1980 Helmuth Lehmann-Haupt

Born in Berlin in 1903 and deceased in Columbia in 1992, Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt was a German-American art historian and book scholar. He studied art history at the universities of Berlin and Vienna and received his doctorate in Frankfurt in 1927. After completing his studies, he spent two years as a volunteer at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. When the book scientist moved to America in 1929, inspired by the American print historian John Clyde, he first worked for the Encyclopedia Britannica and from 1930 as a curator in the Department of Rare Books at the Columbia University Library in New York. In 1939, he also became assistant professor of book art at the local School of Library Service. Lehmann-Haupt also taught in 1954/55 at the Pratt Institute in New York, from 1965 to 1967 at the Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and from 1969 to 1974 at the University of Missouri.
He was particularly interested in creating a basis for the expansion of the West German book trade by relocating publishers and book holdings to Frankfurt and Wiesbaden in the service of the US Army in 1945. In 1980, he was awarded the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz and the International Gutenberg Society for "working as a scholar, but also as a man of action".