Madeleine Stern remarks: “Connections with Printing History,” APHA Letter No. 56, 1983, No. Six, page 3.

From The APHA Letter No. 33, 1980

FIFTH ANNUAL APHA AWARD. At the January 26th Annual Meeting of APHA the Fifth Annual APHA Award was presented to Dr. J. Ben Lieberman for his contributions to the study of printing history. APHA President Catherine Brody presented the Award plaque to Dr. Lieb­erman and read its inscription: “This plaque, the 1980 Annual Award of the American Printing History Association, is presented to J. Ben Lieberman in grateful recognition of his important service advancing understanding of the history of printing and its allied arts.” As Prof. Brody’s presentation talk pointed out, Dr. Lieberman’s contributions to the encouragement of the study of printing have taken many forms. His abiding concern has always been to retain the humanistic values of true printing craftsmanship and pre­servation of the freedom of the press. Dr. Lieberman founded the American Printing History Association in 1973 to encourage the study of printing history and the preserva­tion of printing artifacts as part of the humanistic tradition. He guided the infant organization in its role of encouraging individuals, institutions and other organizations to contribute to a common goal of preserving and using oral, written and printed source materials for printing history. Dr. Lieberman is a noted private press proprietor at his Herity Press, which he operates with his wife Elizabeth. He has long been active in the Chappel organizations of private presses, having founded the world chappel movement in 1956. The Herity Press was founded in 1952, when the Liebermans lived in San Francisco. It is now located at their home in New Rochelle. Star of their press, pridefully en­sconced in their living room is the famous Kelmscott/Goudy press. This Albion was the press used by William Morris’ Kelmscott Press for the Kelmscott Chaucer. Later it was owned by Fred Goudy, the American type designer, and eventually came into the Lieberman printing shop.

Ben’s doctorate is in political science from Stanford. He began his career as a newspaper reporter in his home town of Evansville, Indiana. During World War II he was the Director of Informational Services for the U.S. Navy with the rank of Commander, and editor of the monthly magazine, ALL HANDS. He was professor in the Graduate Schools of Business and Journalism of Columbia, and taught at the University of California at Berkeley. He was consultant to the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of Educa­tion, worked with the UN’s Organization for Economic Cooperation, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the U.S. State Department’s foreign aid program. He was a public rela­tions associate at General Food, worked as an economist at Stanford Research Institute, as the assistant general manager of the San Francisco Chronicle. He joined the inter­national public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton in 1967 and became a vice president in 1970. He took early retirement only a few years ago to work on some personal projects.

Major among these was the establishment of the Myriade Press, which has published some valuable books in the field of graphic arts, including such valuable sources as GOUDY’S TYPE DESIGNS H. Zapf’s TYPOGRAPHIC VARIATIONS, and a second edition of Ben’s own valuable TYPE AND TYPEFACES. Ben’s publishing endeavor has done a real service to students of printing in making these books available, in the series he has named the
“Treasures of Typography.”

One of the products of the Herity Press is publication of a “Check-Log” of private press names, compiled by Elizabeth Lieberman. This little book acts as a register of private press names and help private press props. to avoid duplicating a press name already in use. The CHECK-LOG has gone through many editions.

Ben’s book PRINTING AS A HOBBY has been published in both hard cover and paperback and has inspired many an amateur printer.

Ben Lieberman is also an inventor with patents on three different kinds of very simple small printing presses designed for home use. One of the presses, called the Liberty Press, has been bought by more than 10,000 beginners through his own company.

Presenting the Award plaque to Dr. Lieberman, Prof. Brody made the following remarks:

“Through his own extensive writing, through his publishing, through his printing, through his encouragement of private press printing and the chappel movement, but most of all for his ability to inspire all of us with his own ideals we thank Ben Lieberman today. Ben’s indomitable spirit can not be subdued, even by illness. We gave Ben a citation when he stepped down from the APHA presidency in 1978, and I simply want to repeat what we expressed then: ‘For both his indispensable contributions of the past, and the advice and support we shall receive from him in the future, we hereby express our deepest respect and gratitude.’ Ben embodies the very spirit of APHA. For all of his contributions to the study of printing history, I am proud to bestow upon him our Annual APHA Award.”

