Acceptance Remarks of Richard L. Hopkins for the American Typecasting Fellowship
Note: APHA presented its 2004 Institutional Award to the American Typecasting Fellowship, represented by Richard L. Hopkins. Mr. Hopkins, editor and publisher of the ATF Newsletter, spoke without notes using a Powerpoint presentation at APHA’s annual meeting held at the New York Public Library on January 24, 2004. The following notes were the basis for his off-the-cuff remarks, and have been expanded and slightly revised for presentation on the web.
What Is the American Typecasting Fellowship?
From the outset, I express my profound thanks to the American Printing History Association for selecting the American Typecasting Fellowship to be recipient of its 2004 Laureate Award for “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation or dissemination of printing history.” I am honored to be here among you to accept the award.
Since I suspect many of you have never heard of our organization, I will attempt to explain who we are. I can take credit for founding the American Typecasting Fellowship simply because I was the one who called the first meeting of typecasting enthusiasts together back in 1978. I was acting upon the consuming fascination I had with metal type–something which had “infested” me when I was in the seventh grade in 1953. By 1978 I had acquired my own Monotype system and had been successfully casting type for about seven years.
The reason I called the group together was simple: I knew there were other individuals “out there” who shared my fascination with type, and I wanted to bring them together to see if we might have a common bond. Thirty persons attended that first Conference, and it proved to be a “little gift from God to all of us,” for we found there was an intense common bond. Some were on such a “high” they never went to bed for three days. Instead, they stayed up through the nights, with non-stop chatter about Monotype machines, type designers, type designs, engraving mats, electro-depositing mats, three-phase electricity, converting machines from natural gas to LP gas, and all the other “in-between” stuff you get into when you become your own typecaster.
At one point during the meeting, I was on an errand to a nearby LP gas supplier to obtain hoses and couplings so we could hook up an ancient Bruce pivotal caster brought by Pat Taylor in pieces, strapped to the top of his sub-compact car. (I believe it had originally belonged to Ben Lieberman, a founder of APHA.) Pat and others had assembled the machine in my garage and they wanted to make type with it–and they did! But I’ve gotten off track. While I was out seeking these supplies, a group headed by Harold Berliner decided to name the organization and set up its by-laws. There was a good amount of alcohol involved, and the original text was scribbled on the back of an envelope. Here is what they came up with:
“Article I. The name of this association is the American Typecasting Fellowship. “Article II. There will be no officers of this association. “Article III. There will be two committees: a meeting committee and a communications committee. “Article IV. There will be no dues and the committees are urged to use their imagination in raising what little money they need for expenses. “Article V. There will be no other by-laws.”
Clearly, no one had vision of a “continuing organization.” I promised those in attendance that I would forward to them all a listing of discontinued American Type Founders faces which I had pulled from the 1959 ATF specimen book, along with a list of those in attendance. Hence, I put together my first edition of the ATF Newsletter, a combination of four 8.5×11 pages letterpressed and six offset.
Over the ensuing years, the only things which have held our organization together have been (a) the Newsletter, which I have continued to publish about once a year, and (b) our biennial meetings, called “Conferences,” which have ranged from Oxford, England, to Provo, Utah, and several places in between. From the outset, my single goal has been a strong orientation toward typecasting (and linecasting) equipment, its use, its maintenance, and proper care. On occasion the organization has strayed into the realm of what I call “bookish” venues, but I always have tried to pull us back to this central focus of using type-making equipment.
After two issues, I changed the format of my ATF Newsletter to a 7×10 page size so I could do it two pages at a time on my 10×15 Heidelberg windmill. I now also am a professional printer, so I’ll confess to having done several issues via offset, but there’s always been a thrust to try to do as much as possible hot metal. After all, that’s why we exist, right? And yes, my issues have, at times, become quite “bookish.” But also in these issues you’ll see articles about how to readjust a Monotype bridge, how to clean the waterways in a mold, or other down-to-earth practical discussions. I have neglected Linecasters and Ludlow machines only because their users only infrequently have come forward with articles; I have knowledge of these machines but don’t feel qualified to write “how-to” articles. TheNewsletter generally ranges around 40 pages per issue, so perhaps I should not have stayed with the name for indeed, as the samples I have with me will demonstrate, the publication is closer to a “scholarly journal,” as haughty and repugnant as that term might seem to me personally.
I insist there is absolutely nothing impressive about a dead, dusty, greasy Monotype machine sitting in the corner of a museum. The same can be said about a Linotype machine. But it is astonishing how animated and intrigued people become when they see one of these machines in operation. Way back when I was a college typography professor, my students, when visiting typography shops in Pittsburgh, always lingered in the hot metal departments, but scarcely raised an eyebrow when facing a big beige box described as a phototypesetting system.
I firmly believe the massive amount of human engineering, innovation, and sheer blood, sweat and tears, involved in the development and perfection of these devices–the technology, if you will–is just as important for preservation as the machines themselves. That’s what ATF is all about. There is a side benefit to this–the supplying of fresh type to those who continue to pop up as “private printers” or “private pressmen.” Without our typecasting efforts, soon their presses would all become silent.
Several of our ATF conference have had sessions regarding matters of equipment disposition, and the “training of a new generation of typecasters.” I personally had no instruction from a so-called “professional”; I taught myself how to use my Monotype machine in 1971. But many associates of ATF (keep in mind, we have no members!) were either typecasters by profession, or received their knowledge by working with professionals. In my Newsletter in 1994, I put out the call to start offering classes, but few responded. So I asked my good friends Paul Duensing and Roy Rice if they would help me with a week-long hands-on session with Monotype machines. They agreed and we took on our first four students. Somewhere along the line, Paul Duensing labeled the session “Monotype University.” That was in 1995. Since then, we have conducted sessions every two years and now have 26 graduates. More importantly, we have a new generation of typecasters enthusiastic enough to seek out and obtain their own equipment, and use it. There’s nothing more gratifying to me than receiving a small package in the mail containing a couple lines of type cast on a new machine by a graduate of Monotype University.
Thus, one might conclude that the American Typecasting Fellowship is trying to live up to the honor of this APHA laureate by both recording typecasting history and technology in its Newsletter, and by passing essential information among its members (especially via e-mail) and on to a new generation of typecasting enthusiasts. Perhaps our lack of formal organization is to our great advantage? Time will tell.
