APHA is pleased to announce the winner of the 2009 competition. Jacob W. Lewis for his proposal, entitled “From Repetition to Reproduction: Charles Nègre in Pursuit of the Photographic.” will be the Mark Samuels Lasner Fellow for 2008. The Fellowship Committee’s citation follows:
Mr. Lewis is a graduate student pursing a Ph.D. in art history at Northwestern University. His dissertation examines the work of French artist, inventor, and photographer Charles Nègre (1820-1880). Mr. Lewis is studying a photogravure printing technique that was patented by Nègre to print camera-made images in ink pulled from an intaglio plate, a history that has been ignored by the art history community in favor of Nègre’s role as an art photographer. Mr. Lewis writes: “Though today we consider photography a reproductive medium first and foremost, reproducibility was neither inherent nor logical to photography in its infancy […] I seek to explain how photography shifted from a flexible set of practices that gained currency among early photographers to an industrial mode of reproduction, though not without resistance from amateurs like Nègre. My focused research on printing history investigates Nègre’s conflicted role at the foundation of what Walter Benjamin has called “technological reproducibility.” Far from endeavors toward purely mechanical reproduction, Nègre’s gravures show that early photomechanical reproductions sought to fuse traditional and handmade printmaking with mechanical processes. The photogravure’s status as a hybrid object made by hand, developed by chemicals, and printed by mechanical means compels a reexamination of the history of the photomechanical reproduction prior to its modern ubiquity. Specifically, I investigate Nègre’s role in the Duc de Luynes competition (1856–1867), which sought to award an inventor for the most permanent and commercially viable photomechanical technique. Nègre lost to the chemist Alphonse Poitevin (1819-1882), but material related to the protracted contest reveals much about the social meanings of photography and reproducibility, and charts the wide shift from amateur to industrial science in nineteenth-century society. My focus on Nègre’s work and that of his contemporaries is to argue for the photographic illustration – rather than the photograph – as the key technology which codified reproducibility as native to photography as well as symptomatic of modernity.”
Mr. Lewis will travel to Paris in September and October of 2009 to research prints and archival material preserved in the collections of the Société Française de Photographie and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where he will explore evidence related to Nègre and the Duc de Luynes competition. Mr. Lewis will also survey the archive of Nègre’s technical notes, journals, and contracts housed at the Musée d’Orsay. He also plans to examine original gravure plates preserved by the Chalcographie du Louvre and the BNF in order to study Nègre’s technique.
Currently, there is no dissertation in English published on Nègre, despite his prominence in museum collections and histories of Second Empire photography; we look forward to the results of Mr. Lewis’s work.
Gwido Zlatkes on Underground Printing in Communist Poland, 1976–1989
APHA is pleased to announce the 2011 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship is awarded to Gwido Zlatkes.
Gwido Zlatkes is now a reference librarian at the University of California, Riverside, Special Collections & Archives. Back in the late 1970s, however, he was involved with experimental theatre, and got swept up in the Solidarity Movement, as a journalist and as an editor and publisher.
In his proposal entitled: “‘Our Gestetner keeps on turning’—underground printing in communist Poland 1976–1989.” Mr. Zlatkes writes:
In the 1970s and 1980s, Poland saw a “paper revolution,” that is, one fought, and won, with (printed) paper rather than guns and bullets. Breaking the communist state’s monopoly on information and restoring free circulation of information and ideas began as pages typed on onionskin with carbon paper and passed around among friends. By the end of 1980s, it evolved into a sizable underground industry. Publishing houses … released several dozen titles per year and developed their own clandestine printing shops and networks of distribution. …. The print runs, as well as the quality of the output, varied vastly from 50–100 copies to 50,000 and more, and from slim books of poetry printed on a “ramka” (the simplest silk-screen printing) to the then top of the line Xerox color print with pages of photographs and professional binding.
Printers, the “black revolutionaries,” are the unsung heroes of this revolution. While virtually all historical writing on Poland under communism pays tribute to (and abundantly quotes from) underground publications, there is very little information on their actual production. What information exists is mostly focused on the editorial side. Printing techniques, the kinds of equipment used and access to it, the organization and conditions of work, obtaining supplies, innovations and inventions, distribution procedures and networks, etc. have not been systematically studied. At present, they are mostly in the memory of the “perpetrators.”
