2024 Conference

Please join APHA in celebrating its 50th anniversary with this special hybrid conference, featuring curated in-person and live-streamed events in New York City (the Grolier Club and the Center for Book Arts) and Berkeley, California (The CODEX Foundation), with virtual-only papers and panels scheduled throughout the weekend. The conference theme explores the ever-evolving story of print across time, with keynotes, papers, workshops, and tours covering a wide range of topics, from typography and artificial intelligence to women in print, historical printing and printmaking practices, letterpress printing education, and the impact of digital media.

Questions? Please contact the APHA Conference Planning Committee at conference@printinghistory.org.

Registration

Registration is now open and available on APHA’s secure payment page. Conference registration fees are as follows: $65 for current APHA members and $85 for non-members; $35 for current student members and $45 for student non-members. All registrants will have virtual access to live-streamed keynote talks and paper and panel presentations. Members may register up to two virtual guests at the member rate. Non-members may register an unlimited number of virtual guests at the non-member rate. Cancellations may be made through September 30.

To attend in-person events in New York City or Berkeley, separate Eventbrite registrations will be required. Please register for the conference first, then proceed to Eventbrite to reserve your in-person spots. In-person event registration on Eventbrite will be limited depending on the event and the venue.

Conference registrants who are not current members are encouraged to join APHA ($60/year for individuals and $30/year for students) to take advantage of lower conference registration rates for members and to receive other membership benefits, like APHA’s semi-annual journal Printing History, and access to local chapter events throughout the country.

Questions? Please contact the APHA Conference Planning Committee at conference@printinghistory.org.

Conference Venues

In-person events in New York City are scheduled to take place at the Grolier Club, America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts, and at the Center for Book Arts. Founded in 1974, the same year as APHA, the Center for Book Arts pioneered the exploration of the book as a contemporary art form while honoring traditional bookmaking techniques.

In Berkeley, APHA’s conference host is The CODEX Foundation. Founded in 2005, The CODEX Foundation is a nonprofit organization with a new location and growing programming that is now open to the public in Berkeley, California. Its mission is to preserve and promote the contemporary handmade book as a work of art, and to bring to public recognition to the artists, the fine craft, and the rich history of the civilization of the book.

Travel and Accommodations

New York City and Berkeley, the host cities for the in-person conference events, are conveniently served by major airports. While we do not have designated conference hotels, attendees can easily book accommodations using popular travel apps.

Detailed directions to in-person venues will be provided in the Eventbrite registration links.

Schedule

Schedule Page

Keynote Speakers

LISA GITELMAN

Typographic Hallucination, Or, A Conversation Imagined Between Artificial Intelligence and the Printing Trades

IN-PERSON AND LIVE-STREAMED EVENT: Grolier Club, Thursday, Oct. 17, 6 pm EDT

The architects of today’s image-generating artificial intelligence—such as OpenAI’s DALLE-3—admit that these systems struggle with text. They hallucinate mangled typographic forms even as they generate plausible contexts for typography. What can mistakes like these tell us about AI, and is there anything they can tell us about typography? Is there something that DALLE-3 “knows” about typography that we don’t? This talk activates questions like these in part by turning to the history of the printing trades in the 19th century and to specimen books published by type founders. Using the language of today’s computational neural networks, we might say that specimen books stitch together sequences of tokens based upon all of the sequences previously observed amid oceans of training data: anything their printers had read or set.

Lisa Gitelman is a media historian whose research concerns American book history, techniques of inscription, and emerging media. Her publications include Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014) and Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2006). She teaches English and media studies at New York University. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University.

MACY CHADWICK & FELICIA RICE

Vibrant Women in Print and Their Influences: In Conversation with Macy Chadwick and Felicia Rice

IN-PERSON AND LIVE-STREAMED EVENT: The CODEX Foundation, Friday, Oct. 18, 6 pm PDT/9 pm EDT

Macy Chadwick is a book artist and letterpress printer living in Petaluma, California. She received an MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She has taught at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State University, and San Francisco Center for the Book. Macy is the founder and director of In Cahoots Residency. The residency provides housing and studio space to both emerging and professional artists with a focus on artists books, letterpress, printmaking, writing, and collaboration. Macy continues to create books and limited edition prints in her letterpress studio and her work is in prominent collections in the U.S. and abroad.