I am most gratified that the American Printing History Association has seen fit to name the American Typecasting Fellowship as recipient of the “institutional laureate” for 2004. The award states we’ve been “a significant contributor to the preservation of printing history” and I concur. It’s been our goal from the outset, with our quirky little angle of keeping the machinery that helped build this industry alive and operational. Words on paper are not adequate for the preservation of printing history. We seek to keep alive the machines and their technology, complete with their smoke, grease, and occasional metal splashes. Your laureate gives us a bit of self-satisfaction and encouragement, and for that we remain most grateful.
Richard L. Hopkins, American Typecasting Fellowship 23 January 2004 Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.
Interested persons may contact ATF and Rich Hopkins by writing directly: Richard L. Hopkins, P. O. Box 263, Terra Alta, West Virginia 26764. E-mail wvtypenut @aol.com.
APHA presented its 2004 Individual Award to D.W. Krummel, Professor Emeritus of Library Science and Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana. He is the author of many books on music printing and the history of bibliography. These acceptance remarks were delivered at APHA’s annual meeting held at the New York Public Library on January 24, 2004, and have been slightly revised for presentation on the web. I’m delighted by this honor, but I’m also rather embarrassed. I surely don’t want to move that APHA should impeach its Awards Committee. But my manners are bad, my taste is bad, my faith is bad, and my scholarship is bad, and I need to ask you to allow me this confessional.
First, the bad manners: This, briefly, is the sad story of my talk at the annual APHA meeting eighteen years ago. A blizzard kept me from coming in from Illinois a day or two early. So, the day of my talk I got up with the roosters at 4 am, caught a 6 o’clock flight that landed at 9:30, caught a cab, and read my paper about 10:30; and during the afternoon session the day caught up with me. I remember the person I sat next to later giving my a knowing smile that said, “Yes, you did really snore; and loudly.” My other sins lie deeper, and may be less forgivable.
As for bad taste, this is not my own printing many years ago. (After all, it was no worse than my piano playing.) Rather, it is that I should study music printing in the first place. Now music and printing have much in common. Both work through an artistry based in craftsmanship—trained hands working in the one with trained ears, in the other with trained eyes—all of this best learned not from textbooks but through practice under a master. But in one important way the two are quite opposite. The music is gone as soon as it sounds: one must listen very carefully. Printing, on the other hand, leads to objects that are there to be examined afterwards. Good oboists know how to breathe in the middle of a phrase, Wagnerian sopranos know when to mouth it because the brass will drown them out, and the skill with which they cover up is part of the beauty of the performance. But printers who cheat like this are humiliated as long as their presswork survives.
Printed music is rarely handsome to look at, for good reason. Its notation can either be committed to memory, so performances can be thought out: the notation is for reference use, an aide memoire, and the printed copy is a last resort. Or the music may be sight-read: and now the momentum of performance needs to overrule any visual distinction that might distract. Over history, furthermore, musical notation has become increasingly nuanced, so that the ideal printed page has come to look less like a Trajan column, more like an engineering blueprint. Admittedly, without printing, Beethoven would be forgotten; the wonderful heritage of American music would be lost. In the printer’s garden, music may be a weed, but its curative powers can be wonderful.
Next, my bibliographical wickedness. Let’s begin with my 1984 book on compiling, and its review in Sovietskya Bibliografia. Here I am accused of being not only “zhurnalistica” (and for this I’m as sorry as I can be, believe me) but also thirty years behind the times. This is because I don’t see the future of bibliographies as tied to downloading. (I’m naughty; and unrepentant. And I’ll be in even bigger trouble with my next book on the history of bibliographical practice. I can hardly wait.)
Bibliography, to my thinking, has its yin and yang, one called rules, the other service. Let me recall Don McKenzie’s 1992 Bib. Soc. centenary lecture, in which he proposed another contrast: stability and durability, on the one hand, and evanescence on the other. Stable systems are those designed to work rather like the medieval Catholic Church: quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus—forever, everywhere, and for everyone. In bibliography, this stability of course allows us to do wonderful things, like verifying citations and locating copies. It also biases our work: the English language rules the world, and subject coverage is often awkward and obsolete for specialized readers. It gets all the more constrained as production schedules and cost accountability enter the picture. The world of ideas, I should like to think, is one more of hunting and gathering than of farms and factories; and bibliography is (or ought to be) part of the world of ideas.
My heresy is actually a bit Pentecostal, in that my faith is less in systems that work from the top down, more in dialogue that works from the bottom up, out of respect for the work being cited and the needs of readers. I use OCLC (that bibliographical Wal-Mart), even if it is dull and often mean: Bigmore and Wyman is less useful, but I love it because it was done for readers like me. Citations work best when they serve their readers. The ideal may be “concise but sufficient,” but it helps if citations serve me and my kindred. Citations ought to play up the odd details of written memory that stimulate readers—and these are of course details of physical presentation as well as textual content. APHA members know how the taste and experience that go into producing physical objects are reflected in the experience of reading. The same spirit of sensitivity—the same crystal goblet—needs to go into the dialogue that leads readers to citations. Over the week you’ll no doubt have picked up citations. It’s one reason why you’re here in person, and why you talk to colleagues.
Finally, bad scholarship. (Strike four.) The list of my typos and errors is long. I’m left-handed, a bit dyslexic, a romantic visionary, lazy, in other words much in need of good editors and proofreaders. Also, like too many of us, clueless, even clueless about my cluelessness. And sometimes just plain wrong, as in the story of the first printed musical notes in Jean Gerson’s Collectorium super Magnificat (ca. 1473). Dull stuff to look at: five quads placed in the forme upside-down at various heights on the page, the staff lines to be drawn in by hand. I’ve too often repeated the conventional wisdom that the printer was Conrad Fyner in Esslingen. Instead, it may be the work of Heinrich Eggestein in Strasbourg. I learned about all just recently in the Sotheby auction catalogue of the Kraus inventory. (And so booksellers’ citations are often more reliable than scholarly prose or cataloguing records: and so who is surprised?) Sotheby-Kraus cites a 1950 Gutenberg Jahrbuch piece by Victor Scholderer. Now I remember old Scholderer from the British Museum. Alec Hyatt King, my mentor there; pointed him out to me in the North Library, and most admiringly. But Alec’s own book on music printing says Fyner.
So did Alec even know Scholderer’s piece? Or did he talk to Scholderer, who said he had second thoughts? ISTC (or now IISTC2, or someday IIISTC3 or 4) may settle the question. And it could be that fifty years behind the times is the right place to be. In any event, my cop-out—and my point—is that bibliography (like music making, and like printing) depends on stability, evanescence, and monuments, but also on activities and processes. It works when scholars and compilers know how to talk to readers, both at large and in their specialties; and readers who know when and how to figure out what is really going on. To my thinking, bibliographicalbricolage—tinkering, improvising, tweaking, wits and smarts—is just as important as methodology and system. (Understandably, my life in academia has not always been a happy one.) In music, similar skills are needed by a string quartet when, for instance, the violist has a bad back, the weather outside is unseasonably balmy so as to affect the intonation of the instruments, and I am snoring in the third row. In printing, I live in hopes of someone writing a history of the practice of makeready.