Mr. Zlatkes will use the APHA Fellowship money to travel to Poland this year to gather information and record interviews with some of the “founding fathers” of independent printing in Poland, concentrating on the technical aspects and details of underground printing. Because he knows the language, is acquainted with some of the pivotal figures, and is familiar with the various technologies of printing involved, he is an ideal candidate to execute this project.
The committee was swayed not only by the strength of the proposal and the skills of the proposer, but by the project’s urgency – collecting history which has not been documented (even the presses’ products are scarce, as so many were clandestinely created and dangerous to own), while the participants can still tell their tales. And the focus on printing technologies makes this a highly appropriate project for APHA to support. It also shows that APHA is listening to its own call to save the printing history of the 20th century.
And so we all look forward to hearing and reading Gwido Zlatkes’ account of the underground printing movement in communist Poland which will surely prove to be an important contribution to printing history.
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.
The 2013 Winner. Corinna Zeltsman for her proposal on the integral role of Mexico City printers in nineteenth century Mexico’s political, cultural and intellectual development.
APHA is pleased to announce the 2013 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship is awarded to Corinna Zeltsman of Durham, NC. Ms. Zeltsman is a history graduate student at Duke, writing a dissertation on the integral role of Mexico City printers in nineteenth century Mexico’s political, cultural and intellectual development.
With the Fellowship funds, she will undertake a research trip to New York to do research in the records of printing equipment manufacturer Richard M. Hoe and Company and type founder George Bruce & Company, examining relevant company records for evidence of how and when U.S. printing equipment ended up in Mexico. Her findings will reveal what technological resources would have been available to Mexico City printers, and shed new light on the transnational business networks that shaped nineteenth century printing in both countries.
Although we had, in the end, three extremely good applications to choose between, this one stood out for the novelty of the subject to APHA, the clarity of the proposal, her very strong recommendations, and her practical training in printing at Wesleyan and the Center for Book Arts in New York City.
The 2013 APHA Awards Committee names the Limited Editions Club for its institutional award. Recognizing that institutions as well as individuals make important contributions to history and that the preservation of such history-minded institutions is a high priority today, APHA stipulates that the criteria for this award should be the same as those for the individual award, namely that the institution is making “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.”
Over the course of more than eighty years, and through nearly six hundred finely crafted volumes, the Limited Editions Club has promoted unique collaborations between visual artists and writers, typographers and papermakers, printers and binders. Its productions have reached well beyond its member-subscribers, who have ranged in number from a few hundred to two thousand, to collectors of various kinds, including many institutional libraries – among them, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which in 1970 acquired the Club’s archives from the first phases of its operations. The Limited Editions Club has cultivated public awareness and sustained appreciation for the traditional arts of the book through decades of rapid change in the publishing and distribution of printed works, and now through an electronic revolution. It has enjoyed a longer continuous operation than any of the individual fine and private presses that were established in the wake of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and has involved many of their artisans in the realization of its manifold productions.
The Limited Editions Club was started in 1929 by George Macy. At age 29, he was an avid reader hoping to make his living from books. The idea was to publish handsomely illustrated classic titles in small quantities; members received books for their dues. The pictures were by illustrators, photographers, and sometimes “fine artists,” such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Grant Wood. Macy frequently used the best designers and printers, including Bruce Rogers and Francis Meynell.
Limited Editions Club was continued by his wife, and then his son, after his death in 1956. In 1970 it was sold, and ownership changed frequently over the next few years. Sidney Shiff acquired it in 1978 and gradually moved towards producing only livres d’artiste. Though the focus shifted away from affordability, Shiff was able to continue the tradition of craftsmanship. Michael and Winifred Bixler, the late Dan Carr and his partner Julia Ferrari, Wild Carrot Letterpress, and Jon Goodman have been among the many contributing bookmakers.
With Sidney Schiff’s death, the baton has again been passed, this time to Jeanne Schiff, his wife. Books are continuing to appear, and a book about the Club is being written by Carol Grossman, and will be published this year by Oak Knoll.
It is a pleasure to present this year’s American Printing History Association Institutional Award to the Limited Editions Club, with Jeanne Schiff accepting.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 26, 2013, The Morgan Library, New York City.
