Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione, founded in 1995, is a museum, archive, library, and “working studio print shop” in Cornuda, Italy. Sandro Berra, Director of Tipoteca, presented on his organization’s efforts to “encourage the dialogue between past and present” and “discover and experience the beauty of letterpress” as part of a panel with Mark Barbour of the other 2023 institutional awardee, the International Printing Museum. Open to the public for tours, workshops, and research, Tipoteca is the first international organization to be selected for APHA’s Institutional award. 

Sandro Berra’s Acceptance Speech 

The International Printing Museum in Carson, California, was established in 1988, and brings “the history of printing and books to life.” Home to “one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collections of antique printing machinery and graphic arts equipment,” the Museum not only hosts tours, workshops, and classes, but serves as community hub by hosting the annual Los Angeles Printers Fair, now in its fifteenth year. At APHA’s 2020 Awayzgoose, Director Mark Barbour presented, as part of a panel on preserving the history of craft and printing, with another 2023 awardee, Tipoteca’s Sandro Berra.

Mark Barbour’s Acceptance Speech: 

Since 1974 the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York, has provided classes and support encouraging the creation of artists’ books. Frequently produced on historic equipment, the printing of artists’ books has been a major force in the preservation of historic printing equipment as well as in the founding of centers providing public access to printing and training on historic equipment. The Women’s Studio Workshop is one of the largest publishers of artists’ books in addition to originating exhibitions and providing lectures around the country.

Academic book art programs are important contributors to the study of historical printing methods. Founded ninety years ago, the Mills College Book Art Program has taken the lead in developing academic programming that became the model for other institutions. Renowned for developing undergraduate and MFA courses of study and hosting prominent practitioners and scholars in the field, Mills has been central to the establishment of this now respected area of study.

The Press and Letterfoundry of Michael and Winfred Bixler houses one of the most extensive collections of English Monotype type and ornaments in North America. Michael and Winfred Bixler have been involved in fine printing since the late 1960s and have built a reputation on their unparalleled attention to style and detail in the composition of beautiful books. Their client list has included almost every notable fine press of the late twentieth century. Their generous spirit and active support of young designers and printers has had a remarkable impact and is evidenced in their ongoing association with the educational programs of Wells College among other institutions.

8Since it was founded by Kenneth J. Carpenter over thirty years ago, the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada, Reno has been dedicated to the practice and teaching of the arts and crafts associated with the creation of finely printed books. The press now has a national reputation for its outstanding work and has become a living museum of traditional printing technology, housing a variety of cabinets Filled with metal type, and a number of historically significant printing presses. Its centerpiece, a gilded 1837 super-royal Columbian iron handpress, is one of the finest examples of a nineteenth century iron handpress to be found anywhere in the country There is a link from the site to a Quicktime movie of the Columbian Press in action.

The Minnesota Center for the book arts has been an exceptional advocate for the field of book arts for 35 years. MCBA’s facilities, programs, and community stimulates and guides conversations across the breadth of the materials and traditions of the book arts, and between the craft of printing and emerging conceptualizations of the book.

From its position as one of three anchors of Open Book, MCBA creates community as a physical space in a historic area of Minneapolis, in collaboration with The Loft Literary Center and Milkweed Editions. MCBA’s studio and classes are essential to passing on to new practitioners in the art of printing and related skills and by challenging traditional notions of the book. MCBA’s awards, fellowships, mentorships, residencies, classes, and exhibitions cultivate learning at all levels—from the best-known book artists to young children. MCBA is extraordinary in its ability to expose new audiences to the printing, papermaking, bookbinding, and craft. The center is embedded deeply in its local community, even while its exhibitions and artist programs influence the field internationally.

MCBA’s mission is “to lead the advancement of the book as an evolving art form.” Its lifelong learning approach enables practitioners and enthusiasts to take part in shaping the future of the book and to gain a deep appreciation for the traditional printing crafts. I would like to nominate the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts for the American Printing History Association’s 2019 Institutional Award, in recognition of its past and present leadership in the field of book arts, and for its substantial contributions to creating greater appreciation for traditional and emerging strengths of the field.

L-R Nina Schneider, APHA President, George Barnum, Government Publishing Office Agency Historian, Chris Sweterlitsch, APHA Chesapeake Chapter Secretary (Casey Smith)

The U.S. Government Printing Office, now known as the Government Publishing Office, has provided printing and dissemination support functions to the U.S. Government for major historical events for nearly 156 years. In 1862 production began on the printing and distribution of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, perhaps the most historically significant job ever undertaken by the GPO. In late 1964 GPO produced the Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, commonly known as the Warren Report. Over that period and into the present, GPO has reflected the changing technologies, techniques, workforce, and standards of the printing industry in general.