Here endeth my confessional, and I hope nobody is too disgraced. Have no doubts about it, however: for all my ill manners, vulgarity, heresy, and fallibility, I’m absolutely delighted to receive this honor, and most genuinely grateful.
D. W. Krummel 23 January 2004 Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.
In 2005 the Individual Award will go to Robert Darnton, an outstanding teacher and lecturer who will be honored for his many publications as well as for his exemplary scholarship in the field of book history. Professor Darnton, the Shelby Cullom David ’30 Professor of European History at Princeton University, is most widely known for his pioneering work in the archives of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, which made use of an innovative approach to the use of archival materials for analyzing printing and publishing practices in 18th-century France. The outcome of his researches was published in 1979 as The Business of the Enlightenment: a Publishing History of the Encyclopédie which, along with the many books and articles he had written since, has added a whole new dimension to the study of the history of the book in Europe. Darnton’s works continue to be very influential, appealing not only to the world of academe but to the general reader as well.
The 2005 Institutional Award will be presented to the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia for its impressive contributions to the field of printing history. In the 55 years of its existence the Society has produced over 175 separate publications, in addition to the 54 volumes of its renowned Studies in Bibliography, which provide a wide range of scholarly articles on bibliographical and textual criticism. Indeed, the Society considers itself “a forum for the best textual and bibliographical work being done anywhere in the world.” G. Thomas Tanselle, the distinguished scholar and its former president, will accept the award on behalf of the Society.
Acceptance Remarks of G. Thomas Tanselle, President of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia
Note: APHA presented its 2005 Institutional Award to the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. These acceptance remarks were delivered at APHA’s annual meeting held at the New York Public Library on January 24, 2004, and have been slightly revised for presentation on the web.
I am delighted to accept APHA’s Institutional Award for 2005 on behalf of the council, staff, and membership of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. The Society’s latest accomplishments are owing to the devoted work of an outstanding council and staff. Simply to list our councilors’ names indicates the quality of support that we enjoy: Terry Belanger, Ruthe Battestin, Kathryn Morgan, David Seaman, David Vander Meulen, and Karin Wittenborg. You will recognize from this roster that we are well connected to the worlds of librarianship, physical bibliography, literary scholarship, book collecting, and the electronic dissemination of texts. And I cannot imagine a staff more congenial, involved, and effective than ours, consisting of Elizabeth Lynch, assistant to the editor of Studies in Bibliography, and Anne Ribble, the secretary-treasurer. I bring you the gratitude of all these people for the honor you have given us.
This year the Society is fifty-eight years old, and it is fortunate to have had similar groups of complementary individuals looking after its welfare from the beginning. I will not attempt on this occasion to recount the history of the Society–which has in any case already been admirably told by David Vander Meulen, in a volume that should be read by all who are interested in the history of the book world in the twentieth century. But I would like to name a few of the persons to whom the Society has been most indebted over the years. The interconnections among all parts of the world of books are strikingly shown by the triumvirate that played the leading roles in the Society’s earliest days: Fredson Bowers, a literary scholar who became the dominant figure in bibliographical and textual scholarship for the next four decades (2005, by the way, is the centenary of his birth); Linton R. Massey, an important collector whose financial support for the Society was for many years crucial to its survival; and John Cook Wyllie, a rare-book librarian whose insight into bibliographical evidence inspired several generations of students and enriched the collections of the University of Virginia Library.
Their worthy successors have included Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., Ray Frantz, Julius Barclay, Anne Ehrenpreis, Walker Cowen, Mary Massey, and three others that I want to single out for comment. One is John T. Casteen, president of the University of Virginia, whose interest in the work of the Society has led to financial support from the Alumni Association. Another is Kendon Stubbs, a former president of the Society and a long-time deputy university librarian, whose concern for all aspects of our organization was indicative of the kind of intelligence, both visionary and practical, that he brought to many university endeavors–so many that in 1998 he was given the Thomas Jefferson Award, the highest honor bestowed by the University of Virginia. The third person is David Vander Meulen, Fredson Bowers’s successor in the Virginia English department and as editor of Studies in Bibliography, the annual volume founded by Bowers as s Society publication in 1948. Vander Meulen, with tireless dedication, has maintained the great tradition of this journal, and he continues to duplicate this feat every year, along with overseeing the Society’s other publications and handling many additional details as the Society’s vice president.
From the beginning, the Society’s publication program has been its major activity, and the annual appearance of Studies in Bibliography quickly became, and has remained, a major event in the international bibliographical world. The mystique surrounding SB is suggested by Robin Myers’s comment, on the occasion of the Society’s fiftieth anniversary, that this “very special publication” causes “a yearly frisson of pleasure as it thuds down on bibliographical doormats everywhere.” Further recent indication of the prominence of SB was the fact that it was one of five scholarly journals selected for discussion in the latest “Learned Journals” issue of the London Times Literary Supplement (5 November 2004), where David McKitterick noted that the journal is both forward-looking and conscious of bibliographical history and biography. The journal has always been international in its roll of contributors, which has included many of the major scholars in the field, such as (to name only a dozen) Fleeman, Foxon, Gaskell, Greg, Hinman, Kyriss, McKenzie, Needham, Silver, Stevenson, Todd, and Alice Walker (plus Bowers and Vander Meulen themselves). And the subject matter treated has been similarly cosmopolitan, ranging from fifteenth-century European books to twentieth-century American ones, from medieval manuscripts to modern literary holographs, from the physical analysis of books (an area in which SB holds a particularly historic place) to the theory and practice of textual criticism and scholarly editing. The journal has also published, from the start, articles dealing with book publication and reception–the kind of work that now falls under the rubric “history of the book.” David Vander Meulen, besides continuing this tradition, has increased the journal’s attention to bibliographical history, having recently published biographical studies of Bowers, Stevenson, Fleeman, Foxon, and Ridolfi, as well as McKerrow’s unpublished 1928 Sandars Lectures, on the relation of Renaissance printed books to authors’ manuscripts, and Gordon N. Ray’s unpublished 1985 Lyell Lectures on the Art Deco book in France (which still make a significant contribution to their subject). (I might add, parenthetically, that the unparochial nature of SB reflects the diversity, both geographical and intellectual, of the Society’s membership, and indeed its leaders: my presidency, for instance, symbolizes–since I have no connection with the University of Virginia–the fact that the Society, despite its name, is more than a local organization.)