Acceptance Remarks of Jonathan Rose for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP)
“From Book History to Book Studies”
This award is only the latest of many good things the American Printing History Association has done for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. SHARP has indeed grown at a very gratifying pace in its first decade, but we only achieved that success with the help of the APHA and other book-related organizations. You gave us advice, you publicized our work, you shared your mailing lists with us. What I once said about SHARP people applies equally well to our friends in the APHA: To work with such gracious and generous people, on a new frontier of human knowledge, is the most fun anyone can have within the confines of a university.
And the fun is just beginning. Over the past ten years SHARP has concentrated its energies on building the basic apparatus of institutionalized book history scholarship, getting courses and conferences and journals up and running. Now that that has been accomplished, let us move on to conquer new worlds. And I have a specific and highly ambitious proposal to place on the table. It is something far too big for SHARP alone to carry out: this will require the collaboration of the APHA and the entire constellation of organizations devoted to the book culture, including the Bibliographical Society of America, the International Association of Publishing Educators, the Library History Round Table, the Society for Textual Scholarship, and John Cole’s network of Centers for the Book. In this new decade, we should work together to create new academic programs in Book Studies, which will explore the past, present, and future of all forms of written and printed documents, including books, periodicals, newspapers, manuscripts, letters, ephemera, and (yes) websites.
True, we already have new graduate programs in book history at (for example) the Universities of London, Toronto, Wisconsin, and South Carolina. But so far, they have been slow to attract students. My own program at Drew University has generated hundreds of inquiries, yet it enrolled no students at all in 1999 (its first year of operation) and only two in 2000. True, an impressive and growing students in traditional graduate programs in history, literature, and library science are writing dissertations on book history; but pursuing a degree in book history is quite another matter. Prospective applicants have asked me again and again, “What can I do with such a degree?” and I have never yet come up with a satisfactory answer.
If indeed free-standing book history programs fail to appeal to a wide constituency, then we as book historians must face the fact that we cannot go it alone. We must think in broader terms; we must reconceive our scholarly work as part of a larger academic project. I propose that we bring together, under one interdisciplinary umbrella, specialists in book history, printing history, the book arts, publishing education, textual studies, reading instruction, librarianship, journalism, and the Internet, and teach all these subjects as an integrated whole. In short, Book Studies would create a critical mass of everyone concerned with the exploration of script and print. And it would have the vocational component that Book History programs lack, preparing students for careers in new media, publishing, journalism, information science, and the book arts — though I suspect that the distinctions between these professions will break down over the next few decades.
The possibilities for intellectual crossfertilization in such a program would be terrific. Allow me to play Rod Serling for a moment and ask you to imagine, if you will, a core Book Studies seminar in the year 2010. It might include a doctoral student in religion who, drawing on his experience working in the university’s printshop and a papermaking shop, writes a dissertation casting quite a new light on the dissemination of theological polemics during the Reformation. A history student becomes interested in the history of information, and uses that knowledge to explain the organization of Diderot’s Encyclopedia. An education student contributes to the debate over bilingual education by exploring the Gaelic schools set up in Highlands Scotland two hundred years ago. A journalism major later goes to work for a media magnate, who puts her on a task force assigned to reinvent the idea of the newspaper; and because she studied both electronic publishing and the origins of newspapers in college, she is able to put aside ingrained assumptions about what a newspaper should be and suggest some genuinely creative alternatives. Just the other day the New York Times reported that mainstream publishers don’t quite know how to reach African-American readers, and they are still struggling with that problem in 2010; but then a bright young Book Studies graduate invents some successful marketing strategies, drawing on his study of book distribution networks in post-Emancipation black communities. (Hint: Work through the black churches.) An information studies student writes a term paper on crossreferencing systems developed by early modern librarians, and uses that knowledge to make electronic bibliographies more user-friendly. And a book arts student draws on her training in the history of typography to perfect software that allows complete amateurs to design their own typefaces.