From The APHA Letter No. 15, January-February, 1977

“In grateful recognition of his outstanding lifelong contribution to the.develop­ment and understanding of the history of printing, through his painstaking and impeccable research, through his lucid and authoritative authorship of numerous definitive books and even more numerous articles, monographs and lectures, through his leadership in organizations devoted to printing and its historic role, and through his enthusiastic support of other scholars in the field and students he has inspired to serve the cause, Rollo G. Silver is this day, January 29, 1977, presented the 1977 Award of the American Printing History Association by unanimous vote of the Association’s Board of Trustees.”

His laureate address, “Writing the History of American Printing,” provided a broad program for APHA in the area of historical scholarship. The audience’s enthusiastic response indicated how well Prof. Silver crystallized APHA’s goals.

“The History of American Printing seemingly has already been recorded,” he noted, “in the newspapers, books, pamphlets, manuscripts and artifacts scattered throughout the collections in this country and abroad. The information is there. But the point is that we have to organize it.”

“It must be one of our major concerns to find out more about such American geniuses as Samuel Nelson Dickinson,” Prof. Silver emphasized, in describing some of Dickinson’s wide-ranging and important (but too little known) activities. Other specific projects he suggested were the compilation of lists of printing presses with descriptions and details of their manufacture, a series of exact reproductions of early American type specimens; updating of bibliographies on printing history; study of local archival records of printing concerns; and inventories of presses and other equipment of every printing shop in a given town or neighborhood.

Prof. Silver advised printing historians to forget about the Colonial printer for now, and concentrate instead on the technical developments of the 19th century. To do this, it will be necessary for historians to work closely with engineers, he pointed out. APHA can foster such cooperation, and can help the scholar in other ways, set­tling for nothing less than the highest standards. Full documentation should be insis­ted upon, he remarked; “let the policy be, ‘all the footnotes fit to print.'” APHA should similarly encourage joint efforts with art historians in recording and analyzing the aesthetics of printing and the various styles. “Printers who recognized and worked with the best of current trends (of art) … deserve a place in our history.” Prof. Silver summarized his recommendations by remarking that “with scholars and technicians working together, and with all the necessary footnotes, the history of American print­ing can be organized.” APHA hopes to be able to publish Prof. Silver’s address in full and distribute it to the entire membership. 

See Newsletter No. 9

No text available

APHA presented its Individual Award posthumously to Hugh Amory, retired Senior Cataloger in the Houghton Library, on January 26, 2002. Hugh’s son Patrick received the citation from David Whitesell of the Awards Committee, and a tribute was offered by Roger Stoddard, Curator of Rare Books, Harvard College Library.

“For Hugh from Roger at APHA, 26 January 2002”
Speech of Roger Stoddard, Harvard University Library, in honor of Hugh Armory (1930–2001)

Good afternoon! It’s been six years since you invited me and David Whitesell to speak about books and Thomas Jefferson. David’s paper, altogether brilliant and far more original than mine, remains unpublished; but you printed mine, so you know that I quoted Hugh Amory on the unreliability of printer assignment in early American books: “incomplete, inconsistent, and unreliable,” he said. Since then Hugh and I have lamented jointly the identical situation in English books, 1641-1700. Fortunate are the members of APHA to have such open and fascinating fields for research. If only Hugh were here with us this afternoon so that I could roast him, what fun we would have! What laughter! What a life! Well, here we go, Hugh:

As he was general and unconfined in his studies, he cannot be considered as master of any one particular science; but he had accumulated a vast and various collection of learning and knowledge, which was so arranged in his mind, as to be ever in readiness to be brought forth. But his superiority over other learnèd men consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking, the art of using his mind: a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge, which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was, in him, true, evident, and actual wisdom. … Though usually grave, and even aweful in his deportment, he possessed uncommon and peculiar powers of wit and humour; he frequently indulged himself in colloquial pleasantry; and the heartiest merriment was often enjoyed in his company; with this great advantage, that as it was entirely free from any poisonous tincture of vice or impiety, it was salutary to those who shared in it. [James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford University Press, © 1980), pp. 1400-01.]

