The American Printing History Association is pleased to introduce members who have agreed to serve as officers and Trustees on the APHA board. This dynamic group of talented people will grow our organization and keep APHA thriving. We’re excited they are joining us.

The Nominating Committee 

J. Fernando Peña, President

J. Fernando Peña 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.

Fernando says, “As APHA approaches its 50th anniversary in 2024, I would like to work with the board to identify and pursue development opportunities and help put the organization on a firmer financial footing for the next fifty years. Another major short-term priority is to collaborate with the Membership VP to improve communication with members and streamline the renewal process. Finally, I look forward to supporting the board in fleshing out and implementing current diversity initiatives that will strengthen APHA in terms of board representation, program planning, and access.”

Danelle Moon, Vice President for Programs

Danelle Moon is Director of Special Research Collections, UCSB. She holds an MLIS from Southern Connecticut State University and an MA in history from California State University, Fullerton. She has extensive experience curating exhibits and is an accomplished historian and rare book librarian and archivist, with subject expertise in 20th-century U.S. history with a focus on women and social and political movements.  She has published numerous articles and presented research focused on women’s social movements and politics. She is the author of Women and the Civil Rights Movement (ABC-CLIO, 2011), a general history of women’s social movements from suffrage to feminism. 

Josef Beery, Vice President for Publications

Josef Beery co-founded the Virginia Arts of the Book as a public-access printmaking studio focusing on letterpress printing and allied crafts of bookmaking. Josef’s own work has focused on letterpress broadsides for writers and poets. He has produced pieces celebrating the work of Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Charles Wright, Rita Dove, and Natasha Tretheway, among many others. Additionally, he publishes Flora Appalachee which celebrates the flowering plants of the Appalachian Mountains. His interest in 18C printing techniques led to his translation of the historic wooden screw press into a desktop printmaking tool that is used in colleges and institutions around the country. This small press, the BookBeetle provides a detailed introduction to the techniques of 18C printing for students without access to a full-size replica press. He recently designed and has begun cutting a 48-point original wood type design in beech which he calls BookBlossom. This type will allow the portable desktop press to be used with students of all ages to provide a completely lead-free letterpress experience.

Meghan Constantinou, Secretary

Meghan Constantinou has served as Librarian of the Grolier Club since 2011 and has been a member since 2013. She received a BFA in Painting from Syracuse University in 2001, MA in Art History from the University of Delaware in 2010, and MLIS from Pratt Institute in 2012. Her research interests include the history of private collecting, women’s book ownership, provenance studies, stenciled books, and the book arts.

Joan Boudreau, Trustee

Joan Boudreau is a curator in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Graphic Arts Collection. The unit focuses on the international history of printing and printmaking and the increase and diffusion of knowledge and information about those trades. Joan’s current research subject interests include: Federal printed imagery of the American West; American Civil War printing; Patent models and the graphic arts; and 20th-century comic art.

Faride Mareb, Trustee

Faride Mereb is a Venezuelan book designer, educator, and researcher living and working in New York City. She was selected as a visiting scholar at Columbia University; teaches at Center for Book Arts; and as a freelance book designer, was awarded multiple prizes for her work from AIGA, Latin American Design Awards, and the Ibero American Design Biennial. She was granted the 10×10 photobooks research grant this year for her work on Karmele Leizaola. Faride has presented talks in New York, California, and Mexico. Her work has been exhibited in individual and group shows in Venezuela, Spain, Brazil, and New York. In 2014, Faride founded Ediciones Letra Muetra, which focuses on careful and design-minded publishing of unedited and lesser-known texts that she considers important to disseminate. Letra Muerta publishes works in Ex Libris, a printing company directed by Javier Aizpurua. She was instrumental in the success of APHA’s first bilingual conference, Impresos: Printing Across Latin American and Caribbean Cultures. Faride was appointed APHA Trustee in October 2021 to complete a position left vacant by a mid-term resignation. 

Richard Minsky, Trustee

Richard Minsky is a New York-based book artist with a long and distinguished career—he owned his first printing press at the age of 13. Richard studied economics, where he graduated cum laude from Brooklyn College and was awarded a fellowship at Brown University for graduate studies. He dropped out of a Ph.D. program after two years to study bookbinding in Providence, Rhode Island with master bookbinder Daniel Gibson Knowlton. In 1974, Minsky founded the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan, the first organization of its kind in the United States dedicated to contemporary interpretations of the book as an art object while preserving traditional practices of the art of the book. In 1978, he was named a US/UK Bicentennial Fellow in Visual Art by the National Endowment for the Arts and the British Council. In 2004, Yale University Library acquired Richard’s archive of published fine art editions and other works. The Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University hosted a fifty-year retrospective of his work in 2010. Richard received the Guild of Book Workers Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 and the following year, he was the recipient of the annual Laureate award from the American Printing History Association.