Preliminary Program   Note: This preliminary program and schedule is subject to change. This web version has speaker biographies linked to names and paper abstracts linked to talk titles. The conference registration brochure (PDF) is also available and may be downloaded here: APHA 2007 Conference Registration Brochure (PDF/400K). Return to the main conference page.

October 11, 2007

2:00–5:00 pm REGISTRATION at UCLA
Young Research Library (YRL) Conference Center

EXHIBITS (Optional)
Viewing of Exhibits in the UCLA libraries and museums from 2:00 to 5:00 (optional)

Special Collections Department:
Transformations: The Persistence of Aldus Manutius

Young Research Library Lobby:
Jamestown, Quebec, and Santa Fe in conjunction with the four hundredth anniversary of their founding

Biomedical Library, History and Special Collections:
More Baby Books Than You Can Shake a Rattle At

College Library:
Middle Eastern Americans and their Culture and Literature, Professor Jonathan Friedlander

Hammer Museum:
The Politics of Rehearsal by Francis Alys, Extraordinary Exhibitions: Broadsides from the
Collection of Ricky Jay, and
Hammer Projects: Jamie Isenstein

Fowler Museum:
Material Choices: Bast and Leaf Fiber Textiles and Women, Water, and Wells: Photographs of W. Africa by Gil Garcetti
 

5:30–6:30 pm RECEPTION
Faculty Center, California Room

Keynote Address (UCLA)
H. George Fletcher, [bio] Brooke Russell Astor Director for Special Collections, The New York Public Library

Reception

October 12, 2007
UCLA and the Getty Research Institute

9:15–10:45 Panels One and Two
11:15–12:15 Panels Three and Four
1:30–2:30 Panels Five and Six
4:00–5:00 Panel Seven at Getty Research Institute
5:00–6:30 Reception at Getty Research Institute
NB: Panels are scheduled to run concurrently.

PANEL ONE: ALDUS MANUTIUS

G. SCOTT CLEMONS [bio]
Saved by Typography: The Aldine Contribution to the Preservation of Greek Literature

MICHAEL CAHN [bio]
A Book with Seven Seals: Inscribing a Contrefaçon

SUE ABBE KAPLAN [bio]
Transformations: Books into Formulae

PANEL TWO: NINETEENTH CENTURY VIEWS

GARY F. KURUTZ [bio]
Rooted in Barbarous Soil: Bringing Print Culture to the Golden Shore, 1834–1858

JEFFREY D. GROVES with ALEX HAGEN, GLENNIS RAYERMANN [bio]
Innovations in Iron: The Mechanics of the Columbian Press

IRENE TICHENOR [bio]
The First Editor: De Vinne’s Appreciation of Aldus

PANEL THREE: HISTORICAL PERSONALITIES

MARCIA REED [bio]
Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the Architecture of the Book

GRAHAM MOSS [bio]
Constructed on the Lines of Truth and Beauty: William Pickering and the Aldine Metaphor, 1820–1854

PANEL FOUR: HISTORICAL TYPOGRAPHY

SUMNER STONE [bio]
Structures of the Serifed Roman Capital Letter in 15th century Italy

ALASTAIR JOHNSTON [bio]
An Englishman, a Scotsman, and a Frenchman: The Evolution of Typography in Britain during the Regency Era

PANEL FIVE: CONTEMPORARY TYPOGRAPHY

GERALD LANGE [bio]
Aldus is, after all, the Prevailing Model—the Beginning and the End: Fine Press Book Printing in the Twenty-First Century

HRANT PAPAZIAN [bio]
Shall We Dance? Authenticity & Functionality in Multi-Lingual Typography

PANEL SIX: A MORE MODERN VIEW

CHRIS CHAPMAN [bio]
Ezra Pound and Aldus Manutius: The Aesthetic Legacy of Typographical Innovation on Modernist Poetics

BRUCE WHITEMAN [bio]
Cui bono?: Printing the Greek and Latin Classics in a Semi-Literate Age

PANEL SEVEN: NEW DISCOVERIES

DANIEL DE SIMONE [bio]
Printing in Ferrara: Venetian Type Design and its Influence on Book Production in Provincial Italy in the Late Fifteenth Century

MARTIN ANTONETTI [bio]
New Light on the Early Career of Ludovico degli Arrighi

October 13, 2007
Third party institution tours and events TBA.
 