I bluntly put the question to my fellow book historians: do you simply want to train more book historians, or do you want to teach to this much wider audience? If we build programs in Book Studies, that larger community of book-loving students will come. At one time they would have naturally gravitated to English departments, but nowadays they are likely to find there a mix of opaque theory, dismal ideology, and few real job prospects other than teaching composition as a perpetual adjunct. For these students, we should create an alternative route of literary studies, one which offers fresh horizons for innovative scholarship, practical applications in art and business, and the possibility of earning a decent living.
I can sum up my proposal in a single word. Once upon a time, professors studied literary works. Then, for the past 25 years or so, they studied texts. Now, we should redirect our attention to books. The problem with focusing on texts is that no one can read a text — not until it is incarnated in the material form of a book. It is perfectly legitimate to ask how literature has shaped history and made revolutions, how it has socially constructed race, class, and gender, this, that, and the other. But we cannot begin to answer any of these questions until we know how books (not texts) have been created and reproduced, how books have been disseminated and read, how books have been preserved and destroyed.
And apropos of that, disregard everything you’ve heard about “the death of the book”: the current crop of undergraduates is the most print-conscious generation in history. Every kid with a website can now play author, editor, publisher, bookseller, and book reviewer. Just as earlier generations of young people tinkered with radios, cars, and computers, this generation experiments endlessly with arranging words on a page. They are familiar with printshop terminology (font, leading, kerning); they often have a keen sense of the (electronic) literary marketplace; and they know a lot more about reader response than Stanley Fish. And just as the Vietnam generation passionately debated the origins of the Cold War, we should be able to interest these students in print history. After all, every one of them owns and operates a printing press — though they prefer to call it a printer.
Book Studies could also do a lot to educate media professionals. Not long ago I was approached by a fairly well-known New York publisher, who had a new idea which was really a revival of an old idea. His plan was to bring back the pamphlet, which had been the great polemical weapon of the nineteenth century, and use it once again to address to great intellectual controversies of today. I suggested (gently) that the literary marketplace, the machinery for book distribution, and the periodical press had all changed considerably over the past 150 years. Hence, a medium useful for Thomas Carlyle might be less practical for Camille Paglia. Evidently nothing came of the project: so far I haven’t seen any colporteurs in the Short Hills Mall hawking Edward Said and Norman Podhoretz. My point is that a publishing professional with formal training in Book Studies would better understand why this wouldn’t work — and, perhaps, might be better equipped to find a new way of making this work.
At any rate, this episode suggests that the world is potentially very interested in what we have to teach. Last October I had the privilege of joining a brilliant panel of book historians who had been invited to share their wisdom with the RAND Corporation, the legendary Santa Monica think tank. The RAND people put to us a straightforward question: Drawing on your knowledge of the printing press as an agent of change, tell us what the social impact of the Internet will be. We drew a deep breath, and began by disabusing them of a common fallacy, what might be called the Two Big Bangs Theory of printing history. Like most educated lay people, the folks at RAND assumed that there were two world-transforming developments in print technology: moveable type and the World Wide Web. Yes, we acknowledged, these certainly had revolutionary consequences — but then so did lithography, papermaking machines, stereotype plates, power-driven rotary presses, offset printing, halftone illustration, the linotype, the mimeograph, microfilm, xerography, photocomposition, and desktop publishing. Now, I don’t have to tell you that each of these new technologies tremendously enhanced the potential of print; I don’t have to tell you that they each had a remarkable impact on everyday social and economic life; I don’t have to tell you that, over the past two hundred years of printing history, change has been a constant. But all this has to be explained to a larger lay public out there. They are keenly interested in the Internet as an agent of change, they are wondering whether the book will be replaced by the e-book — and an education in Book Studies could give them the historical perspective they need to address these questions.
Now, I will not venture here to predict whether the e-book will catch on, but let me suggest another futuristic scenario. What if this new technology was being developed and refined in a Book Studies laboratory? What if specialists in the history of reading, the history of typography, the history of information, the history of printing, and the history of printing surfaces were working alongside the software engineers and the hardware engineers, offering a constant stream of advice about the interface between reader and print? Then, I strongly suspect, we could design this technology with a much better understanding of its limits and its possibilities.