You will recognize these sentiments as those of James Boswell in his summary of the character of Samuel Johnson, but for those of us who were his colleagues, these words apply just as well to:

Hugh Amory 
(July 1, 1930-November 21, 2001)

In his youth Hugh was mechanical, assembling parts in order to achieve special effects. He designed and constructed a cart for his brothers, he mastered the soldering iron, he cast lead soldiers, he cast wax soldiers, he learned how to concoct gunpowder. (Later, in Korea, he served as staff sergeant in the U. S. Army Explosive Demolition Team.) He taught himself how to take apart the engine of his Cord automobile and how to put it back together again: it worked just fine. All of it worked just fine–except for the wax soldiers; they emulsified with cauterizing effect.

At Harvard he discovered the Poet’s Theatre–more special effects–for which he composed at least two vehicles, one of them being a translation of Sophocles’s Ajax. He got a reputation as a poet. The sublime Frank O’Hara challenged him:

Listen, you mad poet, never 
ask for gasoline from the girl 
selling bonbons in the department store! 
… 
Your words, sea-rushed engines, 
hammer on, and from the muck 
and bones and golden curls and silk 
your sienna house, New Jerusalem, 
rises. Art! Hosanna! Huzzah! 
[Frank O’Hara, Early Writing, ed. Donald Allen 
(Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox Press, © 1970), p. 64.]

After achieving the magna, with highest honors, in 1952, he styled himself “playwright” in his class report, but in 1958 he got the LL. B. from the Law School, followed by the Ph. D. in English literature–eighteenth-century, he would report, from Columbia in 1964. There they charged him with the proseminar as Assistant Professor, and his former student and later colleague and collaborator Elizabeth Falsey recalls him as smart, mysterious, infuriating. Student papers were followed by an hour and a half of punishing cross examination, and the material argument or material evidence seemed to be a subtext. They asked themselves Where was he coming from? Didn’t they know that the protocols of the classical rhetoric of Quintilian together with courtroom practice and the handling of evidence would follow a law school graduate into any classroom? Only years later did Elizabeth figure out that Hugh had been teaching from the perspective of a library, the attitude of a library cataloger.

But where were the publications of smart young Hugh Amory? Just an eight-page article in the journal of the Manuscript Society, and that just a touch-up of his classroom handout, “Eighteenth Century Autographs and Manuscripts: a Selective Bibliography”? He left Columbia to become an associate professor at Case Western Reserve from 1968 until 1973. But where …

But then, in 1972, the tragic death of Daniel E. Whitten opened a position for a cataloger in English literature at Houghton Library. Hugh came for interview on a Saturday, so James Walsh, Keeper of Printed Books, had to unlock the great front door of the library for him, locking it up behind him with the usual great thud and echo. Must have seemed like the Tombs–or a Yale fraternity house! James handed him two copies of an early English book. They were the same (line-for-line), but also different, as one was a reprint of the other. There was no reason for Hugh to spot the differences so fast and explain them so well, for, whatever he had been doing, he hadnot been comparing dozens or hundreds of early printed books in order to sort out bibliographical conditions. James was dumbfounded, Hugh got the job and remained inside the great front door. Hugh Amory, the catalog department, and Houghton Library were never the same again.

My first clear recollection of him is the moment when he discovered me unpacking from two tea chests the Russian books that I had bought at the Diaghilev-Lifar sale at Monaco in 1975. He seemed reluctant to believe what he was being handed, including all those gift books and journals with printed labels from the Paris exhibition that Lifar had organized for the Pushkin centennial in 1937, and that Hugh would organize and publish for Houghton’s celebration of Pushkin’s 150th in 1987. How was I to know that he could read the stuff?