Felicia Rice is an artist, letterpress printer, publisher, and educator. In 1977 she set Moving Parts Press in motion. With one foot firmly planted in the 19th century and the other in the 21st, she utilizes letterpress and digital technologies to produce artists’ books, prints, and broadsides in collaboration with visual and performing artists, writers, and philosophers. Work from the Moving Parts Press has been included in exhibitions from Mexico City to New York and Japan. Felicia’s books are held in library and museum collections worldwide and she has been the recipient of many awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to the French Ministry of Culture.

Tours, Workshops and Other Events

paul shaw

The History of Type in Twelve Type Specimens

IN-PERSON EVENT: Grolier Club, Thursday, Oct. 17, 4 pm EDT

The earliest surviving type specimen is a broadside printed by Erhard Ratdolt in 1486. Since then type specimens have evolved both in terms of form and content. Paul Shaw will lead a short survey of these changes using specimens in the renowned library of the Grolier Club. He will discuss the proliferation of typefaces, the broadening of items offered for sale by type founders, changes in the texts used to display typefaces, and the design of specimens. Among the specimens will be ones from Giambattista Bodoni, the Bruce foundry, the Morgan Press, the Thomas P. Henry Company, and Hoefler Type Foundry.

Paul Shaw is a typographic historian, lettering artist and graphic design educator. He is the author of several publications, including Helvetica and the New York City Subway System (2009) and Revival Type (2017), and the co-author of Blackletter: Type and National Identity (1998).

Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Innovative Printing in The Met’s Thomas J. Watson Library

IN-PERSON EVENT: Watson Library, Met Museum, Friday, Oct. 18, 3:30 pm EDT

Please join Jared Ash, Florence and Herbert Irving Museum Librarian for Collection Development at the Thomas J. Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for this tour and presentation featuring a wide range of works from the library’s rich holdings, from lavish chromolithograph plate portfolios to contemporary artists’ books.

“Square Route”, Lesley Foxcroft, 1989

Robbin Ami Silverberg

Vico’s Spiral: Half Century of Artists’ Books

IN-PERSON EVENT: Center for Book Arts, Saturday, Oct. 19, 4 pm EDT

Join Robbin Ami Silverberg, exhibition co-curator, for this guided exhibition tour and curators’ talk of “Vico’s Spiral: Half Century of Artists’ Books” hosted by the Center for Book Arts. As the Center marks its 50th anniversary, it is celebrating with this groundbreaking exhibition exploring its own exhibition history. The exhibition’s central theme is the innovative range and diversity of artists’ book concepts and practices. Exhibition curators examine these through the lens of Vico’s spiral and his nonlinear vision of history, which has proven invaluable in understanding the recurring ideas and methodologies that have shaped exhibitions at the Center during the past fifty years.

Robbin Ami Silverberg, artist and educator, is the founder of Dobbin Mill, a hand-papermaking studio, and Dobbin Books. Robbin’s work is showcased in over 130 public collections. Known for her innovative use of paper, Robbin creates both artist books and site-specific installations.

Panelists and Paper Presenters

XENA BECKER

Honing Her Craft: Women in the Arts and Crafts Printing Movement

In this presentation, I will discuss three Arts and Crafts printing operations in New York State that had women working in prominent positions, from illuminator to editor to designer. Drawing on issues of Craftsman Magazine, and works produced by the Roycrofters and the Elston Press held in the Colgate University’s Special Collections and University Archives, this presentation highlights individuals or groups of women whose contributions have been overlooked in the legacy of Arts and Crafts printing. In examining these women, I invite discussion on the roles women take in printing throughout history and into the future.

Xena Becker is currently Special Collections Librarian and Assistant Professor in the Libraries at Colgate University, where she is responsible for collection management and instruction with the rare book and literary manuscript collections. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from New York University and an MLIS from the University of Illinois. At work, she spends as much time as possible touching old books and talking to people about them. Xena’s research interests include abolitionist perspectives on libraries and archives, queer bibliography, and the history of manila paper.

