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.
APHA presented its 2004 Individual Award to D.W. Krummel, Professor Emeritus of Library Science and Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana. He is the author of many books on music printing and the history of bibliography. These acceptance remarks were delivered at APHA’s annual meeting held at the New York Public Library on January 24, 2004, and have been slightly revised for presentation on the web. I’m delighted by this honor, but I’m also rather embarrassed. I surely don’t want to move that APHA should impeach its Awards Committee. But my manners are bad, my taste is bad, my faith is bad, and my scholarship is bad, and I need to ask you to allow me this confessional.
First, the bad manners: This, briefly, is the sad story of my talk at the annual APHA meeting eighteen years ago. A blizzard kept me from coming in from Illinois a day or two early. So, the day of my talk I got up with the roosters at 4 am, caught a 6 o’clock flight that landed at 9:30, caught a cab, and read my paper about 10:30; and during the afternoon session the day caught up with me. I remember the person I sat next to later giving my a knowing smile that said, “Yes, you did really snore; and loudly.” My other sins lie deeper, and may be less forgivable.
As for bad taste, this is not my own printing many years ago. (After all, it was no worse than my piano playing.) Rather, it is that I should study music printing in the first place. Now music and printing have much in common. Both work through an artistry based in craftsmanship—trained hands working in the one with trained ears, in the other with trained eyes—all of this best learned not from textbooks but through practice under a master. But in one important way the two are quite opposite. The music is gone as soon as it sounds: one must listen very carefully. Printing, on the other hand, leads to objects that are there to be examined afterwards. Good oboists know how to breathe in the middle of a phrase, Wagnerian sopranos know when to mouth it because the brass will drown them out, and the skill with which they cover up is part of the beauty of the performance. But printers who cheat like this are humiliated as long as their presswork survives.
Printed music is rarely handsome to look at, for good reason. Its notation can either be committed to memory, so performances can be thought out: the notation is for reference use, an aide memoire, and the printed copy is a last resort. Or the music may be sight-read: and now the momentum of performance needs to overrule any visual distinction that might distract. Over history, furthermore, musical notation has become increasingly nuanced, so that the ideal printed page has come to look less like a Trajan column, more like an engineering blueprint. Admittedly, without printing, Beethoven would be forgotten; the wonderful heritage of American music would be lost. In the printer’s garden, music may be a weed, but its curative powers can be wonderful.
Next, my bibliographical wickedness. Let’s begin with my 1984 book on compiling, and its review in Sovietskya Bibliografia. Here I am accused of being not only “zhurnalistica” (and for this I’m as sorry as I can be, believe me) but also thirty years behind the times. This is because I don’t see the future of bibliographies as tied to downloading. (I’m naughty; and unrepentant. And I’ll be in even bigger trouble with my next book on the history of bibliographical practice. I can hardly wait.)
Bibliography, to my thinking, has its yin and yang, one called rules, the other service. Let me recall Don McKenzie’s 1992 Bib. Soc. centenary lecture, in which he proposed another contrast: stability and durability, on the one hand, and evanescence on the other. Stable systems are those designed to work rather like the medieval Catholic Church: quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus—forever, everywhere, and for everyone. In bibliography, this stability of course allows us to do wonderful things, like verifying citations and locating copies. It also biases our work: the English language rules the world, and subject coverage is often awkward and obsolete for specialized readers. It gets all the more constrained as production schedules and cost accountability enter the picture. The world of ideas, I should like to think, is one more of hunting and gathering than of farms and factories; and bibliography is (or ought to be) part of the world of ideas.
My heresy is actually a bit Pentecostal, in that my faith is less in systems that work from the top down, more in dialogue that works from the bottom up, out of respect for the work being cited and the needs of readers. I use OCLC (that bibliographical Wal-Mart), even if it is dull and often mean: Bigmore and Wyman is less useful, but I love it because it was done for readers like me. Citations work best when they serve their readers. The ideal may be “concise but sufficient,” but it helps if citations serve me and my kindred. Citations ought to play up the odd details of written memory that stimulate readers—and these are of course details of physical presentation as well as textual content. APHA members know how the taste and experience that go into producing physical objects are reflected in the experience of reading. The same spirit of sensitivity—the same crystal goblet—needs to go into the dialogue that leads readers to citations. Over the week you’ll no doubt have picked up citations. It’s one reason why you’re here in person, and why you talk to colleagues.