In order to make its historic resources available to the public, GPO reactivated its history program, with dedicated staff, to serve the agency and outside researchers.

This history program includes:

• GPO history exhibit space—the only permanent public display of printing history in Washington, DC;
• Special displays on timely and topical themes such as the Civil War, machine typesetting, and the Congressional Serial Set;
• Publications under GPO imprint;
• Educational opportunities, including lectures, for staff and the public;
• The digitization of GPO’s photo collection; and more.

For its efforts in preserving and documenting its history, which reflect the history of the printing industry, as well as making those resources available to the public, I am pleased to present the U.S. Government Publishing Office with the 2017 APHA Institutional award. George Barnum, Agency Historian, will be accepting the award on behalf of GPO Director, Davita-Vance Cooks–please join me in congratulating the GPO!

Remarks by George Barnum, Agency Historian, U.S. Government Publishing Office:

With thanks to the Awards Committee and the Trustees, we’re very pleased and very honored to receive this award, and to find ourselves among the distinguished roll of previous laureates.

The Government Publishing Office has had a program for collecting, preserving, recording, and interpreting the history of the agency off and on for about the last 30 years. In 2010, after a few years of there having been no designated agency historian, I was appointed with the immediate task of marking our 150th anniversary in 2011. In preparing these remarks, I looked back over the list of the History Program’s projects of over 30 or so years. I’m pleased to say that it’s a good long list, and that a satisfying amount of it has taken place on my watch, with the inspiration and collaboration of many people, not least my immediate boss Andrew Sherman, and my predecessors James Cameron, Daniel MacGilvray, and Barbara Shaw.

We published a new official history in 2011 (and a second, revised edition of it last year), published (this very week) a book of over 200 photographs (and will shortly make that collection available on the internet), created a 2000 sq. ft. ongoing history exhibit that highlights the industrialization of the printing and binding trades in the late 19th and early 20th century, GPO’s prodigious output, and the people who have spent their working lives as part of the GPO family. We preserved a marvelous collection of wood display type that is now used by the students at the Corcoran College/George Washington University. There have also been many smaller projects including a series of bi-weekly lunchtime history talks for the staff (and anybody else who happens to be around).

My fellow GPO employees often say to me after a history talk or other presentation, “Oh, I just love history.” Grateful as I am for their interest, this comment always takes me back to the prospective library school students I used to interview on “career night” when I taught in the at Kent State in the early 90s:

Me : What makes you want to get an MLS?

Prospective student : Oh, I just love books.

To those folks I generally suggested an application at Barnes and Noble rather than a master’s degree. But in the almost-decade that I’ve been GPO historian, I think I’ve started to understand what my co-workers mean.

Government agencies, like many other organizations, are particular, peculiar ecosystems. Their particularity derives from their object of providing a benefit – a service, generally – to people, largely without payment of a fee or much reference to any qualification other than citizenship (and sometimes not even that). GPO is particular and peculiar because it has at its core not only this somewhat abstract duty (embodied in the free and open provision of Government information to the public) but also the very concrete, hands-on mission of an industrial workplace. We actually make stuff.

And while what we make has changed radically in the last 20 or 30 years from primarily ink-on-paper documents (which we still produce an awful lot of) to a mix that includes almost every kind of digital information product you can name, the presence of GPO’s mission is always shining through.

This combined sense of being in the service of the American people and at the same time part of a long tradition of craft-based industry is in the broadest sense what sparks my co-workers’ involvement, investment, and pride in the Office, which I see demonstrated all the time. And from that, I feel, grows the respect and interest they have for the history of the Office. I’ve been very lucky to have had the time, support, and resources to look rather closely this thing we call (in a kind of shorthand) “the GPO way.” It has roots in a lot of things – apprenticeship, the traditions of the printing and binding trades, patriotism, wartime experience, progressive workplace reforms.

One might, perfectly sensibly, ask why a Government agency, and not necessarily a glamorous one either (the State Dept. or NASA we are not) needs a history program at all. I’m reasonably sure that nobody in this room would ask that, but you can be assured that it’s a question that will be asked in the days ahead. If the question is about the significance of the work that my three predecessors and I have done, off and on, for 30 years, here are some thoughts:

• The audience outside our walls for what I do is diverse and probably larger than ever owing to the history exhibit being open to the public five days a week (where we see “regular” people who just turn up, scheduled groups, and lots of people who are in the building for appointments). We’ve also found new ways to engage via the internet. I get direct inquiries, we actively use social media, and we constantly find new ways to interact (like the APHA blog, for example). We’ve seen a big increase in the number of inquiries we get from people doing family history, asking us for information about a grandfather/aunt/uncle/cousin who worked at GPO. We clearly have a significant spot in American printing history, and we have been able to engage with that in many new ways during my time as historian.