That compartment behind the great front door was no sleeping car, it was an express special into print for Hugh, beginning with a prodigious output of catalog cards. Neither language nor subject could baffle him, and he would explain to you that he had simply changed classrooms, for he was teaching as before; books remained his subject, but catalog descriptions were his lectures.

That was not enough for him, for someone who wanted to create special effects. One thing to describe a book, another to show it. From 1977, with his Edward Gibbon, Hugh became the library’s most prolific and inventive designer of exhibitions: Johnson, Mather, Fielding, Pushkin, F. J. Child, Cambridge Press, Carlo Goldoni. Many were memorialized by printed catalogues no less creative than the shows that spawned them: He Has Long Outlived His Century (a catalogue written by Harvard graduate students for the Johnsonians), New Books by Fielding (designed for class reading, just like Pushkin and his Friends), The Virgin and the Witch(poster/catalogue of the Law Library exhibition on Elizabeth Canning),First Impressions: Printing in Cambridge (distributed with the long-awaited type specimen of the press). He changed formats, won prizes, reformatted the exhibition cases. Articles flowed freely now, rich with insights and connections, full of new data from unexpected sources. All the while, Fielding provided the ground bass; is any English author so well ‘grounded’ in every aspect of printing, bookselling, and reading culture now that Hugh has considered and recorded all those aspects with his articles and editions?

At his retirement party Hugh shared an important anecdote. He said that cataloging books was not very difficult, in fact it was easy, just telling the truth about books. But recently he had discovered that the authorized heading for Ossian, the fictitious creation of James Macpherson, was “Ossian, 3rd cent.” as if such a person had actually existed. He complained to the LC authority office, but he was told to subside–the heading holds false to this day: they had created it by analogy with the heading for Homer. “So, I’m glad I’m retiring. Now I can go back to telling the truth about books,” he concluded. And so he did.

Almost immediately appeared the indexed facsimiles of the first three catalogues of the Harvard Library, then five years later The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, both of them monumental contributions to American history from the point of view of The Book. The first was a collaboration with W. H. Bond; Hugh helped to identify the “cataloged” books, but also he rendered the badly printed originals, with the readthrough that had prevented any earlier facsimile edition, into legible masters, no mean feat. He collaborated in the editing of the latter with David Hall; instead of thinking about what he contributed–all the sections are signed, just consider what the volume would have been without his knowledge of British booktrade practice and without his clearheaded analysis of printing statistics. Don’t just count the products, he said, distinguish job printing from newspapers and book printing; count by the energy factor of the press, materials plus labor, by enumerating sheets, just as the trade priced their work–by the sheet. Don’t miss his “Pseudodoxia Bibliographica [i.e., False Bibliographics], or When is a Book not a Book? When it’s a Record” in the Consortium of European Research Libraries Papers II: The Scholar & The Database (2001).

Hugh’s colleague, the Slavic cataloger Golda Steinberg, would burst into tears when she saw how the cancer was ravaging his body and darkening his countenance. We embraced, Golda and I, when word of his death reached the library. She says that she still sees him, don’t we all, with his face deep in a book, concealing for the moment that outrageous laugh of his that so endeared him to friends!

The next issue of The Book, newsletter of the Program in the History of the Book, will memorialize Hugh by printing work both by and about him. His chapter on the London booktrade will appear in the fifth volume of The History of the Book in Britain, and his biography of Andrew Millar will be printed in the New Dictionary of National Biography. Let us hope that we will see more fruits of Hugh’s dedication to the products of the printer’s twenty-six little lead soldiers, as he styled them. What a life! What an afterlife! What laughter! What special effects! What fun we had!

Roger Stoddard
Curator of Rare Books, Harvard College Library
Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.

APHA presented its 2003 Individual Award to James Mosley, retired Librarian at St Bride Printing Library, London, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. These acceptance remarks were delivered at APHA’s annual meeting held at the New York Public Library on January 25, 2003, and have been slightly revised for presentation on the web.