PAPER DESCRIPTIONS

 G. Scott Clemons
Saved by Typography: The Aldine Contribution to the Preservation of Greek Literature
The arrival in Venice of Greek scholars and manuscripts after the fall of Constantinople, coupled with the introduction of printing technology, formed a fortuitous combination of circumstances for the printing of the Greek classics in that maritime republic. Prior to the last decade of the fifteenth century, though, very few texts had been printed in the Greek language. Unlike the simpler Roman alphabet, the Greek language contains variant forms, accents, breathing marks, ligatures, contractions and elisions, posing a significant technological challenge to the development of a Greek font. Aldus relied on the linguistic expertise available to him as a result of the Greek diaspora from Constantinople, and was successful in creating multiple Greek fonts, which in turn allowed his press to print the editiones principes of much of the Greek canon.

The works of Aristotle, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus and others first found expression in print as a result of Aldus’ technological advancements in Greek typography. Capturing these texts in print contributed directly to the preservation of a literary culture which was in genuine danger of extinction.

Michael Cahn
A Book with Seven Seals: Inscribing a Contrefaçon
Contrefaçons, the pseudo-Aldines produced in Lyon, are no small indicator for the early success of Aldus. My copy is such an edition of Pliny from Lyon (1510), remarkable for the marks of ownership and transfer of ownership. It includes the owner’s name inscribed along the gauffered edges, complete with a quotation from Revelation 5 which compares the work of Pliny to the biblical Book With Seven Seals. An additional elaborate inscription will give us a revealing insight of what book ownership meant in the early 16th century. It also highlights the way in which the work of Aldus is only the beginning in a complex sequence of inscriptions which each add layers of meaning.

Sue Abbe Kaplan
Transformations: Books into Formulae
How does one describe 1000 books printed before 1600 in a way that reveals structure, text and transmission in a short and discrete manner? In 1990, the Department of Special Collections decided to compile a catalogue of the Ahmanson-Murphy Aldine Collection, one of the premier collections of Aldines in the world. The editor’s first job was to decide what information was to be compiled for inclusion and how that information was to be presented—both the order of information and the typographical and organizational needs of the catalogue as whole. The compilation of all that information for 1000+ books was no easy task and a method of gathering information needed to be devised as well. This talk will consider the decisions and issues that went into putting together the catalogue of the Collection including the methological tools at our disposal and the procedures and resources we needed to devise for ourselves.

Gary F. Kurutz
Rooted in Barbarous Soil: Bringing Print Culture to the Golden Shore, 1834-1858
The introduction of printing into the remote province of Alta California represented a triumph of innovation and adaptation beginning with the first specimens created on Zamorano’s “stiff and rheumatic” Ramage Press. Following the discovery of gold in 1848, printers rushed into California and flexibility was the rule of the day. Newspapers and job work in multiple languages rolled off the presses in dozens of cities and mining camps. By 1849, the first book of an original nature was published, and by 1850, the first city directory. In short order, California was no longer on the “extremity of civilization” but a flourishing center for the printed word.

Jeffrey D. Groves with Alex Hagen, Glennis Rayermann
Innovations in Iron: The Mechanics of the Columbian Press
George Clymer, the inventor of the Columbian printing press, designed his transformative machine around 1813.Widely copied and commercially successful, the Columbian represents an elegant solution to several problems that hand press inventors were trying to overcome in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Our paper will touch briefly on those problems, the solutions arrived at with other press designs (especially the Stanhope and the Albion), and the mechanics of the Columbian itself. Our observations on the physical operation of the press will be based on our current work with a Columbian (c. 1850) in the Libraries of the Claremont Colleges.

Irene Tichenor
The First Editor: De Vinne’s Appreciation of Aldus
Theodore Low De Vinne (1828-1914), the premier American printer of his generation, was interested in every aspect of the craft and left a considerable body of published writings for posterity to peruse. A lifelong student of printing history, he wrote pieces about Caxton, Plantin, Moxon, and Aldus that highlighted admirable aspects of their work without unduly romanticizing them. De Vinne’s 7,500-word essay on Aldus, “The First Editor,” appeared in Scribner’s Monthly in October 1881 and was reprinted three times in the twentieth century. We will examine the merits of this piece addressed to the sophisticated general reader.

Marcia Reed
Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the Architecture of the Book
Building on the foundation laid by early books on art, the eighteenth century saw vast advances in antiquarian and art historical publications. The architect, printmaker, and publisher Piranesi made strong contributions to the polemics of the period, presenting his ideas in conceptually integrated illustrated books. His innovations range from elaborate double title pages to elegant page spreads with specially designed initial letters and ornaments. Although Piranesi’s prints and his antiquarian polemics on the city of Rome have received extensive scholarly examination, this paper describes his innovative and complex designs for books that, surprisingly, have received scant attention.