Finally, bad scholarship. (Strike four.) The list of my typos and errors is long. I’m left-handed, a bit dyslexic, a romantic visionary, lazy, in other words much in need of good editors and proofreaders. Also, like too many of us, clueless, even clueless about my cluelessness. And sometimes just plain wrong, as in the story of the first printed musical notes in Jean Gerson’s Collectorium super Magnificat (ca. 1473). Dull stuff to look at: five quads placed in the forme upside-down at various heights on the page, the staff lines to be drawn in by hand. I’ve too often repeated the conventional wisdom that the printer was Conrad Fyner in Esslingen. Instead, it may be the work of Heinrich Eggestein in Strasbourg. I learned about all just recently in the Sotheby auction catalogue of the Kraus inventory. (And so booksellers’ citations are often more reliable than scholarly prose or cataloguing records: and so who is surprised?) Sotheby-Kraus cites a 1950 Gutenberg Jahrbuch piece by Victor Scholderer. Now I remember old Scholderer from the British Museum. Alec Hyatt King, my mentor there; pointed him out to me in the North Library, and most admiringly. But Alec’s own book on music printing says Fyner.
So did Alec even know Scholderer’s piece? Or did he talk to Scholderer, who said he had second thoughts? ISTC (or now IISTC2, or someday IIISTC3 or 4) may settle the question. And it could be that fifty years behind the times is the right place to be. In any event, my cop-out—and my point—is that bibliography (like music making, and like printing) depends on stability, evanescence, and monuments, but also on activities and processes. It works when scholars and compilers know how to talk to readers, both at large and in their specialties; and readers who know when and how to figure out what is really going on. To my thinking, bibliographicalbricolage—tinkering, improvising, tweaking, wits and smarts—is just as important as methodology and system. (Understandably, my life in academia has not always been a happy one.) In music, similar skills are needed by a string quartet when, for instance, the violist has a bad back, the weather outside is unseasonably balmy so as to affect the intonation of the instruments, and I am snoring in the third row. In printing, I live in hopes of someone writing a history of the practice of makeready.
Here endeth my confessional, and I hope nobody is too disgraced. Have no doubts about it, however: for all my ill manners, vulgarity, heresy, and fallibility, I’m absolutely delighted to receive this honor, and most genuinely grateful.
D. W. Krummel 23 January 2004 Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.
In 2005 the Individual Award will go to Robert Darnton, an outstanding teacher and lecturer who will be honored for his many publications as well as for his exemplary scholarship in the field of book history. Professor Darnton, the Shelby Cullom David ’30 Professor of European History at Princeton University, is most widely known for his pioneering work in the archives of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, which made use of an innovative approach to the use of archival materials for analyzing printing and publishing practices in 18th-century France. The outcome of his researches was published in 1979 as The Business of the Enlightenment: a Publishing History of the Encyclopédie which, along with the many books and articles he had written since, has added a whole new dimension to the study of the history of the book in Europe. Darnton’s works continue to be very influential, appealing not only to the world of academe but to the general reader as well.
Elizabeth M. Harris Elizabeth M. Harris, former Curator of Graphic Arts in the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, is the 2006 Individual Laureate. Her varied publications record includes articles on 19th-century printing processes–compound plate printing, glyphography, nature printing, and map printing, to name just a few–and printing presses, such as The Common Press (with Clinton Sisson, 1978), andPersonal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth-Century America (2004). Harris’s innovative Smithsonian exhibitions on such topics as pochoir, printing for the blind, and American wood type are highlights of her distinguished career as an educator.
Introduction of Elizabeth M. Harris Introductory remarks by David R. Whitesell
On behalf of the other members of APHA’s Awards committee—Julia Blakely, Patricia Fleming, and Jane Rodgers Siegel—it is my honor to present the 2006 American Printing History Association Individual and Institutional Awards for Distinguished Achievement in Printing History. I will not trouble you with details of our deliberations, other than to say how grateful I am to Julia, Pat, and Jane for their hard work and thoughtful counsel. One other person also deserves mention, and that is APHA Honorary Member Lili Wronker, who once again has provided the calligraphy for the awards certificates. Thank you, Lili! Oh, and I must not overlook APHA Executive Secretary Steve Crook, whose expert assistance is appreciated by us all.
