Betsy Raymond was a notable Northern California calligrapher and book artist. [Read more]

The American Printing History Association (APHA) is currently accepting applications for the 2018 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship in Printing History for the study of printing history. An award of up to $2,000 is available for research in any area of the history of printing, including all the arts and technologies relevant to printing, the book arts, and letter forms.  [Read more]

From the contact form:

Hi, I’m a doctoral student at Columbia University. I’m researching women printers and printers from minority backgrounds in the US and UK who worked during the long 19th century.   [Read more]

Printing History 22, the second issue produced by the team of Brooke Palmieri, editor; Michael Russem, publication designer; and Katherine Ruffin, Vice-President for Publications, has just been mailed to APHA members. Kim Schwenk is the guest editor of this issue, which is based on the Black Arts and Printer’s Devils theme of the APHA conference held at the Huntington Library in October 2016.  [Read more]

7:30 pm,  Thursday, November 2, the University of Iowa English Philosophy Building (EPB), room 107. Free & open to the public

Women & the Labor of Print: An American Story

Women printers were a central presence in colonial and early republican America. Between 1639 and 1820 at least 25 women press owners ran businesses, acted as publishers and performed other work, such as postmistress and shopkeeper, that was often a core part of the printer’s role. By 1821, the number of women press owners in the newly formed states had dropped to one. Women didn’t disappear from printing; their collective role, however, changed substantially in the industrializing U.S. This illustrated talk will examine case studies of women and printing in eighteenth and nineteenth century America to explore women’s shift from owner to worker, with a seventeenth-century aside to query just who was America’s first printer.  [Read more]

Jude Lubrano from  J & J Lubrano Music Antiquarians, rare book & manuscript dealers specializing in music, is seeking information about a set of engraving tools that she acquired a decade ago at an auction in Germany. [Read more]

The APHA website is now accepting short articles on lesser known aspects of the history of printing and related arts and crafts, including calligraphy, typefounding, typography, papermaking, bookbinding, illustration, and publishing. Texts must be original but are not required to be scholarly. (That need is well met by APHA’s journal Printing History.) The website editor will consider biographical sketches, tales of provenance, professional reminiscences, as well as preliminary research. All are encouraged to submit—APHA members and nonmembers, students and non-academics, the trained and self-taught—by contacting the editor.

The speaker roster is now confirmed for “Good, Fast, Cheap: Printed Words and Images in America before 1900” our joint conference with the American Antiquarian Society. APHA’s forty-second annual conference will be held at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. Registration and other information are still in development. Please stay tuned.

Saturday, June 10, 2017, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Join APHA NorCal as we stroll around North Berkeley and visit some of the local print shops. We will see the studios of Norman McKnight, David Lance Goines, Richard Seibert, and Li Jiang, and we will be treated to a delicious lunch along the way.

This tour is strictly limited to the first 15 people who sign up! Be sure to renew your APHA NorCal membership, if you haven’t already, and sign up here today!