Graham Moss
Constructed on the Lines of Truth and Beauty: William Pickering and the Aldine metaphor, 1820–1854
When Panizzi had his edition of Bojardo published by William Pickering in 1830, one of his correspondents wrote: “If Pickering be not squeezed to death in his own press, his nose at least ought to be rubbed in his own title pages while the ink is still wet...I do not blame him for his imitation, but for his bad imitation, of Aldus.” This paper looks at how Pickering's use of the Aldine anchor coupled with “Aldi discip. Anglus” can be justified, and on what grounds, using the best evidence available, the books he published, to investigate his statement.

Sumner Stone
Structures of the serifed roman capital letter in 15th century Italy
A comparison of the different classes of written and printed serifed roman capital letters (not including inscriptions) made in 15th century Italy focused on their external and underlying structures. This comparison will be based on the manuscript letterforms of Poggio Bracciolini, Felice Feliciano, and Bartolomeo Sanvito; the printed letterforms of Nicolas Jenson and Aldus Manutius/Francesco Griffo; the copies of inscription smade by Bracciolini, Feliciano, and Sanvito; the printed inscriptions of the Hypnerotomachia  Poliphili; and Feliciano's geometrically constructed forms.

Alastair Johnston
An Englishman, a Scotsman, and a Frenchman: The Evolution of Typography in Britain during the Regency era
British typography evolved along with technological advances in the Georgian era: the introduction of wove paper, the iron printing press and improved printing types palpably changed the look of print. The reciprocity between printers and founders bounced between Baskerville (who first used wove paper and improved presses) and his admirers in Paris. F.A. Didot's work in turn inspired John Bell, a London bookseller. After the widespread introduction of the Stanhope Press in 1800, sharper types further impacted the look of our reading matter.

Gerald Lange
Aldus is, after all, the prevailing model—the beginning and the end: Fine Press Book Printing in the Twenty-First Century
The considerations of early-to-mid-twentieth century typographic apostles, such as Tschichold, Are still the basis for ‘correct’ composition, as we know it today—as reiterated by any and every typography primer. The light cast by Emery Walker’s slide lantern lecture shines brightly. The early twentieth century typographic revival—initiated by Walker and William Morris— by the early 1920s had settled on its interpretation of the Aldine work as its model. Since around the turn of the century, typographic practice has entered a neo-classical phase and contemporary studio-letterpress book printers, reliant on historic typeface revivals proffered by digital type foundries, have followed suit. The photopolymer plate process, which allows for digital-to-analog transformation, has facilitated this.

Hrant Papazian
Shall we dance? Authenticity & Functionality in Multi-Lingual Typography
Different types of dance require different relationships between the participants—and the same applies to multi-lingual typography. Unfortunately virtually all non-Latin typeface design is a formulaic execution where a Latin “master” is used to derive subservient non-Latin designs. This “Latinization” typically includes the imposition of culturally inauthentic elements and the forced congruence of vertical proportions. Latinization tends to ignore a script’s texture and usage of the Cartesian space, weakening its natural formation of word shapes. In contrast, The Micro Foundry has implemented an innovative system of fonts for the convenient, high-quality setting of Armenian and Latin texts of varying structures. By providing separate but stylistically compatible designs for each script, and giving each a subordinate component in the other script, it becomes possible to strike the desired balance between authenticity and Functionality.

Chris Chapman
Ezra Pound and Aldus Manutius:
The Aesthetic Legacy of Typographical Innovation on Modernist Poetics
My paper explores the presence of Aldus Manutius and the coterie of cultural producers his support enabled in High Modernist poetry. I look at Ezra Pound's transcription of a letter by Hieronymous Soncinus describing the significance of Aldus's punchcutter and poet “Messire Francesco da Balogna” (Pietro Bembo) to the Ferrarese court of Lucrezia Borgia. Exploring Pound’s focus on Aldus, Bembo, and Soncinus allows me to confront criticism of his engagement with the Italian Renaissance that has tended to concentrate on his interest in the condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta.

Bruce Whiteman
Cui bono?: Printing the Greek and Latin Classics in a Semi-Literate Age
Aldus Manutius became famous for publishing much of the surviving corpus of classical literature. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries there was a widespread market for these texts, and that market continued to be robust well into the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century. Today, very few students in Europe and North America study Latin and even fewer study Greek. Yet letterpress printers continue to print the texts. Is the printer's interest in the ancient classics merely quixotic, even conservative? Who needs these books, and who reads these books in an age when reading itself seems to be declining precipitously?