Let me begin by asking: How many of you attended the 1991 APHA Conference in Washington, D.C.? I remember it well, not only because it was the first I attended, but because it remains one of the most varied and interesting conferences APHA has ever sponsored. An indelible memory is my visit to the National Museum of American History. There, by the printing and graphic arts displays, I encountered a group of children who were excitedly printing—not, mind you, with type and press, but with a fish! Before long a number of big APHA kids had gathered round, the more fortunate ones soon sporting their nature-printed T-shirts to envious friends.
The impresario of this scaly wayzgoose was none other than this year’s individual laureate, Elizabeth M. Harris, former Curator of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. My anecdote can only hint at why Elizabeth Harris has had a stellar career as scholar and educator. But let me tell you more, and rest assured that this is no fish story!
Elizabeth Harris came to prominence in the 1960’s with a series of influential articles on 19th-century printing and illustration processes. In these she demonstrated both the resolve and the expertise to tackle the difficult subjects that many avoided: compound plate printing, medal engraving, glyphography, nature printing, and map printing processes, to name just a few.
During the 1970’s Harris’s interests shifted from printing surfaces to printing presses. She collaborated with Clinton Sisson on the 1978 publication, The Common Press, an authoritative study of the Smithsonian’s 18th-century wooden hand press. Later Harris published catalogs of the Smithsonian’s remarkable holdings of printing presses and printing-related patent models. Her latest book, Personal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth-Century America, is both a definitive catalog of 19th-century small presses and an engaging study of their use by American amateur printers.
During her tenure at the Smithsonian, Harris was responsible for rescuing from oblivion many important artifacts and archives relating to printing history. As an educator Harris has had few peers, for her innovative series of Smithsonian exhibitions and catalogs on such subjects as pochoir, printing for the blind, and American wood type have introduced an entire generation to the allure of printing history.
Following her retirement in 1997, Harris returned to her native England. There she has set forth on a new adventure: that of raising goats and making cheese. I regret to say that her present responsibilities made a quick trip to New York problematic at best, and in the end it was not possible for her to be with us this afternoon. Although she cannot be here to accept the award in person, I hope that you will nonetheless join me in congratulating Elizabeth Harris for an exemplary life of achievement in printing history.
Elizabeth Harris has prepared some remarks for this occasion, and I will now call on Jane Rodgers Siegel of the Awards Committee to deliver these on her behalf.
Acceptance Remarks of Elizabeth M. Harris
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Greetings from Dorset, Thomas Hardy country.
I am enormously moved and grateful to the APHA for this award, and to the Awards Committee for conveying the news of it and now giving you my response. The news was a complete surprise, and it revived some beautiful memories that I will keep with me in my very different new world of goat and cheese farming, in this agricultural county of Dorset in the south of England. Many memories in fact, but I’ll mention just a few. One project that gave me particular pleasure was working on the history of printing for the blind — not only because I’ve always found languages in all forms to be intriguing and this turned out to be a rich field of them, but because I met and learned from some inspiring people, blind and sighted. Then, quite different, there was an exhibition on nature printing — the idea of getting an object to produce its own portrait has surely appealed to humans for as long as we have made pictures, if we can include that stencilled image of a hand on a cave wall. The nature printing exhibition came to life, I thought, with our weekly demonstrations of fish printing on t-shirts, but this activity divided my colleagues. Is it worthy of a museum of sober scholars to be squashing fishes on to t-shirts? Oh yes, I did enjoy that controversy. And finally, research into 19th century small presses, which spread over my last 15-plus years at the Museum, fed the puzzle-loving part of my head: it was fun, and full of little surprises and new friends, and if it wasn’t always easy that just made it better. I will add that the small press puzzle is certainly not solved. I hope someone else will take it up.
And now I’ve come to Dorset. Dorset has not just farmers but several good writers and poets to its name. Apart from Hardy himself, there was William Barnes, born in 1801 on a tenant farm, a bright lad who grew up to be a legal secretary, a minister of the church, a schoolteacher, a philologist, and a poet, as well as a sometime wood and copper engraver, and who finally bought some land and dabbled in farming again. He is remembered as a poet, but it is his philology that I like. He divided his poems between those in “national English” and those in “Dorset dialect.” Barnes grieved for the passing of the old ways of farming. I could tell him that not everything would pass: 150 years later his Dorset dialect survives, and I use his poems as a tutorial. When I arrived here I met my neighbour, a good farmer and a wise man, my own age, who had not set foot outside this county until recently. I liked him, but it took about a year for me to understand what he was saying because he speaks straight from William Barnes. He was quicker to understand me, but that wasn’t instant either. Not just the accent but the words and grammar of Dorset are different from “national English,” and they constantly delight me.