Let me confess that the proposal I have briefly sketched here is not entirely original, certainly not in Europe. Book Studies programs already exist at four German universities (Mainz, Münster, Munich, and Erlangen) and at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. The Gutenberg University in Mainz (which hosted the most recent SHARP conference) has had an Institüt für Buchwissenschaft operating since 1947. As the Erlangen website somewhat regretfully notes, “There is nothing quite like Buchwissenschaft abroad, so there cannot be an exact translation equivalent.” But the Book Studies idea may soon migrate to America. Such a program is now under serious consideration at the University of Iowa (with the support of the APHA), and a similar plan has been mooted at the University of Maryland at College Park. And that weekend at the RAND Corporation offered a delicious taste of what Book Studies could be like. When you bring together the best minds in the field, and ask them to attack a common problem, the light generated is absolutely thrilling. “Gosh,” I exclaimed at the end of it, “I’d love to teach in a department like this.” If we get to work on it now, we will.
Jonathan Rose Drew University Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.
Acceptance Remarks of Dr. Francine de Nave for the Plantin-Moretus Museum and the Municipal Printroom
“The Plantin-Moretus Museum: A Synthesis of its History, Treasures, Accomplishments, and Goals for the Future”
Ladies and Gentlemen:
As coordinating manager and director of the Plantin-Moretus Museum / Municipal Printroom, it is my pleasure to be with you this afternoon. I am very honored by your kind invitation to accept in person your highly esteemed Annual Award, which you have bestowed this year on the Plantin-Moretus Museum on the occasion of its 125th anniversary. I think that it is appropriate to mark this exceptional event by informing your very honorable company about the institution that you have distinguished, the Plantin-Moretus Museum, although many of you are probably familiar with it. Thus, in the following speech I will address three topics: 1) the museum’s history; 2) its treasures and collections; and 3) its significance, accomplishments, and goals for the future.
1. The Museum’s History Around 1440, Johannes Gensfleisch, alias Gutenberg, devised the means of printing with movable type in the western world. This process resulted in the first technical revolution that would help define the modern world. Within fifty years, this revolution swept through Europe, completely changing the diffusion and development of learning, sciences, knowledge of the economy, and intellectual life. Thanks to the new fabrication of books, knowledge that had previously been handed down and distributed through manuscripts could now be recorded in printed form in much greater quantities and at a lower price, thereby allowing it to be disseminated throughout broader levels of society. The rise of Humanism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and, two centuries later, the Enlightenment and the start of Democracy would not have been possible without the invention of printing. In other words, Gutenberg’s means of printing started the democratization of knowledge. His invention is, therefore, a milestone in history that changed the world. As one of the most important economic regions of Europe for typography, the practice was quickly taken up in the Low Countries by 1473. Eight years later, in 1481, Mathias van der Goes printed the first book in Antwerp.
By the mid-sixteenth century, Antwerp’s aura as a center for book production and the largest center for trade and the exchange of capital to the north of the Alps enticed the French bookbinder and leather craftsman, Christopher Plantin (Saint Avertin, near Tours, ca. 1520 – Antwerp, July 1st, 1589) to immigrate there from Paris. Registered as a citizen of the city on March 21st, 1550, Plantin wanted to establish himself as a printer. It took five years, however, before he gathered the necessary financial resources. The funds were probably provided by the heterodox sect “The House of Love”, which was interested in starting up a Press in the tolerant city of Antwerp for the distribution of the writings of its leader, Henrik Niclaes. Once he had the necessary capital, Plantin, who was then about thirty-five years old, started his printing and publishing career in 1555. Exceptionally intelligent and no less dynamic, as indicated by the motto he adopted in 1557, “Labore et Constantia”, Plantin developed an excellent reputation and created a modern integrated business, the “Golden Compass”, which, by ca. 1567, had become the most important Press in the world. Between 1568 and 1573, Plantin completed his masterpiece, the “Biblia Regia”, which was printed in five languages–Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syrian, and Chaldean or Aramaic–in eight folio volumes and was also provided with extensive commentaries and dictionaries beyond the text editions themselves. It was the largest polyglot bible produced in the sixteenth century and the biggest typographical undertaking by a single printer in the Low Countries. With this project, Plantin achieved the pinnacle of his career and his workshop flourished as never before, not only as a printing house, but also as a major humanist center in the western world.