Daniel De Simone
Printing in Ferrara: Venetian Type Design and its Influence on Book Production in Provincial Italy in the Late Fifteenth Century
The subject of this presentation is the relationship between Ferrarese and Venetian printers with a focus on the various printing types borrowed or copied by Ferrara’s most notable printers of the incunable period. Between 1471 and 1501 there were 121 editions printed in Ferrara and fewer than a dozen printers were know to have worked in this small publishing center. The substance of this talk is based on an examination of Ferrarese imprints found in American libraries.

Martin Antonetti
New Light on the Early Career of Ludovico degli Arrighi
Ludovico degli Arrighi, or Vicentino (1480?-1527?), printer, scriptor in the Papal Chancery, and calligrapher of luxury manuscripts, was active in Rome in the early decades of the 16th century. Fewer than fifteen manuscripts have been attributed to him, of which only two are signed. An examination of a hitherto unknown illuminated manuscript of the works of Petrarch, signed by Arrighi and bearing the date 1508, now adds substantially to our knowledge of Arrighi's early days in Rome and alters some of our basic assumptions about his professional life. This talk will describe (and illustrate) the manuscript, identify the patron for which it was made, elucidate the circumstances of its production, and explain how the information gleaned from this discovery changes the basic contours of Arrighi’s biography.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

G. Scott Clemons

G. Scott Clemons first developed an interest in the transition of classical texts from the manuscript to the printed era while studying Greek and Latin as an undergraduate at Princeton University. The role of Aldus Manutius in this transition–—from both a technological and humanist — attracted his attention, and he rapidly developed a deep and incurable case of bibliomania. Scott bought his first Aldine text while still a student, and won Princeton’s Elmer Adler prize for undergraduate book collecting twice on the basis of his nascent Collection of the Aldine Press. His Collection has grown substantially since his college years, and now includes the imprints of all three generations of Aldine printers, incunables, Greek, Latin and vernacular texts, contrefactions and the imprints of branches of the Manutius family in Rome, Bologna and Paris. Scott is a Managing Director at the Wall Street firm of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. by day, where he oversees the firm’s wealth management business in New York and Palm Beach.

Michael Cahn

Michael Cahn (Dr habil) is a historian of rhetoric and of print. He has studied and taught at the University of Konstanz in Germany. During the last twelve years he has built up a second hand internet bookshop in Cambridge (UK) and displays his wares at www.plurabelle.org. He is currently teaching a course on the history of printed matter for the history department at UCLA.

H. George Fletcher

H. George Fletcher is the Brooke Russell Astor Director for Special Collections at The New York Public Library. He was previously the Astor Curator of Printed Books and Bindings at The Pierpont Morgan Library, and before that was Director and Editor in Chief of Fordham University Press. A lifelong book collector, with a primary interest in Aldus, his publications include New Aldine Studies and In Praise of Aldus Manutius, as well as a number of articles on aspects of the Aldine Press. The most recent of these is forthcoming in the Miscellanea Marciana.

Sue Abbe Kaplan

Sue Abbe Kaplan was the assistant editor on the publication of The Aldine Press: Catalogue of the Ahmanson-Murphy Collection of Books by or Relating to the Press in the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles, 2001, University of California Press. She is presently proprietor of Shulamis Press, a fine press focused on presenting works of Jewish interest.

Gary F. Kurutz

Gary F. Kurutz is curator of Special Collections, California State Library. He is the author of The California Gold Rush: A Descriptive Bibliography among other titles and served for nearly twenty years as the chair of the Book Club of California’s Publications Committee. He also teaches a class at the California Rare Book School, UCLA.

Jeffrey D. Groves, Alex Hagen, Glennis Rayermann

Jeffrey D. Groves is Professor of Literature at Harvey Mudd College (HMC). Glennis Rayermann (HMC 2009), a chemistry major, and Alex Hagen (HMC 2010), a physics major, have been working with Groves on a Columbian press since January 2007.

Irene Tichenor

Irene Tichenor holds a Ph.D. in American History and an M.S. in Library Science from Columbia University. She has written and lectured on the history of printing, focusing especially on nineteenth-century New York City. Her biography of Theodore Low De Vinne, No Art Without Craft, was published by David Godine in June 2005.

Marcia Reed

Presently Head of Collection Development at the Research Library, Marcia Reed has been at the Getty Research Institute since it was founded in 1983. Initially, she developed the general library Collections; as the first Curator of Rare Books, she built the Collections of rare books and prints. Past Getty exhibitions include “The Edible Monument,” “Naples and Vesuvius on the Grand Tour,” and “Picturing the Natural World.” Current research and publications focus on the history of illustrated books, prints, and the literature of art history, with special interest in the eighteenth century. In November 2007, “China on Paper: European and Chinese Works from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries” will be shown in the GRI Gallery, and a catalogue for the exhibition will be published. In December 2007 “The Magnificent Piranesi,” an exhibition on Piranesi’s prints and illustrated books, will open at the Getty Villa Museum.