If SB–or “Studies,” as it is more often called within the Society–is the centerpiece of the Society’s publication program, it is not the only element in our commitment to the dissemination of scholarship. We take pride in the fact that the Society has published over 175 other works, and I can give a flavor of what this accomplishment amounts to by naming a few of the landmarks. Paul Morrison in 1950 and 1955 published indexes to the printers, publishers, and booksellers in the Pollard-Redgrave Short-Title Catalogue and in Wing; Charles C. Mish brought out in 1967 his final version of a listing of seventeenth-century English prose fiction; and Roger Bristol published in 1970-71 the final revision of his supplement to Evans’sAmerican Bibliography. Although Morrison’s work was superseded by the third volume of Pantzer’s STC revision, and although all three are now superseded by the electronic English Short-Title Catalogue, they served a crucial function for many years. D. F. McKenzie’s Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1605-1640 (1961) was the first book of this major bibliographical scholar; and Rollo G. Silver’s Typefounding in America, 1787-1825 (1965) and The American Printer, 1787-1825 (1967) were the two main books of one of the premier historians of American printing (and the second recipient of an APHA Individual Award). B. C. Bloomfield’s 1964 descriptive bibliography of Auden, especially as revised with Edward Mendelson in 1972, is generally regarded as one of the models for twentieth-century author bibliography (a cause also promoted by a series of descriptive bibliographies named in honor of Linton Massey). A substantial collection of Bowers’s essays, published in 1975, has been one of the Society’s most often cited books. And two distinctive instances of the responsible publication of facsimiles, which demonstrate the scholarly contributions that can be made by such editions, are G. Blakemore Evans’s eight-volume series of Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century (1960-96) and David Vander Meulen’s exemplary historical study of Pope’s “Dunciad” of 1728 (1991).
In recent years the Society’s publication program has taken full advantage of the possibilities for electronic dissemination on the internet. One of Kendon Stubbs’s many services to the Society was to get us started on this venture, and since then we have been expertly assisted by David Seaman, Matthew Gibson, and the staff of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center. We were able to announce, at the Society’s fiftieth-anniversary gala, that the full run of Studies in Bibliography was accessible to all readers on the Society’s website. I believe we can correctly claim that SB is the first scholarly journal with a long run to be made available in its entirety and free of charge on the internet. And it can now be read in ebook form as well. Our program of electronic publications includes not only other previously published works but also new works, such as Emily Lorraine de Montluzin’s record of attributions of authorship in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and supplementary material to accompany contributions to SB, such as the illustrations for Gordon Ray’s study of the French Art Deco book.
If the Society’s influential presence in the bibliographical world comes largely through its printed and electronic publications, it does sponsor other activities for a local audience in Charlottesville. From the beginning the Society has held a student book-collecting contest, which now brings to the winners not only the monetary prizes provided by the Society but also a number of gift certificates from booksellers, an exhibition in the library, publicity in the newspapers, and a special session with the curator of rare books–plus, for the first-place winner, a tuition-free class in Terry Belanger’s Rare Book School. The Society’s meetings in recent years have also recognized the importance of encouraging bibliographical work among students. In alternating years graduate students are asked to read papers on bibliographical and textual subjects–and in the intervening years Virginia faculty members report on their work in these areas.
This APHA award brings welcome attention to all these activities of the Society. But there is one other aspect of the award that I want to mention: that it comes from an organization with the word “history” in its name. Some of the work supported by our Society would of course be considered “history” under anyone’s definition. That bibliographical scholarship is necessarily historical scholarship, however, is not always recognized. To me, this situation is epitomized by the fact that listings of scholarship in book history rarely include work in bibliographical analysis, even though such analysis has repeatedly uncovered facts of printing history–facts that are just as much a part of the full story of each book’s life as are publishers’ marketing decisions and readers’ responses. People sometimes have claimed that analytical bibliography–that is, the activity of examining the manufacturing clues present in printed artifacts like books and ephemera–involves too much interpretation to result in solid facts, such as those supposedly derived from archival records. The answer to this claim is that the products of the printing press are part of the archival record and that whatever difficulties they pose for interpretation are matched by those present in other archives, such as printers’ and publishers’ papers and ledgers.
Every category of surviving artifact requires informed judgment for its decipherment, and what we call historical facts are always the result of an interpretive process and thus subject to future refutation. Much of what we wish to extrapolate from tangible evidence–and therefore much of what we regularly call “history”–consists of past events: that is, the actions and thoughts of particular individuals at certain times. Reconstructing the activities of compositors and pressmen on specific occasions (or, indeed, the intentions of authors at specific times) is no different from the myriad other acts of hypothesizing that historical knowledge is made of. We in the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia are therefore particularly gratified that a printing history association has again chosen to recognize the activities of a bibliographical society, and we thank you very much.
G. Thomas Tanselle President of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia 29 January 2005
Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.
Introduction of the John Carter Brown Library’s Director, Norman Fiering Introductory remarks by David R. Whitesell
When in 1552 Francisco López de Gómara dedicated his history of the conquest of Mexico to Charles V, he said: “Most excellent Lord[,] the greatest event since the creation of the world … is the discovery of the [Americas].” His comment was echoed two centuries later by Adam Smith, who probably did not realize how prescient these 1776 remarks would be: “[T]he discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.”
Although quick to import and exploit the New World’s resources, Europe was slow to export one of its own chief resources: printing. A press was established in Mexico by 1539, Peru by 1584, and Cambridge by 1640, but many locales in the vast American hemisphere did without during much of the colonial period. Efforts to collect, preserve, and study the printing history of the Americas were likewise delayed until undertaken by pioneers such as Thomas Prince and Isaiah Thomas.
From its founding in 1846 as the private collection of John Carter Brown—and since 1901 an independent center for advanced research in history and the humanities located at Brown University—the John Carter Brown Library has been at the forefront of these efforts. That the JCB has carefully assembled what is probably the world’s finest collection of primary printed sources pertaining to the discovery, exploration, and history of the colonial Americas—North and South—might be reason enough for an award. But the JCB and its dedicated staff have consistently excelled in applying these unequalled resources to the practice of printing history.
The contributions of George Parker Winship, Lawrence C. Wroth, and Thomas R. Adams—to mention only a few JCB staff—to the history and bibliography of colonial North American printing and cartography are well known. Of equal importance are the JCB’s model fellowship and exhibition programs, which have enabled scholars from around the world to study its holdings and to disseminate their findings, not only in books and articles, but in exhibition catalogs of permanent value. Knowing that American imprints are usefully studied in conjunction with their European counterparts, the JCB has long paid these close attention, culminating in the monumental six-volume bibliography, European Americana.
