2022 APHA President’s Letter

December 19, 2022

Dear APHA member and friend,

You are cordially invited to our annual meeting on Saturday, January 28, 2023, 2 p.m. (EST) to conduct APHA’s business and celebrate excellence in printing history. As in recent years, our 2023 annual meeting will be virtual.

Our annual meeting program will include officers’ reports, the election of board trustees, awards to individuals and institutions for their distinguished contributions to printing history, and the announcement of the 2023 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship in Printing History. The Nominating Committee presents the following slate for your vote at the meeting:

Trustee (1st term of three years): Christine Moog (London, United Kingdom)

Trustees (2nd term of three years): Diane Dias De Fazio (Cleveland, Ohio) and Kseniya Thomas (Ogden, Utah)

All APHA members present at the annual meeting will be able to vote on this slate. To renew your membership please visit https://join.printinghistory.org/ and update your member data if you have not already done so. Your membership and additional donations ensure the continued vitality of APHA.

This year has been a busy one for APHA and its chapters. We were thrilled to offer our first in-person conference since the start of the pandemic, “Making Artistic Noise: Printing and Social Activism from the 1960s to the Present,” which took place in Los Angeles in October in collaboration with Rare Books LA, an antiquarian book, map and ephemera fair. Papers from “Making Artistic Noise” will be included in Printing History 33, scheduled to appear in summer 2023.

In December 2022, Danielle Aubert, Professor of Graphic Design at Wayne State University in Detroit, delivered this year’s Lieberman Lecture via Zoom. Professor Aubert’s talk, “The Power and Promise of a Union: Labor, Printing, and Graphic Design,” presented her research on the Detroit Printing Co-op and case studies from contemporary union organizing efforts.

We are excited to announce that our 2023 conference will take place at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. APHA’s Programs Committee looks forward to working with Harry Ransom Center curators and staff to put together a stimulating conference. In 2023 and beyond, we will endeavor to present all our conferences, Lieberman Lectures and annual meetings in hybrid or virtual format to allow all APHA members, wherever they are, to engage and participate fully.

As we approach the end of the year and our fiftieth anniversary in 2024, please consider contributing to APHA. The Board and Chapter leadership have worked hard to broaden our programs, publications, and membership across ages, cultures, and geographic locations. It is your support that makes all of this possible.

Thank you, and best wishes in the new year!

J. Fernando Peña, APHA President

President@PrintingHistory.org

About the Author

J. Fernando Pena

J. Fernando Peña, as of 2022, is the President of APHA. He has worked in the rare book world for many years and in various capacities—as a librarian, educator, and senior specialist in a major auction house. From 2001 to 2011, Fernando was curator and librarian at the Grolier Club in New York City. It was at that time that he became active in APHA, first in the local New York Chapter and then as APHA secretary from 2008 to 2012. As director of the Rare Books Program at the Palmer School of Library & Information Science of Long Island University from 2011 to 2019, Fernando advised students and regularly taught courses on rare books and special collections librarianship, descriptive bibliography, archival description, and the history of the book. From 2019 to 2021, he was Senior Specialist in the Books and Manuscripts Department at Christie’s in New York City, where he focused on early printing, color-plate books, and cartography. Among his major accomplishments at Christie’s was researching, cataloguing and marketing a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, which sold for nearly $10 million in October 2020 and set a world auction record for a printed work of literature. Since leaving Christie’s in 2021, Fernando has started a consulting business, Bibliomane Appraisals & Consulting LLC, which provides collection advisory and collection management services, and specializes in appraising and valuing printed books, manuscripts, and maps.

Besides APHA, Fernando has been active in the Rare Books & Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the American Library Association, for which he was elected Member-at-Large and then Section Chair; and in the Center for Book Arts of New York, where he served as board member and treasurer from 2006 to 2015. He is also a member of the Bibliographical Society of America and the Grolier Club.

More by J. Fernando Pena

2024 President’s Letter