“Review of *Democracy: A Man Search*, by Louis H. Sullivan”

AboutDimitri Tselos reviews the first publication of Louis Sullivan's unpublished 1908 manuscript *Democracy: A Man Search*, issued in 1950 by the Louisville Free Public Library as an early experiment in non-profit micro-card publishing, with an introduction by Hugh Morrison. Tselos situates the essay within Sullivan's long meditation on democracy as a moral and spiritual project of human emancipation from "Feudalist" ignorance and prejudice, written during the lean years of his practice in the early twentieth century. He characterizes the text's prose as oracular and poem-like, echoing Morrison's own description, and finds its emotional intensity compelling but its argument for the meaning of democracy insufficiently clarified — "a good deal of quartz" amid "some precious diamonds." The bulk of the review, however, is devoted to the micro-card format itself: Tselos explains the technology (36 to 58 pages photographically reduced onto a single 3-by-5-inch card, read via a magnifying micro-reader), reports his own difficulty using it comfortably, and questions whether the process is genuinely economical once the cost of the cards and reader access are weighed against ordinary printing. He nonetheless credits the Library for making Sullivan's last literary work available at all, sparing readers a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, where the original typescript is held.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1543-6322%28195124%2910%3A2%3C210%3ADAMS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L