More recently, under the direction of Norman Fiering, the JCB has done much to cultivate “book history” in Latin America. In 1987 the JCB hosted a landmark conference on “The Book in the Americas,” and I am sure that many of you have seen the superb traveling exhibition and catalog which complemented it. The JCB has also been enlarging its enviable holdings of Latin American and Brazilian imprints, which it plans to document in several forthcoming book catalogs. By cataloging these to the highest standards, and by sharing the information with bibliographical databases such as the online Latin American STC, the JCB is once again laying the groundwork which will pay rich scholarly dividends.
For over 150 years the John Carter Brown Library has made printing history its special province, an enduring achievement which the AmericanPrinting History Association gratefully recognizes with this award.
Acceptance Remarks of Norman Fiering, Library Director Note: APHA presented its 2006 Institutional Award to the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University for its leadership in collecting, preserving, and promoting the printing history of the colonial Americas, North and South. [Read the citation.]
These acceptance remarks were delivered by Library Director Norman Fiering at APHA’s annual meeting held at the New York Public Library on January 28, 2006, and have been slightly revised for presentation on the web.
On behalf of the JCB, I want to express our gratitude for this recognition from APHA. I hope I do not appear immodest when I say that, taking the long view, the Library deserves it, and not because of anything that has happened there since I have been the Director, although I have tried to do my part.
APHA is 30-some years old; the JCB is more than 150 years old, and so strong is the tradition at the Library of attention to printing history that one might say that the JCB was a division of the American Printing History Association before there was such an Association.
One thinks immediately, of course, of two of my predecessors, George Parker Winship and Lawrence Wroth, whose combined service at the head of the JCB covers about fifty years. Their contributions to the field in the first half of the 20th century were seminal. Some of Winship’s most fundamental work was done after he had moved from the John Carter Brown Library in 1915 and taken a post at Harvard, but he left an indelible impression on the Library (to use a printing metaphor).
For Winship, I am thinking, for example, of “Early Mexican Printers,” published in 1899; Rhode Island Imprints, 1727-1840, published in 1914; “French Newspapers in the U. S., 1790 to 1800 ” (1920); Gutenberg to Plantin: An Outline of the Early History of Printing (1926); and most well known, perhaps, The Cambridge Press, 1638-1692, published in 1945.
Wroth was thirteen years younger than Winship and came to the JCB in 1923. His Printing in Colonial Maryland had appeared the year before. His work on Abel Buell of Connecticut, the first type-cutter and caster in English America, appeared in 1926. And in1931, he published his much esteemed The Colonial Printer, which concerned British America, but like Winship, Wroth was hemispheric in outlook. He wrote on the book arts in early Mexico, and on the origins of typefounding in North and South America. He was also keenly interested in prints and maps, and in 1946, with Marian Adams, published a catalogue of American Woodcuts and Engravings.
The tradition at the JCB goes back even earlier, to John Russell Bartlett, the first librarian, less well known than his successors, perhaps, but an extraordinary bookman in every sense. He served as John Carter Brown’s personal librarian from 1855 until Brown’s death in 1874 and then continued in that role for John Carter Brown’s widow and sons until his own death in 1886.
Bartlett compiled the first catalogues of the John Carter Brown Library, known as the Bibliotheca Americana, beginning in 1865. Those early catalogues remain splendid examples of bookmaking, aside from their exemplary content as bibliographical records. The catalogues were awarded a medal at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876.
During most of the years that Bartlett served the Brown family as librarian, he was at the same time the elected Secretary of State of Rhode Island, offering estimable service in that post, among other things assembling for the first time the earliest archives of the state and publishing them in ten volumes under the title, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations 1636-1792. That Bartlett arranged to have fifty copies of this publication printed on large paper, at his own expense, shows a consciousness of the importance of presentation.
Bartlett was always into projects, as a lexicographer, historian, bookseller, documentary editor, bibliographer, extra-illustrator, and distinguished artist. We will be publishing this spring a brief autobiographical memoir left by Bartlett, which records a life of remarkable accomplishment.
I want to quote from a not untypical page, representing Bartlett’s unflagging energy and enterprise:
When the late rebellion broke out [i.e., the Civil War], I commenced the collection of slips from the newspapers relating to it. I thought the war might last about a year; nevertheless, having begun the work, I continued it, scarcely omitting a day without clipping & pasting. I think that I labored on an average three hours a day for four years.
After mentioning the several newspapers from which he clipped articles, he continued:
At the same time, I collected all the pamphlets and books appertaining to the war that I could lay my hands on. . . . My collection finally increased so much that towards the end of the war, I found that a catalogue was necessary, in order that I might know what I had. I therefore with much labor made a catalogue. When it was completed, I thought it would be better for me to include in it every thing that had been published relating to the war, whether I owned it or not. I accordingly carried out this plan, and furthermore included in it the titles of all publications appertaining to American Slavery. This seemed properly to belong to the subject, as it was the cause of the war, while emancipation was its result. Then, in order that others might derive benefit from my labors, I published the catalogue, under the title, The Literature of the Rebellion. . . .
We see in this account that familiar, quite logical sequence, one act leading to the other, almost like destiny: collecting, cataloguing, publishing. That catalogue of works relating to the Civil War came to a massive 477 pages, and once more, Bartlett tells us regarding presentation: “Of this work 250 copies were printed in royal 8vo, and 80 copies in 4to.”
In this instance, Bartlett was primarily interested in content, not in the history of printing as such, but he was immersed in print throughout his life, a phenomenon not uncommon in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was, in my opinion, the high point of book culture in the West.
Book collecting and cataloguing are obviously a kind of preparation for the study of the history of printing, as such, a point that I will come back to.
One of Bartlett’s specialties was extra-illustration, the original hyper-text, taken literally. He could expand a work of two volumes into a work of ten volumes with his left hand, and did so in several instances. He lists in his memoir 21 books to which he gave this treatment. For example:
Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Sculptors, 2 vols, extended to ten volumes with 2,000 illustrations. Marshall’s Life of Washington, 5 vols. Extended to ten volumes. Drake’s Dictionary of American Biography, 1 vol., extended to 7 volumes, with 1,135 portraits.
Enough about Bartlett for the moment.
Again going back to the beginning of the 20th century, and the JCB as a proto- division of APHA, there is Daniel Berkeley Updike, the founder of the Merrymount Press and the author of Printing Types, Their History, Forms, and Use (1922), in two volumes, a work that has been referred to as the printers’ bible.