Acceptance Remarks of James Mosley
Members of APHA, thank you very much. As some of you may recall, I’ve been here before. In 1989, one of the first Institutional awards of the American Printing History Society went to the St Bride Printing Library, and I came to New York as its librarian to receive it.

I retired from that library nearly three years ago now, so I hope that in kindly inviting me back, you are making a distinction between the institution and the person, though it’s a distinction that I still have some difficulty in making myself. I took up a job at the St Bride Printing Library in June 1956. The librarian, W. Turner Berry, having worked there more or less continuously since 1913 was understandably ready to hand it over, which he did in 1958. So between us we presided over it for eighty-seven years.

This is an awful example to set before a younger generation and I don’t recommend it on principle. But in practice it seemed to work out quite well. In any case, when I joined it nobody ever expected even the library to last that long, let alone the librarian. For one thing, one of the new roads planned for the City of London after the Second World War was due to be cut right through the building within the next few years, so beyond the patching up of superficial war damage – Berry and his colleagues had put out the fire bombs with a water hose as they came through the roof – no money was ever spent on its maintenance, so the building was shabby and the roof leaked. And then there were the financial crises. They came regularly – one every decade throughout my time there. However both the library and its librarian are still around: not quite the same as they were, perhaps, but in many ways working better than ever – or so it seems to me, but I am prejudiced in their favour.

Looking at the APHA web page to see the distinguished roll call of those who have received my award, I see that in return they are encouraged to offer an “important statement of philosophy or accomplishment about the importance of printing history and the book arts”. It’s not for me to offer an opinion on the accomplishment or the importance, but I think I can do a bit of philosophy, so here it is.

When I began to work in Bride Lane I used to think how different its part of London must have been when Berry was a boy in 1900. He was born in 1888 and his father had been a saddler in Lower Thames Street, not so very far from the address of the library in Bride Lane. At that time all the heavy goods were still carried around very slowly on carts hauled by huge gentle horses – which was a reason why the saddler’s trade was important – saddlers made harness for carthorses. But in some ways it had not changed so very much. At the beginning of the 20th century the district to the north and south of Fleet Street contained the greatest concentration in the world – even if we take cities like Leipzig and Chicago into account – of publishers and printers and their suppliers – lithographers, blockmakers, papermakers, inkmakers and typefounders. There were rather fewer publishers there in the 1950s than there had been in 1900, since some had moved to another part of London or out of London altogether, and many of their offices and warehouses had been destroyed by the fire-bombs of 1940 when millions of books were destroyed in a single night, and half-burnt pages floated to the ground several miles away. But several of the old-established printers and publishers rebuilt their offices after the war, and others had survived intact, unchanged for centuries.

One survival was Taylor & Francis in Red Lion Court, specialist scientific printers and publishers who are still in business and flourishing. They had been in their building in Red Lion court – a splendid merchant’s house of the late-17th-century with fine decorated plaster ceilings and a noble staircase – since the 1790s. But in 1969 it was discovered that the effect of the weight of accumulated metal in the old structure was making it imperative for the firm to quit the building fast, and they moved to a part of South London where they still operate. Happily the library in Bride Lane was able to step in to offer a home for their papers, a massive and important archive which includes correspondence of about 1810 with one Friedrich König: Richard Taylor, founder of the firm, was one of the consortium that invested in his steam printing machine.

Fleet Street of course was still the home of the newspapers. Every night, until the middle of the 1980s, millions of newspapers were printed within a radius of less than half a mile, including, at its peak in the late 1950s, eight million copies of one title alone, the Sunday paper called The News of the World. Even in the 1970s, on hot summer nights in Red Lion Court, after workers in the surrounding offices had gone home, when the windows of the composing room of the Daily Telegraph were wide open, you could hear the musical tinkle of the Linotype mats as they were recycled in the magazine, and every so often, in quiet streets, the familiar clack of the Monotype caster came from the trade typesetters.