Several years ago I made some presentation to APHA, and I was at that time quite troubled by the thought that the historian who publishes is almost bound to modify history, not simply add to it, in ways that he may not intend. A museum may choose to collect and teach about everyday life in the past, as we did, but instantly those collected everyday relics cease to be everyday and become iconic: major records of the past. The work that Clint Sisson and I did on the Franklin Press seems to have spawned a host of Franklin press replicas, which is certainly a measure of success but, objectively, is it a good thing? Doesn’t it imply that the Franklin press is more important than other contemporary presses that survive? The very term “common press” is often capitalised (as Moxon did but for different reasons) and manages to convey not common but special. All this was beginning to bother me. My own version, I guess, of the physicist’s observation that in measuring something, you always alter it.
Well, I’m pleased to report that I was wrong. It is quite natural not only for historians to disappear, but also whatever they may consider to be their legacy. What remains is not in our own control. When I left the Smithsonian I decided to bequeath my ongoing research files to a colleague or two. I’m told those files no longer exist — and well, perhaps that’s not a bad thing. On the other hand I find that my personal printing past, the one in my head, refuses to be left behind. I try to be a cheesemaker, but keep turning back into a printer. The two cheese presses I use in Dorset, which I built from trees that fell in my Maryland woods (American black walnut, Black Locust, and Eastern Red Cedar) are unmistakably related to Ramage’s portable wooden presses, and like his printing presses they were designed to be dismantled and flat-packed for travel. Thanks to them, I feel I understand Adam Ramage better than I did when I was sharing a museum with his presses. And now that I am outside my old printing world there are other questions I would like to ask him, starting with — really now, Adam, why Honduras mahogany? I’m no longer so sure that it was tougher or more durable than his local woods: a woodworking neighbour tells me it is considered rather light among hardwoods. Was it fashionably exotic in 1810, and if so to what extent did Ramage himself create that fashion? Or was it just available in Philadelphia: who was importing Honduras mahogany, and who else was using it?
Back again to cheesemaking: when my first wheels of hard cheese needed to be dated and numbered I tried all kinds of clever devices but in the end I fell back on what now seems obvious: movable type. So I brand the cheeses with bookbinder’s brass type blackened in the flame of a candle (it’s better than printing type because, apart from the matter of lead and antimony in your cheese, type metal melts in a candle flame. It melts, in fact, at a lower temperature than some cheeses).
Printing history was my life for 35 years, and after all it still is. Printing, I am happy to tell you, will not leave you when you leave it.
Elizabeth M. Harris, January 2006 Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 28, 2006, in the Trustees Room (2nd floor), New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City. A reception followed.
And here we are again. I am Jane Rodgers Siegel, chair of the awards committee. My distinguished colleagues on the committee this year are Cathleen Baker, Michael Russem, and Vic Zoschak.
The criteria for the Individual award read in part: “The Award is for a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.” And the papermaker, printer and publisher Henry Morris has single-handedly contributed to the study, recording, preservation anddissemination of a good bit of printing history.
Sid Berger’s Forty-four Years of Bird & Bull: a Bibliography, 1958-2002, lists 66 items published by Henry Morris, in addition to 45 items printed for others and 37 items of ephemera; to bring us more-or-less up-to-date, I find in Columbia’s catalog eight additional items, including the Bibliography, published since, making 74 items published – so far. Perhaps we’ll hear soon what Henry has up his sleeve now.
Morris started Bird and Bull, one of America’s oldest private presses, in 1958 as an outlet for his new-found interest in hand papermaking – an interest sparked by a piece of fifteenth-century paper. Indeed, his strong interest in the art and history of handmade paper has resulted in a variety of books on Western, Japanese, and Chinese papermaking, and marbled and decorated papers, from Henk Voorn on Old Ream Wrappers (1969) toDard Hunter and Son, by Dard Hunter II (1998), the unforgettably largeNicolas Louis Robert and His Endless Wire Papermaking Machine(2000), and Sid Berger on Karli Frigge’s Life in Marbling (2004). Morris’s 2006 J. Ben Lieberman Memorial lecture describes his belief that “Paper: There wouldn’t be any Printing History without It.”
