APHA Board Candidates for 2025

The American Printing History Association is pleased to present the following members who have agreed to serve on the APHA board and to stand for election at our annual meeting on Saturday, January 25, 2 p.m. EST.

The Nominating Committee
Hosea Baskin
E. Haven Hawley, Past President (Chair)
J. Fernando Peña, President
Sara T. Sauers
Nina Schneider

Joan Boudreau (TRUSTEE, SECOND THREE-YEAR TERM)

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.

Richard Minsky (Trustee, Second Three-Year term)

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.

JESSICA SALINAS (TRUSTEE, FIRST THREE-YEAR TERM)

Jessica Salinas is an early career special collections librarian who has been working at The New York Public Library since 2022. The newly-minted librarian of The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, she performs many vital public service functions working directly with researchers of all levels of experience. Jessica greatly enjoys orienting readers and working hands-on with collections and is passionate about library outreach, engagement, and primary source literacy. Her research interests include the history of the book in Early Modern New Spain and women’s presence in the printing trade.

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.