JOSEF BEERY

The Two-Thirds Press and the BookBeetle

J. Ben Lieberman, the inspiring co-founder of APHA in 1974, dreamed of putting a replica wooden hand press in every American classroom. His “Two-Thirds Press”, named for its slightly reduced size, would give school children the opportunity to experience the meaning of “freedom of the press” first hand. Times have changed, a bit. Now the appearance of the BookBeetle desktop hand press has revived the idea of a classroom press, but with a new mission. Josef Beery, creator of the BookBeetle Press, examines Lieberman’s original inspiration and presents the opportunities offered by this new take on a wooden screw press. Using this tool, students are offered a hands-on experience of the technology which would permanently change the history of Europe.

Josef Beery is a book designer, printmaker, and educator. In 1995 he cofounded the Virginia Arts of the Book Center as a public-access printmaking studio. Josef’s own work has focused on books and letterpress broadsides for writers and poets as well as woodcuts of the flowering plants of Appalachia. In 2016 he developed a wooden desktop hand press, the BookBeetle Press, for use in schools and institutions. This teaching press recreates exactly the process used to print on 18th-century wooden hand press. He is an active member of APHA, where he has served as trustee, chair of the Awards Committee, and Vice President for Publications since 2022, managing the publication of the peer-reviewed academic journal Printing History.

RYAN CORDELL & ISABELLA VIEGA

The Past Is Ever Present: The Resurgence of Letterpress Printing in Higher-Education Institutions

Over the past decade, a growing community of scholars in book history, media studies, libraries, and digital humanities have developed hybrid spaces for experiential teaching, learning, and research using historical letterpress technology. These letterpress studios, textual “makerspaces”, and “book labs” remain understudied. This paper will theorize the resurgence of letterpress printing in higher-education institutions and reflect on how these initiatives preserve print history by drawing on the findings from the “Surveying the Humanities MakerLab Movement” project, as well as the authors’ experiences establishing Skeuomorph Press & BookLab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Huskiana Press at Northeastern University.

Ryan Cordell is Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cordell primarily studies circulation and reprinting in 19th-century American newspapers, but his interests extend to the influence of computation on contemporary reading, writing, and research. Cordell collaborates on the Viral Texts project, which uses robust data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across archives of 19th-century periodicals. Cordell serves as a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School and directs UIUC’s Skeuomorph Press & BookLab.

Isabella Viega is a PhD student at Goldsmiths University of London, writing their dissertation on the reception of Ancient Greek Sibyls in 19th-century literature. They previously undertook their doctoral studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where they studied book history and served as Assistant Director of Skeuomorph Press & BookLab from 2022 until 2024. They received their MSt in English Literature (1830-1914) from the University of Oxford and their BA in English from Northeastern University.

HELENA DE LEMOS & JOCELYN PEDERSEN

The History of Printing Inspires a New Generation at an Undergraduate Liberal Arts College

In 2010, the special collections & archives department at Occidental College, a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles with a rich fine press tradition which is reflected in its collections, joined forces with a letterpress and book arts professor to bring back a book arts program that was shut down in the 1990s. Once the Vandercooks started rolling again, a new generation got their hands on ink, metal type and fine papers, and classes have been full ever since. In Special Collections, students engage all senses in works spanning over six centuries of great printing and book design, and learn about the development of typography. This talk will show how librarians and printers together can create an optimum environment for the preservation and growth of the printing tradition.

Helena de Lemos received her Master in Library and Information Studies (MLIS) from UCLA, and has been at Occidental College since 2006. As Special Collections Instruction and Research Librarian, she brings classes from across the curriculum to engage with the collections. She collaborates with Jocelyn Pedersen in teaching the history of printing and the development of typography.

Jocelyn Pedersen is a letterpress printer and book artist, and Coordinator of the Book Arts program at Occidental College, where she has been teaching since 2010. She has an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book.

JOOST DEPUYDT

Wonderful Woodblocks and Curious Copper Plates: The Hidden Gems Behind Printed Maps

As relics of historical crafts, printing surfaces fall outside the modern disciplines and have often been overlooked. Until recently, the vast majority of these printing surfaces remained inaccessible to researchers because they were uncatalogued. The Museum Plantin-Moretus (Antwerp) keeps about 14,000 woodblocks and 6,000 copper plates. In recent years, all woodblocks have been catalogued and digitized. Recently a new project has been initiated to do the same for the copper plates. Focusing on some 20 woodblocks and around 100 copper plates that were used to print cartographic representations, we will demonstrate the research potential locked within these printing surfaces.

