2022 APHA President’s Letter

Fernando Pena

December 19, 2022

Dear APHA member and friend,

You are cordially invited to our annual meeting on Saturday, January 28, 2023, 2 p.m. (EST) to conduct APHA’s business and celebrate excellence in printing history. As in recent years, our 2023 annual meeting will be virtual. [Read more]

About the Author

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.