With no less than 16 printing presses and 80 employees (20 typesetters, 32 printers and 3 proofreaders, in addition to domestic personnel and sales staff) the Officina Plantiniana was the biggest printing–publishing business and bookshop of its time and had an international clientele.
Through its internationally distributed production, which was superior visually and in terms of the quality of its contents, the Officina Plantinianacame to dominate the trade of books as far away as the Americas, North-Africa, and even in the Far East. The financial backbone of this capitalistic undertaking was the highly lucrative monopoly on the production and sale of liturgical and religious works for Spain and the Spanish colonies overseas, which Plantin, who had been named the royal printer on June 10th, 1570, had been granted by the Spanish king Philip II on February 1st, 1571. This trade with Spain declined after the Spanish Fury (Antwerp, December 4th-6th, 1576) and financial difficulties forced Plantin to begin working for those opposed to Spanish rule. In 1582, with the advance of Farnese and the impending siege of Antwerp, Plantin established another Press in Leiden. At the end of April 1583, as academic printer to the university (which he became on May 1st, 1583), he laid the foundations for academic publishing and book trade in the Dutch Republic. Nevertheless, he returned to Antwerp immediately after the capitulation of the city (on August 17th, 1585). Together with his son-in-law Jan Moretus I, he continued to re-build the Antwerp firm to such an extent that by the time he died on July 1st, 1589, it had become the most important printing-publishing business for the Counter-Reformation in the whole of the Low Countries.
Plantin’s enormous output in the course of his 34 years of activity–totaling ca. 2,450 titles, or an average of 72 editions a year–made him the first industrial printer in history. The quality of his production was always high, both in form and content. His output included religious (33.32%), humanist (35.47%), legal (1.65%) and historical (4.15%) publications, as well as musical scores and often pioneering studies in the field of geography (2.76%) and the sciences (7.37%)–botany, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and pharmacology, physics, and technology. As such, he was the first great publisher of Counter-Reformation literature and the most prolific printer of humanist, academic, and scientific publications of his time. In addition, however, he was also the most creative and productive printer–publisher of the second half of the sixteenth century and one of the greatest of all time. Moreover, his work also earned him a unique place in the development of typography as the first industrial printing entrepreneur in history. He consequently made a major contribution to the development of culture and book publishing and must thus be regarded as one of the great trailblazers of Western culture.
The credit for the continuance of the operations of Plantin’s enterprise into the second half of the 19th century must be given to the Moretuses. Following Plantin’s motto Labore et Constantia (“Through Work and Constancy”), Plantin’s descendants and successors, the Moretuses, were able to become the wealthiest residents of the city and its surroundings through rich marriages, business deals, and all manner of successful monetary speculations. Consequently, they were completely independent financially of their business income and enjoyed an opulent life-style once they entered the nobility in 1692. Nevertheless, the Moretuses continued to cherish and care for the old Plantin Press with all its treasures out of family piety until the last printer-entrepreneur of the Moretus dynasty, Edward Moretus, closed the book on three hundred years of printing on April 20th, 1876. To insure that the family estate should remain as the Plantin-Moretus Museum, the Officina Plantiniana, together with its buildings, grounds, and all its household effects, was sold to the city of Antwerp.
For a total sum of 1,200,000 BEF, including 230,000 BEF in the form of a government grant, the Plantin Press was preserved for future generations as the Plantin–Moretus Museum. The majority of the real estate (23/30th) became state property, while the moveable goods became part of Antwerp’s patrimony. As a result, the old Plantin House, still completely intact as a splendidly furnished mansion and fully equipped publishing and printing office, changed not only ownership but also purpose. After the completion of a number of alterations to accommodate museum visitors, the institution was opened to the public on August 19th, 1877.
2. Unique collections in a unique house: the treasures of the Plantin-Moretus Museum The Plantin-Moretus Museum provides us with one of the finest examples of a stately patrician residence from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. However, the Plantin-Moretus Museum is known not only as such but is famous primarily as a unique fully equipped printing business preserved as it was in the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
The world-famous Plantin-Moretus Museum offers the only original examples of the technique of printing as it was practiced since the middle of the 15th century. Indeed, as a unique and harmonious combination of a patrician residence and business, the Plantin–Moretus Museum houses, in its original historic setting, an exceptionally rich and diverse typographical collection, unequalled in the world.