Joost Depuydt is Curator of Typography & Printing House Heritage at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp. Joost graduated as historian at the KU Leuven in 1991 and received an MA in Combined Historical Studies (The Renaissance) at the Warburg Institute in London in 1992. Between 2007 and 2018 he was Curator of Special Collections (maps, drawings, prints) at the FelixArchief / Antwerp City Archives. He has organized the 26th International Conference on the History of Cartography (ICHC 2015) in Antwerp. Since 2018 Joost has been in charge of the typographic collections at the Museum Plantin-Moretus, which includes punches, matrices, hand moulds, cast type, woodblocks and copper plates.

MAGGIE ERWIN

Studying Sloped Feet:A Pulled Sort in Wynkyn De Worde’s 1495 edition of De Proprietatibus Rerum

This paper investigates the unusual type used in Wynkyn De Worde’s 1495 printing of De Proprietatibus Rerum. In the copy held at Houghton Library (STC 1536) there is an impression of type pulled from the forme and erroneously printed. The pulled sort is approximately 25 centimeters tall with a sloped foot. While sloped type is known, we have yet to discover other examples from an English printer or with similarly steep slopes. I will discuss how this new example changes the landscape of scholarship on sloped type and how hands-on experimentation can help us better understand this phenomena.

Maggie Erwin is a current Master’s student at the Simmons School of Library Science where she specializes in rare books and special collections librarianship. She holds a BA in English from Wellesley College, and has a background in letterpress printing and book arts education. Maggie currently works as a Curatorial Assistant in the Printing & Graphic Arts Department at Houghton Library. Her research interests include letterpress teaching, early modern printing history, and the intersections of labor, craft, and artistic process.

BERTA FERRER

The Unconventional Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Printed Narratives Influenced by Digital Media

The new conventional novel in the 21st century has shifted from a printed object to a genre that can easily flow from one form to another. This hybridity has also brought forward an interest in the material dimension of the book and a focus on unconventional narratives that work exclusively in print but are aware of the digital influence. To understand this shift, this paper analyzes the reading and design processes of three major unconventional novels. In Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010) and Abrams’ S. (2013), it becomes evident that digital technology is used to enhance print and create print specific novels.

Berta Ferrer is Architect of Books (@arquitectadelibros), an expert in unconventional narratives. With an MA Architecture and MA Graphic Design, she combines her academic work with her PhD at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading (UK), which focuses on the possibilities offered by the printed book as a physical object in the digital era. Berta lectures and delivers book design workshops to international schools and universities, and she is Programme Leader of the BA Graphic Design & Digital Media at LABA Valencia, School of Art, Design & New Media.

MEGAN E. FOX

Commas, Daggers, and Stars: Shakespeare on the Popean Page

Alexander Pope cared deeply about how his writing appeared on the page. Through a close reading of Pope’s typography, Megan examines how Pope curates an influential reading of Shakespeare—his textual history, his literary merits—via the typography of his edited edition of the plays. Pope’s mise en page relays what is Shakespearean in the plays, not just the relative aesthetic value of different passages. In this analysis, Megan argues that typography is an essential recourse for understanding Shakespeare’s exponential growth in cultural influence during the eighteenth century, demonstrating how typography provides a useful heuristic for understanding Shakespeare’s editorial history.

Megan E. Fox is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She previously received a master’s at the University of Toronto in Library and Information Science with a specialization in Book History. Her research interests include early modern and 18th-century literature; history of the book; library history and archival theory; and early literary criticism. Megan’s dissertation examines the historiography of 18th-century Shakespearean editing through the lens of information organization. She currently works at the UW’s Special Collections Department, and co-chairs the Graduate Early Modern Student Society, at the UW’s Center for Early Modern Studies.