Updike was a close friend of one of John Carter Brown’s sons, Harold Brown, who died prematurely in 1900 at age 35, and because of that association, as well as for other reasons, Updike did all of the early printing for the JCB.
At the Library we take for granted these productions for forty years by our “house printer,” so to speak, but Updike collectors are dazzled. In 1916 Updike joined the Board of Governors of the Library, at that time called the Committee of Management and consisting of only five persons. He remained a member of the Committee, and thus was intimately associated with the JCB, until just before his death in December 1941.
In 1935, Updike gave the JCB a bible printed at Lyons in 1550 by Sebastian Gryphius. In the JCB annual report for that year, the gift was recognized as follows: “The book is surely one of the great works of typography of its time. It is printed in folio, in double column in a large letter, and it notably demonstrates the clarity, dignity, and elegance that mark the best French printing of the first half of the sixteenth century.”
At Updike’s death, the Library’s Committee of Management included in its memorial minute these words: “In the business of the Library, Mr. Updike gave of the best he had in judgment and action. . . . His devotion to the ideal of quality in doing and thinking, his reliance upon simple integrity in the large and small things of life, made him incomparable as an adviser and friend.”
Bartlett, Winship, Updike, Wroth, takes us up to about 1960. That’s a great legacy, which I would not dare to say has been continued in its full glory since then. My immediate predecessor, Tom Adams, is certainly one of the pre-eminent bibliographers of the second half of the twentieth century, but he made no substantial contributions to the technical history of printing, although he became an expert on the London printers Mount and Page. Adams is renowned for his fundamental bibliographies of both British and American political pamphlets printed during the revolutionary period, 1764 and 1783.
Less well known is Adams’s bibliography of English Maritime Books Printed before 1801, compiled with David W. Waters, which in 1995 the JCB published jointly with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, in 400 copies. Maritime books may appear to be an esoteric subfield in the history of printing in England before 1800, but in fact it is central to the history of English printing in this period.
It has been said (and maybe it’s true) that the most frequently printed “genre” of all books printed in England in the eighteenth century was the maritime book, in all of its many facets–– navigation manuals, seamanship manuals, shipbuilding manuals, hydrographic texts, navigation tables, books on tides and currents, books on health at sea, books on gunnery, books on nautical instruments, and so forth.
To take just one example from Adams and Waters, almost at random, a work called The Boate Swaines art, or the compleat boate swaine, by Henry Bond, first printed in London in 1642. This book appeared in later editions in 1664, 1670, 1676, 1677, 1695, 1699, 1716, 1726, 1736, 1764, 1772, 1775, 1781, 1784, 1787–140 years and at least 15 editions!
Another instance, even more staggering, is Andrew Wakely, The Mariners compass rectified. This book first appeared in London in 1665(maybe even earlier but no copies have survived) and was re-issued 57 times––that’s right 57 times––before 1800. The last one in the 18th century was published in 1796, 131 years since the first edition was printed.
The JCB owns 11 editions of Wakely’s Mariners compass, of the 57 issued before 1800, and we would be happy to acquire more, a fact that may need explanation. Our mission, unchanged by hardly a hair since 1846 when the Library was founded, is above all to collect and preserve contemporary printed and manuscript records relating to the history of the Americas, North and South, during the colonial period.
Maybe half of the JCB collection consists of works printed in the Americas (from the beginning of printing in this hemisphere in Mexico in ca. 1540) and half of works printed in Europe about America, beginning with seven pre-1500 editions of Columbus’s “Letter” from 1493 announcing his discovery. We collect European maritime history because the European conquest of the oceans was the precondition of the discovery, exploration, settlement, and development of the Americas, and hence an integral part of the story. War, commerce, empire, at the time, all depended upon prowess at sea.
To come back now to John Russell Bartlett as a collector of Civil War material and what might be called inadvertent or indirect contributions to printing history. The JCB, I often tell people, is one of the few rare book institutions in the U. S. that collects intensively on a large scale. I mean we collect intensively not just for one or several authors, or one or several printers, or a particular geographical region, but intensively for the whole of the history of the Americas, from Hudson Bay to Patagonia, from 1492 to ca. 1825 in seventeen different European languages, plus Native American languages.
Eleven editions of Wakely’s Mariners compass is not unusual at the John Carter Brown Library. We have 30 editions of Antoniode Solís’s Historia de la conquista de Mexico, first published in Madrid in 1684. We have copies printed not only in Spain, but in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, England, Germany, and Denmark, all before 1800.
When as a committee at the Library we make our acquisitions decisions from week to week, one rarely hears the argument that we should not buy a particular work because we already have ten editions or three translations; more often that fact is presented as a good reason to buy, because we are striving for totality: copies of every single title printed in the Americas to the end of the colonial period in each country, in every edition, and similarly, copies of every European book with a mention of the Americas before 1825. We can never achieve that totality, but it is a guiding aspiration.
We do not routinely collect to document printing history as such, but of course, the JCB, because of its policy of intensive collecting––i.e., its goal to become denser and denser as a collection, not broader in time or space––is a marvelous resource for the study of printing history.
This leads me to a few final remarks about more recent initiatives at the Library. Our holdings of works printed in the Spanish empire in America are unrivaled in the world (7,000 titles in all)––with the strongest concentrations for Mexico and Peru, the two principal centers of the press in the early years, but also including Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, and so forth. Naturally, we felt an obligation to promote the study of printing history in Latin America, which Bartlett, Winship, and Wroth all had taken an interest in.
Moreover, the rising fashion in the early 1980s of the study of the history of the book in France, England, Germany, and the U. S., gave us a good opportunity to call attention to Latin America. In 1988, we organized a memorable international conference at the Library entitled, “The Book in the Americas: The Role of Books and Printing in the Development of Culture and Society in Colonial Latin America.” One of my greatest regrets as Director of the JCB for twenty-three years is that we never did publish the papers from that unprecedented conference, which all of those who were present still recall with appreciation. Those papers were full of new information, especially new information made available for the first time in the English language.
I referred earlier to that compelling natural sequence of collecting, cataloguing, publishing, with the last meaning printing on paper. That sequence is generally short-circuited these days to: collecting, cataloguing,visit it online. Institutions now take inordinate pride in the fact that they have abandoned publication on paper, but I am not convinced it is such a great virtue in all cases.
At the JCB I have continued to operate in the faith that for many purposes the printed book is the ultimate convenience, and we have no less than five real, not virtual, publications in the pipeline that are simply specialized subject catalogues of a particular part of the JCB collection as a whole: a catalogue of our Portuguese and Brazilian Books, a catalogue of books with American Indian language content, a catalogue of our Chilean imprints, a catalogue our Peruvian imprints, and the final two volumes of a catalogue of our holdings of works in the German language (all relating to America, of course). In all of these areas the JCB’s holdings are matchless or nearly so, and hence these printed catalogues will serve as yardsticks against which to measure similar collections elsewhere.
None of these publications will sell more than 300 or 400 copies, and of course, they are expensive to compile and produce. Moreover, all of the data, i.e., the cataloguing records on which these books are based, are available online, and what is worse, because we are actively continuing to acquire books in all of these areas, these printed catalogues will be out-dated a month after they are published.
We have words like “bibliomania” to refer to insane book collecting. Is there a word to describe an insane desire in the cyber-era to continue to put into print bibliographical data or specialized subject catalogues? Typomania? Vanity?
Our typomania goes even further because the JCB supports the use of letterpress whenever it can prudently do so. Our letterhead and some other official JCB publications are printed letterpress, which we do for reasons beyond the aesthetic, although that alone is compelling. We do it on principle. Institutions heavily invested in the history of printing should help to support the traditional trades.
With regard to teaching and research in the field, the JCB, along with several other rare book libraries, offers, thanks to Bill Reese, a fellowship every year for research on book history and the history of printing.
On a grander scale, in 2001 several members of the Library’s Board of Governors came up with $1 million to create an endowed visiting professorship in historical bibliography and the history of the book. Named in memory of Charles H. Watts II, who served on our Board for twenty years, the JCB makes arrangements with either the History Department or the English Dept. at Brown University to appoint this visiting professor each year, who teaches a semester-length course, in the Library, on book history.
This course is for credit at Brown University, which is necessary if undergraduates are going to pay attention, but, regrettably, no academic department wants to host true technicians in the history of the book or in typography; so the education the students receive in the history of printing is relatively superficial. Book history in only the most general sense is the norm.
You are all no doubt familiar with this problem, which has arisen on various campuses, of how to fit the history of printing into the present organization of the disciplines and the passing trends in academe.
The Rhode Island bibliophiles group, the John Russell Bartlett Society, which was founded at the JCB in 1983, offers a prize for undergraduate book collecting, the Margaret B. Stillwell Prize, and the dream was that the Watts professorship would stimulate that interest on campus and increase the sophistication of young collectors. That may be happening at Brown, but to a limited degree thus far.
We have the resources on the Brown campus right now, thinking of the John Hay Library as well as the JCB, to substantially direct undergraduate attention to the study of printing and to “rare books” as objects, but this potential has not yet been fully realized. It’s a worthy goal, however, and we may yet get there.
Once more, on behalf of the great institution that I represent, and its distinguished past, I want to express my gratitude to APHA for the honor it has bestowed upon us.
Norman Fiering, Director John Carter Brown Library January 28, 2006 Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 28, 2006, in the Trustees Room (2nd floor), New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City. A reception followed.
Elizabeth M. Harris Elizabeth M. Harris, former Curator of Graphic Arts in the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, is the 2006 Individual Laureate. Her varied publications record includes articles on 19th-century printing processes–compound plate printing, glyphography, nature printing, and map printing, to name just a few–and printing presses, such as The Common Press (with Clinton Sisson, 1978), andPersonal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth-Century America (2004). Harris’s innovative Smithsonian exhibitions on such topics as pochoir, printing for the blind, and American wood type are highlights of her distinguished career as an educator.
Introduction of Elizabeth M. Harris Introductory remarks by David R. Whitesell
On behalf of the other members of APHA’s Awards committee—Julia Blakely, Patricia Fleming, and Jane Rodgers Siegel—it is my honor to present the 2006 American Printing History Association Individual and Institutional Awards for Distinguished Achievement in Printing History. I will not trouble you with details of our deliberations, other than to say how grateful I am to Julia, Pat, and Jane for their hard work and thoughtful counsel. One other person also deserves mention, and that is APHA Honorary Member Lili Wronker, who once again has provided the calligraphy for the awards certificates. Thank you, Lili! Oh, and I must not overlook APHA Executive Secretary Steve Crook, whose expert assistance is appreciated by us all.
Let me begin by asking: How many of you attended the 1991 APHA Conference in Washington, D.C.? I remember it well, not only because it was the first I attended, but because it remains one of the most varied and interesting conferences APHA has ever sponsored. An indelible memory is my visit to the National Museum of American History. There, by the printing and graphic arts displays, I encountered a group of children who were excitedly printing—not, mind you, with type and press, but with a fish! Before long a number of big APHA kids had gathered round, the more fortunate ones soon sporting their nature-printed T-shirts to envious friends.
The impresario of this scaly wayzgoose was none other than this year’s individual laureate, Elizabeth M. Harris, former Curator of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. My anecdote can only hint at why Elizabeth Harris has had a stellar career as scholar and educator. But let me tell you more, and rest assured that this is no fish story!
Elizabeth Harris came to prominence in the 1960’s with a series of influential articles on 19th-century printing and illustration processes. In these she demonstrated both the resolve and the expertise to tackle the difficult subjects that many avoided: compound plate printing, medal engraving, glyphography, nature printing, and map printing processes, to name just a few.
During the 1970’s Harris’s interests shifted from printing surfaces to printing presses. She collaborated with Clinton Sisson on the 1978 publication, The Common Press, an authoritative study of the Smithsonian’s 18th-century wooden hand press. Later Harris published catalogs of the Smithsonian’s remarkable holdings of printing presses and printing-related patent models. Her latest book, Personal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth-Century America, is both a definitive catalog of 19th-century small presses and an engaging study of their use by American amateur printers.
During her tenure at the Smithsonian, Harris was responsible for rescuing from oblivion many important artifacts and archives relating to printing history. As an educator Harris has had few peers, for her innovative series of Smithsonian exhibitions and catalogs on such subjects as pochoir, printing for the blind, and American wood type have introduced an entire generation to the allure of printing history.
Following her retirement in 1997, Harris returned to her native England. There she has set forth on a new adventure: that of raising goats and making cheese. I regret to say that her present responsibilities made a quick trip to New York problematic at best, and in the end it was not possible for her to be with us this afternoon. Although she cannot be here to accept the award in person, I hope that you will nonetheless join me in congratulating Elizabeth Harris for an exemplary life of achievement in printing history.
Elizabeth Harris has prepared some remarks for this occasion, and I will now call on Jane Rodgers Siegel of the Awards Committee to deliver these on her behalf.