Bird & Bull has also published on the history of printing and book illustration, including John Feather on English Book Prospectuses (1984) and Gaylord Schanilec on My Colorful Career (1996); works on bookbinding include Bernard Middleton’s Recollections (1995). Henry’s significant collection of typographic numismatics led to several works, including his reprint of William Blades’ Numismata Typographica, the Medallic History of Printing (1992), and to his Trade Tokens of British and American Booksellers and Bookmakers, with Specimens of Eleven Original Tokens Struck Especially for this Book (1989).
Morris’s publishing program has been a boon to the historian of the book. He is correct when he writes “It pleases me to know that without the Bird & Bull, many books on worthwhile, albeit esoteric subjects would probably never have been published.” And all these works have been printed by letterpress from metal type on either Henry’s own handmade or on imported mould-made papers.
Aside from his serious and informative publishing program, Morris has also produced a steady stream of humorous and satirical work. Particularly, his additions to the history of the fictional island nation, the Republic of San Serriffe, have created a parallel and offbeat universe of the book, which many enjoy reading about in its various chronicles, even if we are just as glad we can never actually visit it.
It gives me great pleasure to present the 2007 [sic] American Printing History Association Individual Award for Distinguished Achievement in Printing History to the distinctive – and distinguished – Henry Morris.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 28, 2008, New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City. A reception followed.
The 2009 APHA Awards Committee nominates typographical historian and author Robert Bringhurst as the recipient of the APHA Individual Award. This award is intended to recognize “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.” In nominating Robert Bringhurst, the committee notes his significant series of publications which have contributed to our study and understanding of the broad cultural contexts of typography.
Bringhurst’s highly important and influential manual, The Elements of Typographic Style, was first published in 1992. Eloquently written, Bringhurst’s work engages the reader masterfully with aesthetic, cultural, and historic approaches to understanding and practicing typography. Richard Eckersley noted in Bookways (Number 9, October 1993), “It is a breadth of vision one associates with the Renaissance, a vision that persisted into the eighteenth century, when publishers were also writers, translators, compositors, printers, papermakers, and, above all, readers.” Paul Koda, writing in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (Volume 89, Number 4, December 1995) concluded that the work “will be retained as a milestone in book making and book history. . . . The Elements of Typographic Style belongs on all our shelves.” Printer, publisher, and designer Gerald Lange, in Abracadabra (Number 7, Spring 1993), wrote that the manual “combines the practical, the theoretical, and the historical in a manner that is a delightful pleasure to read and of value not only to the amateur but to the professional as well.” Bringhurst has revised The Elements of Typographic Style five times, most recently in 2005, with substantive additions to the text. Now in its third edition, the manual has also been translated into ten languages.
Following the initial publication of The Elements of Typographic Style,Bringhurst produced a series of detailed essays on specific aspects of typographic history. Published in Serif: The Magazine of Type & Typography, these include:
“On the Classification of Letterforms,” Serif (Number 1, Fall 1994).
“Holding Ideas in the Hand: The Physics & Metaphysics of Renaissance Letterforms,” Serif (Number 2, Winter 1995).
“Painting with Ink & Steel: The Roman & Italic Types of the Baroque Age,” Serif (Number 3, Fall 1995).
“The Invisible Hand, Part I: Neoclassical Letterforms,” Serif(Number 4, Spring 1996).
“The Invisible Hand, Part II: Roman & Italic Type in the Romantic Age,” Serif (Number 5, Fall 1997).
An additional essay on typography, “The Typographic Nude,” was published in Critique in 1997. In October 2000 Bringhurst delivered the keynote address at APHA’s 25th Annual Conference, published in Printing History 46 under the title “The Voice in the Mirror.” (This was not his first presentation at APHA, as he also delivered APHA’s 1993 J. Ben Lieberman Memorial Lecture.) Bringhurst’s recent publications include The Solid Form of Language (2004), an extended essay on language, writing, and typography, and The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada (2008), a survey of English and French-Canadian books and book design from the early 19th-century to the present.
