It all started with his work as a library volunteer. From The Sun Sentinel:
For Arthur Jaffe, books weren’t just to be read. They were to be treasured as works of art. Jaffe, who donated a lot of money and his vast collection of hand-crafted books to Florida Atlantic University, died Sunday. He was 93.
Though he passed away this week, his legacy will live on through the Arthur and Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at FAU’s Wimberly Library, where he spent 13 years as curator before retiring in 2011. The collection has grown from Jaffe’s original donation of 2,800 handmade books to 12,000 today.
The Jaffe collection includes children’s pop-ups, wood cuts and lithographs. There are several versions of the Bible, classics like “Moby Dick” and “Hamlet,” and more unusual volumes, such as “Ghost Diary” by Maureen Cummins, a rare book made of glass. Even after retiring in 2011, he continued to visit the center on a regular basis. In 2012, he launched a project that seemed unusual for the book arts center: a documentary on the tattoos of FAU students.
“Here was a 91-year-old looking at all these tattooed kids and saying, ‘they’re all walking books,'” Cutrone said. “Sometimes you think of older people as being set in their ways, but that was not Arthur. He was willing to see the other side of things.”
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