The 2012 Winner

David Shields for his proposal, “A Handlist of 19th & 20th Century Wood Type Specimen Books”

APHA is pleased to announce the 2012 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship is awarded to David Shields for his proposal, “A Handlist of 19th & 20th Century Wood Type Specimen Books.”

Most of you will know David’s work with the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection through his talks, his articles (including one in our own Printing History [n.s. no. 7, Jan 2010]), and the extensive web site he has created for it (http://www.utexas.edu/cofa/rrk/).

As a first step towards his grand, ambitious project, the Conspectus of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Wood Type, David is working on a comprehensive Handlist of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Wood Type Specimen Books, an exhaustive bibliography of all known wood type manufacturers’ catalogs.

To date, he has developed a working bibliography of nearly 140 wood type specimen books and brochures published in the nineteenth and twentieth century. This number nearly doubles the only other list of wood type manufacturers’ catalogs: Kelly’s bibliography in American Wood Type.

David will use his fellowship for travel to archives and collections (both public and private) he has not already visited for this project. And then, David will publish his Handlist of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Wood Type Specimen Books. This will be a very useful addition to the literature of type specimens, not only for David’s next project, his wood type Conspectus, but for other scholars of typography and printing history.

The committee was convinced by the interest of the project, the strength of the proposal, and David’s previous work in the field. The Handlist will be a publication which APHA can congratulate itself for supporting.