Crumbling Pillars: The Spine Design of Gibbon's Decline and Fall (1946)

In 1929, publisher George Macy founded The Limited Editions Club (LEC) to produce finely illustrated limited editions of classics. Macy collaborated with artists such as Matisse and Picasso, and photographers like Edward Weston. For the 1946 edition of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the LEC commissioned Clarence P. Hornung to create a spine design that shows Roman pillars progressively crumbling across the seven volumes. The set also features illustrations by 18th-century printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi. George Macy later called the collection "the most herculean labor of our career."