In addition to his own writings related to printing history, Bringhurst has also been involved in making the work of others readily available. He is responsible for the 1999 second edition, revised and updated, of A Short History of the Printed Word. He and Warren Chappel are co-authors of this second edition. He also edited, and provided an introduction to, the 1991 English translation of Jan Tschichold’s The Form of the Book.
In his publications, Bringhurst has influenced the way students, scholars, curators, and practitioners of typography approach, consider, understand, collect, and create. His placement of type within a larger cultural context—as an object of serious art historical and anthropological study—is an important contribution to printing history.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 24, 2009, New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City.
The 2010 APHA Awards Committee has nominated Johanna Drucker, prolific author and internationally recognized authority in the book arts, as the recipient of the APHA Individual Award. This award is intended to recognize “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.” In nominating Johanna Drucker, the committee cites her significant series of scholarly publications which have contributed to our study and understanding of the intellectual and aesthetic contexts of typography, the history of printing, and the book as object; her lectures and exhibitions; and her teaching.
Drucker’s important scholarly book publications include The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (1995); The Century of Artists’ Books (1995, Second edition, 2004); Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics (1998); and The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art (1994). In addition to these scholarly monographs, Drucker has published more than one hundred critical and scholarly articles concerning contemporary art, visual culture, graphic design, artists’ books, and the book. A selective listing of articles which focus on printing history and typography includes: “Graphical Readings and the Visual Aesthetics of Textuality” (2005/2006); “What is a Letter?” (in the volume Education of a Typographer (2004)); “Typographic Intelligence” (in Typographically Speaking: The Work of Matthew Carter (2002, reissue 2004)); “The Artist’s Book as Idea and Form” (2000); “Experimental Narrative and Artist’s Books” (1999); “Collaborative Ty/opography” (1999); “The Art of the Written Image” (1997); and “The Myth of the Democratic Multiple” (1997). Her contributions to the study and dissemination of printing history also include the publishing of book reviews and shorter pieces; participating on panels and in symposia; delivering scholarly and critical lectures (including APHA’s 2001 Lieberman Lecture); and curating exhibitions. Several of her works have been published for international distribution, with translations into Catalan, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Complementing this prodigious activity, Drucker has also contributed to the understanding of printing history through her teaching. Since 2008 she has served as the inaugural Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. From 1999 to 2008 at the University of Virginia she held the Robertson Chair in Media Studies and served as Professor, Department of English, and Director of Media Studies. She has also held positions at Purchase College, SUNY; Yale; Columbia; Harvard; and the University of Texas at Dallas.
In her publications, presentations, exhibitions, and teaching, Drucker has challenged and influenced the way in which scholars, students, curators, and practitioners of typography consider, understand, collect, and create. Her placement of letterforms and books within a larger cultural context — as worthy objects of serious intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic concern and engagement — is an important contribution to printing history.
It is a pleasure to present this year’s American Printing History Association Individual Award to Johanna Drucker.
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The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 30, 2010, New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City.
Hendrik D. L. Vervliet is Professor and Library Director Emeritus of the University of Antwerp, and has been a leading researcher on the history of types in the early modern period for over forty years. His body of work is one of the largest and most important contributions by a single scholar to the history of Renaissance typography and the history of the book more generally.
Vervliet’s many studies of early type have led to precise identifications and descriptions of individual fonts and dates for their use by various printers in several European cities, thereby offering for the first time a clear understanding of the relationships between type founders and printers in a period of great design innovation. This kind of work has already changed our notions of originality and imitation in the field of type design, and it will enable future researchers and critics to even better assess the aesthetic history of Renaissance typography. Vervliet’s most recent book on Paris types and printers of the sixteenth century offers an outstanding, up-to-date model of bibliographical analysis, close type comparison, and historical judgment as applied to typography.
Vervliet has also edited numerous source documents and facsimiles relating to printing and type history. These range from annotated portfolios of type specimens to the correspondence of important publishers with the great intellectuals of their day. Most impressive in this latter regard is his edition of the correspondence of Justus Lipsius. Vervliet was the sole editor of the Annual Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries from 1974 to 1990, when, upon his retirement, it was determined that this enormous international project could only be continued by a large team of editors. Under Vervliet, this indispensable reference work chronicled the progress of book history during the fertile period that saw the birth of the new history of the book. It remains a standard reference.
