Written by Dennis Hevesl Sunday, 06 November 2011 22:11

Sam Fink, noted Calligrapher & Illustrator of Historical Texts, Dies at 95

Jerusalem - Sam Fink, a calligrapher who in a series of books reverentially inscribed the precise texts of four historical documents — each a beacon of liberty — and illustrated them with sometimes whimsical, often pungent drawings, died on Tuesday in Jerusalem. He was 95.The cause was kidney failure, said Natasha Fried, managing editor of Welcome Books, Mr. Fink’s primary publisher. A grandson of Jewish immigrants to the United States from Russia and Poland, Mr. Fink dedicated the last four decades of his life (after retiring as an advertising art director) to hand-lettering, illustrating and commenting on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address and the Book of Exodus.

The series drew national attention in television news programs and from organizations like the Literary Guild, the History Book Club and the Book of the Month Club, which recommended his book about the Constitution.

Sam Fink is an artist of inimitable range who first learned to hand-letter from his father. After marrying his wife Adele, they raised two sons while he studied at the National Academy and the Art Students' League. For two decades Fink worked as an art director at Young & Rubicam. Later, he taught at Pratt Institute and made professional contributions to the Lands’ End catalog.

For his inscription of “The Constitution of the United States of America” (first published in pen and ink by Random House in 1987 and re-released in watercolor by Welcome Books in 2006), Mr. Fink depicted the document in a drawing of the vertebrae of the spine. “This is a backbone,” he wrote. “No man can stand erect without one. Neither can a country. The backbone of the United States is her Constitution.”

To illustrate Article I of the Bill of Rights, with its guarantee of free speech, he drew a screaming eagle perched on a soap box. For the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote: A woman wearing a broad-brimmed bonnet, her arms thrown wide as she bursts out of a ballot box.

In a review for the online version of The New Yorker on Sept. 16, 2010 — the 223rd anniversary of the signing of the Constitution — Ian Crouch encouraged teachers and parents to introduce the book to their children. “Fink is at once reverent and mischievous,” he wrote. “Throughout, we see his gentle but strongly felt patriotism, along with flashes of humor.”

It was his distant ancestors’ flight from tyranny that inspired Mr. Fink to spend years inscribing the entire text of the Book of Exodus — both in Hebrew and English — on 45 watercolors, most of them ethereal impressions of the sky.

Born in the Bronx on May 27, 1916, Sam Fink was one of two children of Morris and Tillie Fink. After studying at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, he joined the advertising firm Young & Rubicam, rising to art director.

Mr. Fink’s grandparents arrived in the United States in the mid-1880s, “penniless,” Mr. Fink said in a 2007 interview for a Random House publication for high school teachers. “I had one grandmother who was illiterate. I have a son now who has a Ph.D. in Jewish history. I have cousins who built businesses,” he said. “It could only happen here.”

Besides his son, David, with whom he was living in Jerusalem in recent years, Mr. Fink is survived by seven grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren. His wife of 45 years, the former Adelle Mandel, died in 1985.

On the introductory page of his 2007 inscription of “The Gettysburg Address,” Mr. Fink penned the text of Lincoln’s Nov. 19, 1863, call for a “new birth of freedom” on a Liberty Bell, with the clapper in the shape of a quill pen. The words “ring as true today as they did then,” Mr. Fink wrote.

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