The focal point of this collection are the two oldest preserved printing presses in the world. Apart from these presses, dating from approximately 1600, there are no less than five Blaeu-type wooden printing presses from the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as a press for intaglio printing dating from 1714.
In the typographical collection the type founding equipment, principally from the 16th and 17th centuries, is well represented both in terms of quality and quantity. No fewer than 278 moulds, 4,477 punches and 15,825 matrices form the equipment needed for the production of around 80 different letter types, including Greek, Hebrew, Syrian, and Ethiopian styles of letters, in addition to the beautiful 16th-century civilité-letter, which Plantin introduced into the Low Countries. Without question, the Museum’s typographical collection is, for the 16th century, unequalled in the world.
In addition, the book illustration materials from the same period, comprising some 650 drawings, 2,846 copperplates, and 13,791 wood blocks, form not only a unique typographical collection but also an exceptionally rich art collection. In the collection of drawings, Antwerp’s greatest masters from the 16th and 17th centuries are represented, featuring in particular Pieter Paul Rubens, the universal genius who established Antwerp’s fame as a city of art forever.
Equally exceptional is the fact that the business and household archives are preserved here. Dating back to 1555 and comprising a nearly continuous series of records from 1563 to 1865, the more than 158 running meters of registers, bundles, and individual pieces provide an incredible wealth of detailed and accurate data. Consequently, the archives are an inexhaustible source for the study of the history of the book, as well as of the artistic, cultural, business, and socio–economic life of Antwerp and the Low Countries in particular, and of Europe in general. The archives of theOfficina Plantiniana are, therefore, more than an account of the fortunes of this large capitalist enterprise: they also reflect and are part of major European cultural currents. That is why this documentary heritage was included as the first Benelux entry–and one of the very few from Europe–on the UNESCO “Memory of the World” Register on September 4th, 2001, a distinction that was celebrated on November 30th, 2001, in the museum with the Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information of the UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization), Mr. Abdul Waheed Khan.
There is also the business’s production, which is housed in the old library. Established at the end of 1563 by Plantin as a working library for the Press, it was expanded by his bibliophile successors into a richly diversified private library. It is one of the very rare private book collections in the Low Countries that was built-up by one family and is preserved in its original surroundings! Due in part to the acquisition policies of the succeeding curators, it now contains some 25,000 volumes of early printed books and is exceptionally diverse in its holdings: 638 manuscripts (9th-16th centuries) and 154 incunabula (books printed before 1501), including the only copy of the 36 line Gutenberg Bible preserved in Belgium–this Bible was printed in Bamberg before 1461 with material that belonged to Johannes Gutenberg and possibly under his supervision. In addition, the library also contains a significant number of “post-incunabula” (books printed between 1501 and 1540) and is internationally regarded as the most complete single collection of Plantin and Moretus publications, as it contains more than 90% of their total production. In addition, it reflects the history of the art of printing and bookbinding in Antwerp from the late 15th century to around 1800 and constitutes one of the most important collections in this field.
Finally the unique and fully equipped workrooms –the type-foundry (1622), the printing office (1579), the proofreading room (ca. 1700), the book shop (ca. 1700), and the office (ca. 1576)– the like of which can be seen no where else in the world in their original state, give the Plantin–Moretus Museum its own, incomparable character.
3. A protected monument with a destination as a museum forever: the accomplishments and goals for the future of the Plantin-Moretus Museum The exceptional character of the Plantin–Moretus Museum makes it the crown jewel among the museums of Antwerp and the most authentic attraction among the world’s typographical museums. Simultaneously, because of its unique collections and archives –exceptional the world over for records of a printing and publishing house from the middle of the 16th through the second half of the 19th century– the Plantin-Moretus Museum is today an important research center for the study of printing in Europe and the Low Countries in the 16th and 17th centuries and, naturally, for the production of the Officina Plantiniana in particular.
Because of its unique character and the immense value of its building and collections, the Plantin-Moretus Museum has been recognized as a cultural patrimony of exceptional value and was designated as a protected monument by a decree from July 10th, 1997, by the Flemish minister of culture. In order to insure the recognition of the whole as a museum, the Flemish Community transferred its ownership of the 23/30th part of the property to the city of Antwerp on December 2nd, 1998. One condition of this transfer requires the government of Antwerp to respect its designation as a museum forever. This was explicitly stated by the Board of Aldermen and the City Council in their decisions of October 2nd and November 24th, 1997. Consequently, the museum must be recognized as such.