The 2012 APHA Awards Committee nominates the Reverend Michael F. Suarez, S. J., internationally recognized authority on book history, editor, bibliographer, teacher, book collector, and poet as the recipient of the APHA Individual Award. This award, of course, addresses only one dimension of the remarkable career of Father Suarez, in that it is intended to recognize “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.”
In this specific regard, then, the Association recognizes that across some twenty-five years, Michael Suarez has published notable works in the academic study of printing and publishing history, has taught undergraduates and graduate students alike to understand the importance of the book as an object, and has encouraged the production of new historical scholarship by others. In the first of these fields, scholarly publishing, we cite above all his many important articles on publishing and the book trade in seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century Britain. Suarez’s 1996 book Traficking in the Muse is a study of poetic canonicity as established by publisher Robert Dodsley. In addition to these direct contributions to the history of printing, he is co-general editor of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (in progress) and has co-edited one volume of it. As a teacher, we recognize his long career at LeMoyne College, Fordham and Oxford Universities, and the University of Virginia. As a mentor and facilitator of other scholars, he is probably best known for his work as co-editor of and contributor to the Oxford Companion to the Book (2010) and of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (2009), but he has also been a contributing or advisory editor to the Oxford Chronology of the Book and The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th edition, and he edited the six-volume edition of Dodsley’sA Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1997).He has also edited the collected essays of D. F. McKenzie, and authored a number of original methodological talks and essays on writing and using book history. We commend as well his willingness to give frequent public lectures on topics related to book history.
In September 2009, Michael Suarez assumed the directorship of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, a forum in which he is already making important new contributions to the study of bibliography, printing and book history, curatorship, and librarianship. The APHA award comes with our sincere best wishes for the future success of his own work and that of the Rare Book School.
It is a pleasure to present this year’s American Printing History Association Individual Award to Michael Suarez.
The 2013 APHA Awards Committee names Sebastian Carter as the recipient of the APHA Individual Award. This award is intended to recognize “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.”
It is almost as if the description of the award was crafted for him. Until 2008, when Carter shut it down, he was proprietor of the Rampant Lions Press. It was founded by his father Will Carter in 1924, giving it perhaps the longest run of a private press in United Kingdom. Apart from being an intelligent designer of books, he is also a smart publisher and a scholar. He is author of Twentieth Century Type Designers (published first by Trefoil in 1987, and a later second edition by Lund-Humphries in 1995), a definitive book on the subject which has been reprinted many times since its first release. He is also the UK editor of Parenthesis, the journal of the Fine Press Book Association. He is an articulate writer about typography, printing, and book design. His articles in Matrix, the Times Literary Supplement, and Parenthesis–on printing history, book design, and typography–have been enjoyed by scholars and general readers since the 1960s. His contributions to Matrix alone would merit some special honor.
A sampling of the titles of his books and articles establishes the range of his contributions: The Book Becomes, The Making of A Fine Edition, 1984; In Praise of Letterpress, 2001; Painting With Type, 2007; “Arnold Fawcus and the Trianon Press” (in Matrix 3), 1983; “Victor Hammer” (in Matrix7), 1987; “Stanley Morison and Jan Van Krimpen: A Survey of their Correspondence,” (4 parts in Matrix 8-11), 1988-1991; “Letters & Things. Wood Engraved Initials of Eric Gill (in Matrix 15), 1995; “The Golden Cockerel Press, private presses, and private types,” 1996; “Steven Heller and Lita Talarico: Typography Sketchbooks” in the Times Literary Supplement, 2012.
He guest-edited a number of The Monotype Recorder on Eric Gill in 1990, and contributed a section called “The Morison Years” to the centenaryRecorder in 1997. He is a co-author of the History of the Monotype Corporation to be published by the Printing Historical Society. He contributed a number of entries to The Oxford Companion to the Book(2010).
He was born in 1941 in Cambridge, England. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital, and King’s College, Cambridge, reading English and Architecture and Fine Arts. He then worked as a designer with the London publisher John Murray, followed by two years in Paris with the Trianon Press. Back in London he worked for the Stellar Press and Ruari McLean Associates. In 1966 he married Penelope Kerr and moved back to Cambridge to join his father at Rampant Lions. He became a partner in 1971 and took over the business in 1991.
It is a pleasure to present this year’s American Printing History Association Individual Award to Sebastian Carter.
