Skip to the good stuff!

Posts

2026 Conference

The Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennsylvania.

Registration   |   Summarized Schedule   |   Keynote   |    Invited Speakers   |   Lightning Round   |   Self-directed Activities

Registration

Registration is closed.

Explore how Revolutionary-era printing and document production continues to shape our design standards, cultural sensibilities, and political life today. The conference keynote will be given by James Green (Librarian emeritus, Library Company of Philadelphia). Invited speakers include Mindy Belloff, Michele Gabrielson, Sara Karpinski, John Pollack, and Angelica Williams. 

 

Summarized Schedule

Friday, October 2

Saturday, October 3

 

Keynote

James Green “The Radical Printers of Revolutionary Philadelphia”

Librarian Emeritus, Library Company of Philadelphia. James is a librarian and scholar (and former APHA President 1988–1990) whose research and teaching experience broadly covers the material culture of books and printing, publishing, and distribution from the colonial period through the 19th century.   |   Presentation

 

Invited Speakers

For 5 speakers: 20 minute presentation, 5 minutes for questions. Moderator: Jessica Peterson

Michele Gabrielson, MA Ed, “In The Margins: Women Printers of the 18th-Century”

18th century newspapers, books, and pamphlets were essential to the dissemination of information and were instrumental in fanning the flames of discord on both sides of the revolutionary conflict.  While the job of printing was largely considered a masculine activity, widows, wives, and daughters took up the mantle of a free press.  Not only did women printers set the type that would be read and shared by readers and subscribers, but also ran and owned their own printing operations and actively engaged in the free press. In this lecture, learn about the indispensable role that women in printing played in the pivotal events leading up to the American Revolution.   

Michele is an award-winning Massachusetts history teacher and historic interpreter of the 18th century. Michele specializes in interpreting the history of colonial women printers, 18th century chocolate production, and the revolutionary playwright and poet Mercy Otis Warren.

 

Mindy Belloff, “Unanimous Declaration of Independence” 

Mindy Belloff will discuss the Unanimous Declaration of Independence designed and printed by Mary Katharine Goddard in January of 1777, and her own historic recreation and rewriting of the document as inclusive, in two editions in 2009 and 2010.

Artist Mindy Belloff publishes fine editions in New York City, creating books, prints, and installations presented through a feminist lens.

 

Angelica Williams, “A Legacy of Liberty: Black Printers and Freedom in the American Revolution”

How enslaved labor was used to generate prints that circulated ideas of freedom and liberty in the years leading up to the American Revolution

Angelica Williams is a graduate student at the University of South Carolina whose research focuses on uncovering the lives and labor of enslaved printers in the 18th-century. 

 

Sara Karpinski, “Pied: Learning from a Dropped Declaration”

John Dunlap and his team set and print the Declaration of Independence in a handful of hours on July 4, 1776. What happens when two park rangers reset the document 250 years later? Explore the experience, frustrations, and lessons from piing the Dunlap Declaration back together.

Sara Karpinski is a National Park Service Ranger at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. She is the coordinator for the Franklin Court Printing Office, running two reproduction 18th-century printing press as part of the park’s visitor offerings. Throughout her 18 years in the NPS, she has worked at several national historical parks and battlefields, and is the recipient of the 2020 regional Freeman Tilden Award for Excellence in Interpretation. 

 

John Pollack, “Paine, Penn, and the Press”

Jim Green argues that we must follow revolutionary polemics as they moved from pamphlets into newspapers, particularly beginning in the crucial year of 1776. This presentation is a case study of the little-known debates over Thomas Paine’s Common Sense conducted in newspapers in the weeks following its publication. I will focus on a fierce debate between Paine and two members of the College of Philadelphia (now University of Pennsylvania): Provost William Smith and the radical mathematician James Cannon. 

John H. Pollack is Senior Curator, Research Services at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. He has co-curated two recent exhibitions related to the Semiquincentennial: Revolution at Penn, in 2025 and The Time to Right All Wrongs: France, Haiti, and Philadelphia in a Revolutionary Age in 2026. 

 

Lightning Round

Moderator: Alex Post

This conference welcomed proposals for presentations from everyone with a passion for printing and book history, including seasoned scholars, librarians and archivists, printers and book artists, conservators, students, and hobbyists. Submissions were encouraged from people of all backgrounds, including established academics, early career professionals, and independent scholars. We believe that diverse perspectives enrich the conversation. 

 

Barry O’Keefe “Pizzini Show Print: The Poster Printer Plant of the South!”

In 2025, Studio Two Three, a nonprofit community printshop in Richmond, Virginia received an extraordinary donation from artist Richard Lee Bland, consisting of the entire remaining collection of type, imagery and equipment from Richmond’s historic Pizzini Show Print, which operated in Richmond from 1840 until 1977. Since acquiring the collection, Studio Two Three staff and members have dedicated an estimated 2,000 hours cleaning, organizing, cataloging and printing this collection of type and imagery to prepare it for ongoing use and care in our studio.