In 1974, ICOM (International Council of Museums) adopted the following definition of a museum, namely, as “a permanent institution at the service of the community and her development, accessible to the public, not aimed at making benefits, acquiring the material testimonies of man and his environment, preserving them, doing research on them, showing and commenting on them for purposes of study, education and pleasure.” The Plantin-Moretus Museum tries to fulfill a stimulating and motivating social role on local, regional, and international levels. As the Plantin-Moretus Museum is one of the main tourist attractions of Antwerp with an average of 100,000 visitors a year, we wish to take up and fulfill its social responsibility in the coming years. In addition, we are determined to keep the institution’s extremely rich cultural patrimony, already preserved for more than four centuries, intact for future generations.
More than ever, a priority is being given to providing public services. This fundamental aim will largely take the form of improved access to the collections and archives via computer and in extending educational services, underpinned by an active exhibition policy.
Moreover, we wish to play a continuing role in the dissemination of knowledge of the old typographic and graphic techniques in the multimedia society of the future. Thus, aside from organizing workshops for students, we are working together with the graphic school of the Plantin Society, which combines knowledge of older techniques with the study of the very recent evolution of graphic and typographical technologies. The courses organized by this institution are financed entirely with the support of several companies in the area of Antwerp, in particular, the Agfa-Gevaert Company. As such, the Plantin Society is acting as an intermediary between the Plantin–Moretus Museum and the graphic industry. These courses also add a new dimension to the museum’s identity. While the museum collections and research based upon them necessarily remain restricted to typographical techniques from pre-1800, is it possible to examine the subsequent and most recent aspects of graphic arts and the industry around it in these courses, designed for an interested public. This combination of old and new can also generate new quality. For example, famous international letter designers search out letter types from the typographical treasures of the museum in order to polish them op for the digital area.
Through these activities, we wish to implement the fundamental objective of the Plantin–Moretus Museum, namely, to support the study of the development of the book and prints as one of the most fascinating aspects of European civilization and connect this with the newest realizations in the exploding field of communication technology. In the coming years, we at the Plantin-Moretus Museum hope to investigate the development of 16th and 17th-century book and print production, as culture-generating media technologies at work since the 15th century, by drawing upon the precious heritage of the old Officina Plantiniana and linking it to the most recent realizations in the exploding field of communication technologies. We will thereby give a new significance and meaning to the museum’s collections.
In this way, the Plantin-Moretus Museum, which is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year, will maintain a true interaction with society through a contemporary, renewing, inventive, and interdisciplinary approach, which already has been praised as a model during the conference “Le livre exposé. Enjeux et methodes d’une muséographie de l’écrit”, organized in Lyon in November 1999 by the Council of Europe and ENSSIB (Ecole nationale supérieure des sciences de l’information et des bibliothèques).
Due to the exceptional importance of its patrimony and its great cultural value these many years, the Plantin–Moretus Museum was also recognized by the Flemish Minister of Culture on February 15th, 1999, and designated as a museum of international importance in the Flemish museum landscape.
Since 1997, the Plantin-Moretus Museum has also been recognized far beyond the Belgian borders, in particular, in the Far East by the Japanese Toppan Printing Company Ltd. in Tokyo, whose activities and reputation extend world-wide. This resulted in an agreement to work together on April 13th, 1999.
Today, the Plantin-Moretus Museum is the honored recipient of the highly esteemed Award that, since 1976, the American Printing History Association has been giving to an institution for “distinguished contributions to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history”. It is my pleasure to accept this Award that following the UNESCO designation, is the second major contribution to the prestige of the Plantin–Moretus Museum in a very short time.
Thank you.
Dr. Francine de Nave Administrative coordinator and Director The Plantin-Moretus Museum and the Municipal Printroom, Antwerp, Belgium
Dr. de Nave is author of Het Museum Plantin-Moretus te Antwerpen (Antwerp: Museum Plantin-Moretus, 1985), describing the library and archives.
Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.
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:
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:
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.