Graham Moss

After reading History at Manchester Victoria University, Graham Moss taught the subject for ten years before an interest in hand binding and letterpress printing led to the establishment of Incline Press in 1993. Since then over sixty handmade books have been commissioned for publication, including New Borders, Pauline Paucker's biography of the calligrapher and type designer Elizabeth Friedlander, the St Bride Notebook, and the first Justin Howes Memorial Lecture, Hand Made Type, by James Mosley. He is presently at work on a new book about Incline Press ephemera, Hung Out to Dry, co-authored with Kathy Whalen.

Sumner Stone

Sumner Stone is the designer of Stone Sans and numerous other typefaces. He continues to produce innovative and traditional types at Stone Type Foundry Inc. located on Alphabet Farm in Rumsey, California. He designs and  the typefaces, the website www.stonetypefoundry.com, and the specimens. From 1984 to 1989 Sumner Stone was Director of Typography for Adobe Systems where he conceived and implemented Adobe’s typographic program including the Adobe Originals. He has lectured and written widely on typography and type design. His book credits include On Stone: The Art and Use of Typography on the Personal Computer, and Font: Sumner Stone, Calligraphy and Type Design in a Digital Age.

Alastair Johnston

Alastair Johnston is a partner in Poltroon Press, Berkeley. He is the author of Alphabets to Order: the Literature of 19th-Century Typefounders' Specimens and Rambling in the Vernacular (A study of folk lettering worldwide).He is currently writing a biography of Richard Austin, the English punch-cutter, and his son, Richard T. Austin, a wood engraver.

Gerald Lange

Gerald Lange is the proprietor of The Bieler Press, a fine press he founded in 1975. He is the author of Printing digital type on the hand-operated flatbed cylinder press, the standard text on letterpress printing of digital type via the photopolymer plate process. Lange was typographic designer of The Aldine Press: Catalogue of the Ahmanson-Murphy Collection of Books by or Relating to the Press in the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2001.

Hrant Papazian

Hrant Papazian is an Armenian native of Lebanon, currently living in Los Angeles. His perspective on written communication was formed at the crossroads of three competing visual cultures. A multimedia designer by trade, his true love remains the black-and-white, but colorful world of non-Latin typeface design, with commissions from Agfa, Unitype, IKEA, the Narod Cultural Institute, Disney, UCLA, the Israel Postal Authority, Liverpool University and TeX Users Group.

Chris Chapman

Chris Chapman holds a Masters Degree in Literature with a specialization in Print Culture attained at Simon Fraser University and is currently in the first year of his doctorate in Literature at The University of Notre Dame. He has given two papers at recent Modernist Studies Association conferences (2003, 2005) dealing with editorial and textual matters in Pound's work. Chapman edited Volume 26 of The New Age, an important early twentieth-century cultural and political journal, for The Modernist Journals Project, an online archive edited by Robert Scholes.

Bruce Whiteman

Bruce Whiteman is the Head Librarian of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. He is the author of many books of poetry, including Visible Stars: New and Selected Poems (1995) and The Invisible World Is in Decline, Books I-VI (2006).He has published extensively as a book reviewer in Canadian and American journals and newspapers, and his scholarly books include Lasting Impressions: A Short History of English Publishing in Quebec (1994) and J.E.H. Macdonald (1995). Most recently he co-edited The World from Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles (2002), a major exhibition catalogue.

Daniel De Simone

Daniel De Simone is the Curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress. His interest in the history of printing in Ferrara was initiated by an earlier study which examined The stylistic development of woodcut images used by Ferrarese printers during the incunable period. This essay appeared in Book Talk: Essays on Books, Booksellers, Collecting, And Special Collections published by Oak Knoll Press, 2006.

Martin Antonetti

Martin Antonetti is the curator of rare books in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, where he also teaches courses in the history of the book and in contemporary artist’s books for the Smith College Art Department. Antonetti has written and lectured on many aspects of these fields including fine printing, the evolution of letterforms, bookbinding, and book collecting. Before coming to Smith College, he was librarian of the Grolier Club in New York City, the country’s premiere organization for bibliophiles. Antonetti is also on the faculty of the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School and is currently vice-president for publications of the American Printing History Association. He took his library degree from Columbia University where he specialized in bibliography and special collections librarianship.

Apart from its conference, APHA supports research and scholarship through its journal Printing History, publications, an oral history project, and a fellowship program. The association, founded in 1974, encourages the preservation of printing artifacts and source materials for printing history.

More information about APHA Conferences is here.