KITTY MARYATT

Slow Printing: Pochoir and Collotype in France, Katagami and Silkscreen in Japan

Gelatin-based collotype printing was developed by French photographer Alphonse Louis Poitevin in 1855 and was often paired with pochoir starting in the 19th century in France. A base color of an artwork was often printed by collotype before adding color by pochoir, a sophisticated French stenciling technique. In 1878, Motifs Decoratifs Tirées des Pochoirs Japonais showing katagami stencils was published in Paris by interior designer Théodore Lambert. Along with Japanese woodblock prints, these images influenced French artists and the pocheurs reproducing their artworks, while katagami used for prints on paper led directly to the development of silkscreen in Japan.

Kitty Maryatt is former Director of the Scripps College Press and Assistant Professor of Art at Scripps College in Claremont, California, where she taught typography and book arts for thirty years. Kitty holds an MA in mathematics from Claremont Graduate University and an MFA in graphic design from UCLA. At Scripps College, Kitty instituted a program in 1986 of collaborative book editions created each semester by the students. Descriptions of the sixty limited edition letterpress books were published in 2016 in the bibliography called Sixty Over Thirty. Since 2017, Kitty has been working on her grand project at Two Hands Press to re-create the 1913 La Prose du Transsibérien by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay with original pochoir and letterpress.

JULIE L. MELLBY

Fit to Print: The Museum of the History of the Recorded Word

In 1929 Elmer Adler, director of Pynson Printers, wrote to his landlord Arthur Hays Sulzberger, soon to be publisher of The New York Times, proposing a simple and dignified showing of the development of recorded thought visually. Over the next seven years they built The Museum of Recorded Word. This is its story.

Julie L. Mellby is graphic arts curator emeritus, Firestone Library, Princeton University. She holds an MLIS from Columbia University and an MA from Hunter College, City University of New York, specializing in 20th-century modernism. Before Princeton, Julie worked at the Toledo Museum of Art, the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her books include The Author’s Portrait (2010), Splendid Pages: the Molly and Walter Bareiss Collection of Modern Illustrated Books (2003), and Salts of Silver, Toned with Gold (1999).

MARK J. NOONAN

The Forgotten William Bradford, New York’s First Printer

2025 marks the 300th anniversary of New York’s first newspaper, the New-York Gazette, printed by William Bradford. Despite his long and remarkable career, Bradford has been largely overlooked in print history. As my talk explores, from the presses of Bradford came a variety of important publications that served to stimulate literacy, induce civic engagement, develop an appreciation for the arts and sciences, and promote Enlightenment ideals. Before Benjamin Franklin had even learned the printer’s trade, Bradford had also battled for press freedom, founded America’s first paper mill, opened a bookstore, and created an inter-colonial book trade.

Mark J. Noonan is Professor of English at New York City College of Technology (CUNY). He is author of Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870-1893 (2010) and co-author of Brooklyn Tides: The Fall and Rise of a Global Borough (2018). He is past President of the Research Society of American Periodicals and serves on the editorial board of Studies in Periodical Cultures. In 2015 and 2020, he served as Director of the “City of Print” NEH Summer Institute (CityOfPrint.com). His new book Revolutionary Ink: New York Colonial Printers and the Promise of America is forthcoming in 2026.

ROBYN PHILLIPS-PENDLETON

The Role of Printing History, Archives, and Research in the Imprinted: Illustrating Race Exhibition

An examination of the historical role of Illustrators and various printing processes in constructing race in the United States through the Imprinted: Illustrating Race exhibition that opened at the Norman Rockwell Museum from June to October 2022 and will travel to the Delaware Art Museum and the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee in 2026. The exhibition of three hundred artworks and objects from 1590 to today physically illustrated the intricate and factual narrative in four gallery spaces featuring printed matter obtained from archives such as the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, small bookstores, and private collections.

Robyn Phillips-Pendleton is versatile in visual storytelling, illustration, and education. She is also a designer, co-curator, and author, and her work is showcased in national and international exhibitions. Her co-curatorial engagement with the Norman Rockwell Museum’s 2022 exhibition, “Imprinted: Illustrating Race”, her role as a Society of Illustrators Board of Directors member, Board of Trustees member of the Norman Rockwell Museum, and 2024 ICON 12 Conference Co-Education chair of Prisms Education Symposium highlight her contributions to the field. She is a professor of Visual Communications at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware.

ANNE RICCULLI

“Mimeographed and Securely Bound”: The Printing History of Unwritten History of Slavery (1945)

In 1945, Fisk University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Nashville, Tennessee, released a bound volume with thirty-seven interview transcripts of conversations between formerly enslaved African Americans and members of the institution’s Sociology Department. This talk reads department archival documents and the recollections of the principal interviewer to investigate the printing history of this mimeographed Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Account of Negro Ex-Slaves at the end of the Second World War in the broader context of the Social Science Institute goal to reach policymakers with documents relevant to contemporary wartime domestic and global race relations conversations.

Anne Ricculli is Director of Exhibits and Collections at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey. As curator of the museum’s historic technology collection, she coordinates exhibitions and programming, and oversees the William H. Edgerton Mechanical Music Library. Her research uses book history as a framework for interpreting the public understanding of science, medicine, and technology, and has presented at the international Congress of History of Science and Technology, the History of Science Society, and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing conferences. Anne has a PhD in History and Culture (Drew University) and an MA in Museum Studies (NYU).

Lisa Rosowsky

Sauf Conduit: The Art and Craft of Document Forgery in World War II France

Life for citizens in World War II-era France was one of privation—and was also awash in paperwork. Organizations that aided Jews and other refugees quickly recognized the need for forged documents, and began to build networks of those with the skills to create them. Many of these forgers were young, some hardly more than teenagers, but they created (or adapted) methods for replication that were ingenious. I will present the work of some of the best-known French forgers, and discuss the printing techniques they adapted to create documents that looked genuine enough to pass inspection under life-or-death circumstances.

Lisa Rosowsky is a tenured professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the country’s oldest public college of art and design, teaching typography, editorial design, print production, and bookbinding. She earned her AB from Harvard College and her MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University, where she focused her graduate thesis on the history of photographic image translation through offset lithography (Richard Benson, advisor). The granddaughter of a commercial printer, Lisa has a longstanding interest in the history and current state of printing technology, and aims to pass along this knowledge to the next generations of students.

KATHERINE M. RUFFIN

The Bibliographical Press Movement: A Twenty-First Century Perspective

This presentation will briefly survey the literature of the bibliographical press movement and explore questions related to the present and future of the movement. How do bibliographical presses contribute to printing history? What can we gain from studying the movement’s arc through the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century? How can this history help us understand the current flowering of presses in college and university libraries? How can these presses be sustained over time? Finally, how might today’s bibliographical presses contribute to the future of printing history?

Katherine M. Ruffin is the Director of Book Studies Program & Lecturer in Art at Wellesley College. Katherine teaches history of the book at the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University and the history of 19th and 20th century typography and printing history at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. She holds an AB in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College, an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama, and a PhD in Library and Information Science from Simmons University.

sandra Wilson & Robert Jackson

Correspondences between Damascening and Mezzotint

This paper explores the similarities between a traditional damascening metal decoration technique and the mezzotint printmaking technique. It also considers whether damascening could have informed the development of mezzotint. This practice-based research explored the use of a damascening chiseled plate to create mezzotint style prints and conversely using a mezzotint rocked metal sheet in damascening. Some evidence alludes to damascening as a possible source for mezzotint, however it cannot be conclusively established. The paper concludes by outlining the benefits for printmaking and metalworking in exploring the varied approaches and tools available to achieve different effects. This traversing has the potential to expand both printmaking and metalworking practices.

Sandra Wilson is professor emerita in ecological metal design at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, part of the University of Dundee. She is an award-winning jeweler and silversmith. She champions frugal metal working techniques such as nunome zogan and works with precious metals recovered from electronic waste using a hydrometallurgy process. Her research is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Daiwa Foundation.

Robert Jackson is a digital making specialist at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, part of the University of Dundee. He is an artist who studied printmaking in NCAD, Dublin and worked at the Dundee Contemporary Arts print studio for eight years prior to working at DJCAD. His initial studies focussed on mezzotint, etching and lithography but has most recently researched the crossover between traditional and emerging technologies within printmaking practice including eye-tracking and CNC carving.