• For the people charged with leading the agency, the history program provides information and insight into the place, the workforce, and the culture that can assist in making more nuanced and (we hope) successful decisions. I feel very fortunate that the two agency heads under whom I have been historian, Davita Vance Cooks, the current Director, and her immediate predecessor Bill Boarman, the 26th Public Printer, have believed in that role and valued that insight.

• For the workforce, regardless of the shade of their collar or the part they play in the operation, it provides context, continuity, and an ongoing connection to that sense of mission that seems to have been part of the fabric of the place since we were created by Congress in 1861. What our history program documents is a rather extraordinary marriage of a big printing and binding works with a Government agency. Interpreting that helps our employees understand their role as part of something that’s more than simply a 40-hour per week obligation.

And ultimately the public are beneficiaries of the sense of service and pride in work that comes out of it. My own understanding of GPO’s 156 years is that, owing to that sense of service, there has been a continuing, uninterrupted stream (a river, really) of innovation and adaptation to constantly changing technology, as well as to constantly changing requirements and expectations. It caused us to rise to the challenges of changing economic conditions, world wars, technological revolutions, and yes, political upheaval. It saw us grow to be the largest printing plant on the planet, and has likewise guided us as those numbers of people and machines have decreased while our mission remains unchanged. What is always there is the drive to fill the orders of our Government customers as expeditiously and economically as possible, and to make the product of that work, which has already been paid for by the taxpayer, not only a good piece of work but as broadly and readily available as possible, which we do in a variety of ways, not the least of which is our long partnership with libraries in the Federal Depository Library Program. Without that extra spark, what I look after is only a large file of photographs of industrial machines. It’s my privilege and my joy to document and interpret that particular and peculiar marriage.

Looked at through the lens of study, recording, preservation or dissemination of printing history, (which the APHA Award honors) I am both very proud of the breadth and variety of the list of accomplishments, and humbled by the Awards Committee and Board of Trustees judgment that ours is a “distinguished contribution.” We are very grateful. And while I’m on the topic of gratitude, I must also recognize Chris Sweterlitsch, who wrote the nomination, for which we’re also exceedingly grateful. I’m delighted to accept the 2017 APHA Institutional Award on behalf of the Director of the Government Publishing Office, and the 1700 proud and dedicated men and women of the GPO, a bunch of whom “just love history.”

Cary curators Steve Galbraith and Amelia Fontenal accept APHA’s Institutional Award from APHA president Robert McCamant, January 30, 2016. (Nina Schneider)

APHA Awards committee statement forthcoming.

Jadwiga Tryzno addresses APHA members after receiving the 2015 Institutional Award from President Robert McCamant. (Gwido Zlatkes)  | Book Art Museum English language video.

Introduction by Michael Thompson, Chair, Award Committee
New York, January 24, 2015

 Jack Ginsburg, a noted collector of artists’ books from South Africa, is a person old enough to have lived most of his life during the apartheid regime in his home country. In a presentation he made recently, not too far from here at a conference sponsored by the Center for the Book Arts, he commented that during the apartheid era when he returned home to South Africa from abroad he was always asked by immigration authorities two questions:

            Do you have any guns?

            Do you have any books?

Both, it seems were viewed as threats to the authoritarian regime.

In the hands of an individual not controlled by the state a printing press is a weapon, and we in the American Printing History Association should not forget that. We should not let the first word in our title, “American,” make us complacent, or allow us to forget the challenges faced by others like us living in political environments that are suspicious of, and actually hostile to, the uncensored printed word.

In a country where fine printing and historic printing techniques were almost entirely eradicated under communism, the Book Art Museum  in Łódź has taken on the important role of ensuring the continuity of the art of fine printing. They restore and preserve vintage printing equipment, cultivate printing skills, and perform outreach to the community. The museum originated from Correspondance des Arts, a small press started by the husband and wife team of artists Janusz and Jadwiga Tryzno in 1980, at a time when the Tryznos were actively involved in underground printing for the Solidarity movement. Their press became a Foundation in 1990, and in 1993 the Tryznos opened the Book Art Museum in Łódź.

Currently the Correspondance des Arts publishes artists’ books with original graphic material and with unconventional bindings of various sizes and shapes, but always related to the history of the book. The press makes books that question the intersection of various artistic disciplines, like images, sounds, and motion, and such books then experiment with the relationship between and among them. These books and many artists’ books made by other artists and presses are collected in the Book Art Museum where they are used for lectures, presentations, and educational meetings.

The 2015 winner of the institutional award from the American Printing History Association is the Book Art Museum of Łódź represented by Jadwiga Tryzno.