association with Leverett A. Peters busy and alive. Usually, the budgets were small; around $200, $250–$300 tops (half for the purchase of type-house services; half for the design of three comprehensive layouts, and in addition the finished camera copy for the selected solution). It behooved, studio managers to write contracts for series of cover assignments than to compete for single cover designs. The budgets allowed for little research. We were lucky, the Boston Public Library was across the street and one of our luxury assets. Later on, in the evolution and expansion of the office, the sales staff had to bring in larger projects, and the design for the book trade faded into the background, unless contracts could be secured for either whole series of covers or full book prototypes.

In the early history of the evolution of graphic design in Boston, there were very few design studios. The majority of commercial artists were freelancers working by themselves. Some of the assignments did not come from the publishers but from large printing production companies that serviced the publishing industries. Frequently, as part of large printing contracts, the printer was required to also supply the design services, especially for the front matter. By farming the creative design portion out to different freelancers or the emerging studios, this disjointed process created mediocre treatments of the typography for dust jackets, hard-covers, and major text matter. To have better oversight and control of the quality of the total project, it was better to work with publishers. During that time, publishers had to be introduced to modular typography and establishing typographic programs for series as well as structural and proportional consistencies.

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