Those of us who visited newspapers at this period remember the sight of a news page of solid Linotype and Ludlow slugs being made up on the stone with astounding speed and skill, and then, the curved stereo plates having been locked to the massive cylinders, seeing them turning slowly at first, then faster and faster, until that endless stream of paper flowed between them with a deafening roar. Things are of course quieter, safer and duller now: the presses are boxed in and controlled by cool, efficient electronics. Those compositors and press operators had the heroic quality of engineers on the footplate of a great steam locomotive. Curiously enough, last October, when I was waiting to catch a train at the Gare du Nord in Paris, where the sleek electric Eurostar trains arrive from London, I found a train at one track which was made up of old-fashioned sleeping and dining cars, all of them museum-pieces. They were hitched to a huge black live steam locomotive. Just as I reached it, it belched an enormous cloud of steam, gave the high-pitched shriek that was typical of French locomotives, and the pistons slowly began to drive its vast steel wheels. What excitement to see all that heavy hot metal in motion once again!

I mention this because early last year the London Science Museum unveiled its latest prize: a single unit from one of the Goss presses that printed the Daily Mail in Fleet Street, extracted from the basement level where it had been entombed since 1986, when Rupert Murdoch changed the technology of the British newspaper industry. It was taken to the Museum’s storage area on an airfield ninety miles from London where it was painstakingly restored. As a piece of industrial archaeology it deserves respect. But it is only a single unit from a press that was once a hundred feet long, and it will never print again. It is a sad sight. One might as well exhibit a caged eagle – or a steam locomotive with its firebox cold.

Mention of this press is a reminder that the technology of printing did change, even in Fleet Street. For us in London the date when it became obvious that the change was not only inevitable but would now happen at an increasing pace was 1963, when the machinery manufacturers sponsored a historical exhibition in the middle of the chief British printing trade show known as IPEX.

‘Printing and the mind of man’ aimed to show ‘what Western Civilization owes to print’. It was proof, among other things, of Stanley Morison’s remarkable ability to charm money out of practical men for causes be believed to be worthwhile. The idea of the exhibition went back to 1940, when it had been decided to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the discovery of printing by showing what impact the printed word had had on ideas. What was new in 1963 was that the books containing the Great Thoughts of Western Man (woman, western or otherwise, hardly came into it) were set in the middle of a loan collection of objects showing the development of the technology that had got the words onto the paper – presses, machines, type, punches and matrices. It was suddenly clear that the gap between printing as we had known it and the hardware down on the floor of the trade exhibition was wider than we had realised, and was widening very fast.

I was as one of the team who had found the machines and other things, and written descriptions of them and the processes that they used. We discovered that far too little had been written about either the processes or the machines. Surviving examples were already vanishing fast, and so too were those who could tell us at first hand how they were used.

What was to be done? One of the members of our team was a printing journalist called James Moran, and he thought there should be a society to promote the study of printing history – something with a more hands-on sense of the realities of the printing trade than you could find among the bibliographical societies, which appeared to be more concerned with antiquarian books and libraries than with the realities of the shop floor. (This was not altogether fair, at any rate to the British Bibliographical Society, which had published such works as Ellic Howe’s The London compositor.). There was a certain amount of scepticism about the idea – Moran’s own personality and his record as a historian were responsible for that. But he founded his society anyway, in the Reading Room of the St Bride Printing Library, inviting anyone who might be interested to join him. So the sceptics conceded that there might be something in his project and that if it was going to happen anyway, they might as well be part of it.

That is how the Printing Historical Society happened. I mention it now, because after a few years some of the Society’s American members decided to form themselves into an American Chapter. This began to ring alarm bells. What if the Chapter on the other side of the Atlantic acted independently of the mother institution, or even told it what to do? With masterly diplomacy, drawing on well-remembered precedent, the British society decided that it was wisest to encourage the North American chapter to assert its independence, and so the American Printing History Association was more or less nudged into existence. I don’t know how this episode is dealt with in APHA’S official history, if such a thing exists, but that is how it looked to us.