Barry O’Keefe is an artist from Richmond, Virginia working in printmaking and public art. He is  adjunct faculty at VCUArts, and Director of Artists and Spaces at Studio Two Three, where he oversees the letterpress shop. He received his BA from William & Mary and an MFA in printmaking from Ohio University. His work has been exhibited in five countries and seven states and can be found in many private and public collections, including the Valentine Museum, theBlack History Museum of Virginia, and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

 

Jeff Jarvis “The Linotype and the Invention of Mass Media”

After the 19th century development of steam-powered presses, stereotyping, paper from pulp, and the telegraph, the much-anticipated typesetting machine, the Linotype, was the last invention needed to open the cultural and economic floodgates of mass media. After about 300 failed attempts to automate typesetting, success came at last to James O. Clephane as muse and Ottmar Mergenthaler as inventor — neither printers — with the rare eureka: the conception of the recirculating matrix, which eliminated the four processes needed to print with movable type: founding, composing, justifying, and redistributing metal sorts.

Tow professor of journalism innovation emeritus, CUNY; visiting professor, Stony Brook; fellow, Montclair State. Author of Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026), Magazine (Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, 2023), and The Gutenberg Parenthesis (Bloomsbury, 2023). Editor of Intelligence — AI & Humanity, new series from Bloomsbury Academic (2027). Formerly president, Advance Internet (Advance Local, Condé Nast); creator, Entertainment Weekly; TV critic, TV Guide and People, columnist and editor, San Francisco Examiner and Chicago Tribune. 

 

Autumn Duffy “Fine Press Aesthetics as Cover in gender liberators”

Sky Syzygy’s 2024 artists’ book gender liberators uses the prestige aesthetics of fine press to challenge readers’ assumptions of literary value even before they begin reading. The book brings together a rich collection of graphic media and ephemera, including event flyers and forms for documenting violence against transgender people, pulled from Syzygy’s ongoing digital archive of gender expansive materials. The book is printed risograph and digital offset which, though atypical for traditionally published books, is typical for zines and other small press ephemera. Its cover is seemingly oppositional to activist design languages. Printed letterpress onto marbled paper, it demonstrates a fine press aesthetic in conflict with the interior text.

Autumn de León is a master’s student at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on book history, print culture, and trans studies. In tandem with her academic work, she is the co-founder of Lavender Corazón Press, a small press producing artists’ books engaged with queer and Latine thought. Her 2026 artists’ book, An Archive, presents a series of questions posed to trans patients by medical gatekeepers as shared in anonymous interviews.

 

Ian Munro “The Printing Press Archive: Documenting the demise of the iron giants

The decline of newspapers is an obvious trend in modern society. Much ink has been spilled about how useful, pertinent information will reach the public sphere as old media business models collapse and new ones are tested.

Yet, a huge swath of those most impacted have received only piecemeal consideration—the print production crews. The blue collar men and women who printed, stacked and delivered the papers covered with ads that powered the profit margins that in turn filled newsrooms have been forgotten in the media collapse. 

The Printing Press Archive elevates the stories of these workers who for so long have been taken for granted.

Blue collar production crews were an anchor for newspapers, which rely on a steady stream of transient reporters who would come to the area, work for a couple years, then move on either out of the industry or to a larger paper. Yet, overwhelmingly, the production crews worked in these same places where they were born and raised. And so the crew could explain social mores, provide a sense of cultural reality and stiffen the backbone of the paper’s independence from politicians’ polemics or financial incentives that may try to cloud coverage.

The Printing Press Archive documentaries following each of these other papers provide snapshots of crew attitudes and outlooks, the monstrous presslines they manned and the feelings of acceptance, loss and hope or fear of the future as the final run comes and goes. 

The sun is setting on the era of printed news and the chance to preserve stories slip each day. These documentaries are meant to ensure these craftsmen and craftswomen contributions and stories are not forgotten even after the last newspaper presses sink into the smelting furnace.

Munro has followed the modern newspaper industry since starting as a reporter in 2019. He immediately connected with the crew that ran that paper’s GOSS Urbanite because of his family’s own past in the printing industry. Since then, he has been making documentaries for a YouTube channel, Printing Press Archive, that follow the human side of the decline in blue collar newspaper printing work. He works fulltime on a sheetfed offset press crew in Richmond, is the publisher of Pallet magazine and printworks volunteer director for Field Day of the Past, a historical machinery preservation and education nonprofit in Dinwiddie County, Virginia.

 

Self-directed Activities

American Philosophical Society

Library Company of Philadelphia (Friday only)

Museum of the American Revolution

University of Pennsylvania, Common Press (Friday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. only)

Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts

Franklin Court Printing Office

Athenaeum Library

Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Rosenbach Library

Other options: