2024 President’s Letter

December 17, 2024

Dear APHA member and friend,

You are cordially invited to our annual meeting on Saturday, January 25, 2025, 2 p.m. (EST) to conduct APHA’s business and celebrate excellence in printing history. This year’s meeting will be held virtually. Further details, including the meeting link, will be emailed to members in January and posted on the APHA website at https://printinghistory.org/.

Our annual meeting agenda includes officer reports, board elections, the announcement of the 2025 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellow, and recognition of individuals and institutions for their outstanding contributions to printing history. This year, APHA will honor Susan J. Goldman for her significant contributions to the study, recording, preservation, and dissemination of printing history. Additionally, APHA will recognize The Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective, founded by Tia Blassingame in 2019. This collective has played a vital role in highlighting the contributions of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to the book arts and printing history.

The Nominating Committee proposes the following slate of trustee candidates for your consideration at the annual meeting:

Joan Boudreau (Washington, DC; second three-year term)
Richard Minsky (East Hampton, NY; second three-year term)
Jessica Salinas (New York, NY; first three-year term)

Brief biographies of the board candidates will be posted on the APHA website in early January. All current APHA members will be eligible to vote on the slate of candidates. To ensure your eligibility to vote, please renew your membership or update your member information on our website at https://join.printinghistory.org/. Your continued support is crucial to APHA’s ongoing success.

This year, APHA celebrated its golden anniversary with a bi-coastal hybrid conference, “APHA @ 50: Printing History Past, Present and Future”. The conference featured in-person activities in New York City and Berkeley, as well as virtual paper presentations. Highlights included keynote talks and tours at the Grolier Club, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Watson Library, the Center for Book Arts, and The CODEX Foundation. Our milestone conference was a financial success, thanks in large part to a generous grant from The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. The conference was also the most well-attended in recent years.

In 2025 we can look forward to another great and innovative conference, Lieberman Lectures, local chapter events, and more engaging issues of our journal, Printing History, which is back to its regular semi-annual schedule.

As we conclude another year, we invite you to support APHA with a donation. Your contribution will help us continue to expand our programs, publications, and membership. Thank you for your continued support.

Happy holidays, and best wishes for 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.