Maybe I ought to add a word on how I got into printing. I went to school in Twickenham, now a south-western suburb of London, which was the home of Adana, the British equivalent of the Kelsey company, which made presses and sold small founts of type. Like John Baskerville I got passionately interested for letters and bought myself a little fount of Times Roman. I did my first printing with a press made out of a tobacco tin. I arrived as a student at Cambridge ready to put this infantile craze behind me, but as fate stepped in. In my first term I found that Philip Gaskell, fellow of King’s College, had set up a Press to provide graduate students of English with a little printing office that would enable scholars to solve the textual puzzles due to accidents of the press, following the model recommended by English bibliographers like R. B. McKerrow.

The Water Lane Press, called after a street in medieval Cambridge that ran through the site, was in a vaulted cellar of the splendid Gibbs building of about 1720 that flanks the college chapel. There was a marvellous scent of ink and paper. The University Press lent a press – a cast-iron Stanhope made by Robert Walker, with the serial number 108, and they cast some founts of Garamond and Bembo for it on their Monotype machines. In the event, the graduate students did not take much notice of it but it attracted a small flock of undergraduates who really had no business there. I was one of them.

Fate having stepped in so helpfully, I should have been ungrateful to resist it, so I spent much of my time at Cambridge setting type and printing. Gaskell wanted to do serious work, and his major project was to print an edition in octavo. The apprentices were allowed to set long takes of copy, which Gaskell put through the stick again to bring them up to his standard of setting.

I came back to Cambridge during a vacation to act as puller to his beater (Gaskell didn’t trust anyone else to do the inking, but the pressman could provide muscle and could do relatively little damage). We printed on reams of paper that had been properly damped in the traditional way. There were a thousand sheets to print – so two thousand impressions to make. It would have been a day’s work in the 18th century, but it took us three days, painfully acquiring the technique of printing a full octavo forme and backing it up. It was only on the third day that the job quite suddenly began to acquire its own natural rhythm. We found that we were co-ordinating the two tasks of pulling and beating more easily. I was no longer pulling the bar of the press like a rower but letting my body-weight do the work. (Just how effective this technique was I found out when, becoming just a bit too relaxed, I failed to grab the bar in time and shot myself backwards across the pressroom.)

If I tell this story it is not to boast of anything particularly special. Plenty of people have worked at the hand press and some still do. Williamsburg has the most perfect and accurate working reconstruction of an 18th-century office that I have ever seen. But for me it was a revelation to cross the barrier – however briefly and partially – between slow and painstaking reconstruction and reliving the experience. The difference between an edition of a few hundred impressions and two thousand were decisive. And I never did it again because Gaskell realistically cut the number of the next sheet to five hundred. And in the event, for various reasons, the third sheet was machined by the University Press.

So am I claiming a special, private insight into aspects of printing from which library-bound scholars are excluded? Only partially, and I hope modestly. I ought to say that among writers on type and printing I have always had a special regard – and I am not the only one – is Harry Carter. This is partly because his writing has exceptional clarity and brevity. But chiefly because he had special qualifications for writing about punchcutting and typefounding and printing at the hand press. I have done a few of these things. Unlike either Updike or Morison, Carter had done them all.

Which brings me to some concluding thoughts. As I speak the last professional punchcutters in the world, who work in the Cabinet des poinçons at the Imprimerie nationale in Paris, are working out the last few months of their tenure: by next year the Cabinet des poinçons will no longer exist in the form that it has maintained since 1948, with links to a tradition that goes back to Garamond.

Type now exists almost wholly – though thank goodness not entirely – in digital form. I don’t deplore that change. I think in many ways it has done more to raise the standard of the typography of books and journals than any event in my lifetime. And it has democratised type. I have had some experience of reviving historical models in digital form and trying to make them work by aligning and spacing them myself, and I have found it a rewarding and exciting experience. I still have hopes that imaging software will fulfil a promise that I remember being made decades ago, namely to take the images of type on paper, distorted as they are by wear and variations of inking and impression, and to recognize those that are derived from the same punches, rejecting the others that are only copies or look-alikes. In the past we have been far too dependent on the eye of the bibliographer, and while Updike and Carter, and Proctor and Morison too, were pretty good at spotting identities, I could – but won’t – give you a great many examples of their fallibility.

