2024 President’s Letter
Dear APHA member and friend,
You are cordially invited to our annual meeting on Saturday, January 27, 2024, at 2 p.m. (EST) to conduct APHA’s business and celebrate excellence in printing history. For the first time since the pandemic, our 2024 annual meeting will take place in-person in New York City, at the end of “Bibliography Week” as had been our custom for decades. We will meet at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan (28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor), which like APHA will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2024. We are very excited about this collaboration with the CBA!
For those of you unable to travel to New York, the meeting will also be streamed live. More meeting details, including Zoom login information for virtual attendees, will be e-mailed to members and posted on the APHA website in January.
Our annual meeting program will include officers’ reports, the election of board trustees, the announcement of the 2024 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship in Printing History, and awards to individuals and institutions for their distinguished contributions to printing history. On behalf of the Secretary, I hereby present the Nominating Committee’s slate for your vote at the meeting:
| Office | Candidate |
|---|---|
| President (2nd term): | J. Fernando Peña (New York, NY) |
| Board Secretary (1st term): | Ana D. Rodriguez (Champaign, IL) |
| Treasurer: | Jim Kuhn (Austin, TX) |
| Vice President for Membership (1st term): | Diane Dias De Fazio (Cleveland, OH) |
| Vice President for Programs (2nd term): | Danelle Moon (Santa Barbara, CA) |
| Vice President for Publications (2nd term): | Josef Beery (Charlottesville, VA) |
| Trustees: | Melanie Leung (Washington, DC), Pranav Prakash (Oxford, UK), Larissa Randall (Bentonville, AR), and Amanda Stuckey (Summerdale, PA) |
The Nominating Committee continues to search for a qualified candidate for the role of treasurer and invites the general membership to submit nominations as soon as possible. Brief biographies of board candidates will be posted on the APHA website by early January. All APHA members present at the annual meeting, whether in-person or virtual, will be able to vote on this slate. If you have not already done so, please renew your membership now by going to https://printinghistory.org/membership/. Your membership and additional donations ensure the continued vitality of APHA.
This year has been a busy one for APHA and its local chapters. Our splendid journal, Printing History, is back to its regular semi-annual schedule. In October we were thrilled to offer our first hybrid conference, “The Printed Weird: Book History from the Margins,” at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. In December, Harry Reese, printer and founder of the Book Arts Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara, delivered the annual Lieberman Lecture at the Letterform Archive in San Francisco. The talk was also streamed live, in keeping with the pledge we made last year to present all of our primary programming in hybrid or virtual format to allow all APHA members to engage and participate fully.
As we approach the end of the year, please consider contributing to APHA. The Board and Chapter leadership have worked hard to broaden our programs, publications, and membership. Your ongoing support makes all of this possible.
Thank you, and best wishes for the new year!
Fernando Peña, APHA President