Albert Boni

Albert Boni (October 21, 1892 – July 31, 1981) was a New York-born publisher, entrepreneur, and Broadway performer. Born into a Jewish family in New York City, he relocated with his family to Newark at an early age and received his secondary education at Barringer High School. He subsequently studied at Cornell University for two years and completed one additional year at Harvard University before leaving without finishing his degree.

Rather than returning for his senior year at Harvard, Boni persuaded his father to fund a bookshop venture. He and his brother Charles opened the Washington Square Bookshop, first at 95 Fifth Avenue and later at 135 MacDougal Street, which became a gathering place for leftist writers and intellectuals in Greenwich Village. The brothers sold the shop to Frank Shay in 1915. That same year, Boni appeared on Broadway in two productions, Another Interior and Licensed. In 1914, Boni had joined Lawrence Langner and others in founding the Washington Square Players, a theater organization connected to the Greenwich Village milieu in which he was active.

The Boni brothers also pursued publishing ventures during this period. Between 1913 and 1914, they produced the short-lived literary magazine The Glebe. They additionally created the Little Leather Library, a series of pocket-sized editions of literary classics bound in imitation leather, which proved commercially successful — Woolworth stores alone sold one million copies in a single year.

On February 16, 1917, Boni and Horace Liveright incorporated the publishing house Boni & Liveright, with financial backing from paper executive Herman Elsas, Liveright's father-in-law. The firm established the Modern Library, originally titled the Modern Library of the World's Best Classics, financed with $25,000 from Felix M. Warburg and the brothers' uncle Thomas Seltzer. The Modern Library was eventually acquired by Random House. Boni sold his interest in Boni & Liveright to Liveright in 1919, though the firm retained the Boni & Liveright name until 1928, when it was renamed Horace Liveright, Inc.

In 1917, Boni married Cornelia "Nell" van Leeuwen, a widow with a young son whom Boni adopted upon their marriage. Sometime between 1920 and 1925, the Boni brothers signed the Greenwich Village Bookshop Door at Frank Shay's Bookshop on Christopher Street, a door that functioned as an autograph book for notable authors, artists, and publishers of the twentieth century. Albert's signature appears on front panel 2. The door is now held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

In 1923, the brothers acquired the publishing company Lieber & Lewis and renamed it the Albert and Charles Boni Publishing Company. Three years later, in 1926, they purchased the publishing business of their uncle Thomas Seltzer. In 1929, they launched Boni Paper Books, which offered subscribers one soft-cover book per month for twelve months at a yearly price of five dollars. The venture did not survive the Great Depression.

Boni's later career centered on microprint technology. In 1934, a conversation with writer and editor Manuel Komroff, who was experimenting with photographic enlargement, prompted Boni to consider the inverse process — reducing rather than enlarging images to store large quantities of text at minimal material and storage cost. Over the following decade, he developed microprint, a micro-opaque process in which pages were photographed using 35mm microfilm and printed on cards via offset lithography, producing a six-by-nine-inch index card capable of storing one hundred pages of text. He secured two U.S. patents for the process. In 1939, Boni founded the Readex Microprint Corporation to produce and license the technology. He also published an article, A Guide to the Literature of Photography and Related Subjects, which appeared in a supplemental eighteenth issue of the Photo-Lab Index in 1943. When Boni retired in 1974, his son William assumed the presidency of Readex. Boni died in Florida on July 31, 1981, survived by his wife, his son, and his son's three daughters.