When the gods give you what you are asking for, they have a habit of doing so in a way that can take you aback. A couple of years ago I was present at the computer-generated typographical firework display mounted in London by Paul Needham and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, which was repeated not long afterwards here in New York. It had something to do with Gutenberg’s type. I am still not quite sure what I saw and what it meant and I look forward to reading about it and finding out. But at any rate it was clear that Dr Needham was once again stirring conventional thinking about early type out of the complacent consensus in which it had rested during recent decades.

You may know Pope’s epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton, celebrating the new cosmic certainties of the enlightenment :

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.
God said, Let Newton be ! and all was light.

Sir John Squire’s reply, written in the 1920s, is rather less familiar:

It did not last. The Devil howling, Ho,
Let Einstein be! restored the status quo.

Carter brought a kind of Newtonian certainty to his subject. I’m not sure if Dr Needham would claim the status of Einstein, but printing history is none the worse for receiving the kind of jolts that are his speciality, and it seems to me that for a few years historians of early printing had better fasten their seat belts : it may be a bumpy flight.

A last word about New York, where I am delighted to find myself again. I first came here thirty-five years ago as a kind of afterthought to the series of lectures called ‘The Heritage of the Graphic Arts’, which were promoted by the legendary Doc Leslie. His payment was to send me my air ticket from London – a fabulous fee in those days. Other friends who I had got to know during their visits to Britain, added locations that turned my trip into a lecture tour, and so began a whole new way of life, following in the footsteps of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. These friends were people like Mike Parker, who followed Jackson Burke as director type development at Mergenthaler Linotype, and the book-filled lower floor of his house in Brooklyn was my base as long as I cared to stay. There was Rollo Silver in Boston, who opened the doors of the New England libraries for me. Jim Wells at the Newberry Library. And Carolyn Hammer in Kentucky, whose King Library printing office in Lexington used the beautiful wooden press made in Florence for Victor Hammer’s Stamperia del Santuccio. I remember that, meeting my plane at Lexington, she took me straight to that extraordinary and splendid research library at Keeneland which is wholly devoted to horses as St Bride and its peers are to typography. And although I know nothing about horses, I felt instantly at home.

And began my alternative career as a wandering lecturer, which made a wonderful change from the librarian’s life. My impresario on the second trip was Terry Belanger, lecturer in the School of Library Service at Columbia, and the hospitable apartment of Allen and Edith Hazen on Riverside Drive became my base in New York. I said I claimed Dickens and Wilde as role models, but in reality they are Mark Twain’s King and Duke. You arrive, perform once, perhaps twice, but then, if you know what is good for you, you leave town fast. But those visits to major libraries were incredibly useful opportunities for gaining access to original materials that I should never have seen in any other way.

For Terry Belanger’s birthday party here in New York City a couple of years ago, I wrote a piece that reminded him of our first encounter. Not many of you will have seen it, so perhaps I can repeat it by way of conclusion. Before I met him I got to New York and was in my mid-town hotel, still operating on London time. By 8.30 am it seemed to me that it was a quite reasonable time to call anyone. But it did not go down well. There was an inarticulate groan at the other end of the line. ‘I’m sorry – did I wake you?’ I said – ‘Had to happen some time I suppose’, he said unconvincingly.

When I am at Rare Book School, now exiled from the calm and quiet of Broadway to the rush and hurly-burly of Charlottesville, Virginia, we teachers and our victims gather together at dawn for coffee, bleary-eyed and hardly awake. Professor Belanger strikes his gong. (In fact it’s quite a melodious xylophone but none the more welcome for that). And he sends us brutally off to start our day’s work. It is exactly 8.30 am.

The life of a wandering professor is full of such trials, but it has its compensations. And many of them – you that is – are present here this afternoon. Thank you all very much.

James Mosley
22 January 2003
Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.