Acceptance Remarks of Elizabeth M. Harris
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Greetings from Dorset, Thomas Hardy country.
I am enormously moved and grateful to the APHA for this award, and to the Awards Committee for conveying the news of it and now giving you my response. The news was a complete surprise, and it revived some beautiful memories that I will keep with me in my very different new world of goat and cheese farming, in this agricultural county of Dorset in the south of England. Many memories in fact, but I’ll mention just a few. One project that gave me particular pleasure was working on the history of printing for the blind — not only because I’ve always found languages in all forms to be intriguing and this turned out to be a rich field of them, but because I met and learned from some inspiring people, blind and sighted. Then, quite different, there was an exhibition on nature printing — the idea of getting an object to produce its own portrait has surely appealed to humans for as long as we have made pictures, if we can include that stencilled image of a hand on a cave wall. The nature printing exhibition came to life, I thought, with our weekly demonstrations of fish printing on t-shirts, but this activity divided my colleagues. Is it worthy of a museum of sober scholars to be squashing fishes on to t-shirts? Oh yes, I did enjoy that controversy. And finally, research into 19th century small presses, which spread over my last 15-plus years at the Museum, fed the puzzle-loving part of my head: it was fun, and full of little surprises and new friends, and if it wasn’t always easy that just made it better. I will add that the small press puzzle is certainly not solved. I hope someone else will take it up.
And now I’ve come to Dorset. Dorset has not just farmers but several good writers and poets to its name. Apart from Hardy himself, there was William Barnes, born in 1801 on a tenant farm, a bright lad who grew up to be a legal secretary, a minister of the church, a schoolteacher, a philologist, and a poet, as well as a sometime wood and copper engraver, and who finally bought some land and dabbled in farming again. He is remembered as a poet, but it is his philology that I like. He divided his poems between those in “national English” and those in “Dorset dialect.” Barnes grieved for the passing of the old ways of farming. I could tell him that not everything would pass: 150 years later his Dorset dialect survives, and I use his poems as a tutorial. When I arrived here I met my neighbour, a good farmer and a wise man, my own age, who had not set foot outside this county until recently. I liked him, but it took about a year for me to understand what he was saying because he speaks straight from William Barnes. He was quicker to understand me, but that wasn’t instant either. Not just the accent but the words and grammar of Dorset are different from “national English,” and they constantly delight me.
Several years ago I made some presentation to APHA, and I was at that time quite troubled by the thought that the historian who publishes is almost bound to modify history, not simply add to it, in ways that he may not intend. A museum may choose to collect and teach about everyday life in the past, as we did, but instantly those collected everyday relics cease to be everyday and become iconic: major records of the past. The work that Clint Sisson and I did on the Franklin Press seems to have spawned a host of Franklin press replicas, which is certainly a measure of success but, objectively, is it a good thing? Doesn’t it imply that the Franklin press is more important than other contemporary presses that survive? The very term “common press” is often capitalised (as Moxon did but for different reasons) and manages to convey not common but special. All this was beginning to bother me. My own version, I guess, of the physicist’s observation that in measuring something, you always alter it.
Well, I’m pleased to report that I was wrong. It is quite natural not only for historians to disappear, but also whatever they may consider to be their legacy. What remains is not in our own control. When I left the Smithsonian I decided to bequeath my ongoing research files to a colleague or two. I’m told those files no longer exist — and well, perhaps that’s not a bad thing. On the other hand I find that my personal printing past, the one in my head, refuses to be left behind. I try to be a cheesemaker, but keep turning back into a printer. The two cheese presses I use in Dorset, which I built from trees that fell in my Maryland woods (American black walnut, Black Locust, and Eastern Red Cedar) are unmistakably related to Ramage’s portable wooden presses, and like his printing presses they were designed to be dismantled and flat-packed for travel. Thanks to them, I feel I understand Adam Ramage better than I did when I was sharing a museum with his presses. And now that I am outside my old printing world there are other questions I would like to ask him, starting with — really now, Adam, why Honduras mahogany? I’m no longer so sure that it was tougher or more durable than his local woods: a woodworking neighbour tells me it is considered rather light among hardwoods. Was it fashionably exotic in 1810, and if so to what extent did Ramage himself create that fashion? Or was it just available in Philadelphia: who was importing Honduras mahogany, and who else was using it?
Back again to cheesemaking: when my first wheels of hard cheese needed to be dated and numbered I tried all kinds of clever devices but in the end I fell back on what now seems obvious: movable type. So I brand the cheeses with bookbinder’s brass type blackened in the flame of a candle (it’s better than printing type because, apart from the matter of lead and antimony in your cheese, type metal melts in a candle flame. It melts, in fact, at a lower temperature than some cheeses).
Printing history was my life for 35 years, and after all it still is. Printing, I am happy to tell you, will not leave you when you leave it.
Elizabeth M. Harris, January 2006 Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 28, 2006, in the Trustees Room (2nd floor), New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City. A reception followed.
Proprietor, Robert D. Fleck Introductory remarks by Jane Rodgers Siegel
The awards criteria read, in part: “The APHA Institutional Award will be bestowed upon institutions that have sponsored, supported, or themselves made distinguished contributions to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history.” Oak Knoll Books & Oak Knoll Press, a bookseller and publisher of books about books, bibliography, book collecting, book design, book illustration, book selling, bookbinding, bookplates, children’s books, fine press books, forgery, graphic arts, libraries, literary criticism, marbling, papermaking, printing history, publishing, typography & type specimens, and writing & calligraphy, has quite possibly disseminated more printing history than anyone else, including (and I do mean that their list includes) Henry Morris.
Founded in 1976 by Robert D. Fleck, Jr., a reformed chemical engineer, Oak Knoll Books maintains a stock of 20,000 items and has published over 280 catalogues, thus making available a tremendous amount of out-of-print material to institutions, historians, and collectors. As a publisher, Oak Knoll Press has published and distributed over 1000 titles, both original work and reprints of important hard-to-find works, making available the research of such authors as: Nicolas Barker, Sidney E. Berger, John Carter, Roderick Cave, Mirjam Foot, Colin Franklin, John Lane, Bernard C. Middleton, Richard-Gabriel Rummonds, Stephen O. Saxe, Marianne Tidcombe, and Michael Twyman. Topics covered by Oak Knoll Press books include everything from the work of Harold Pinter to bookbinders’ finishing tool makers and the papers used by J. M. W. Turner, and their list is impressively long. Publishing partners include The British Library, the Library of Congress, and the Private Libraries Association. In addition, Oak Knoll Press distributes books for the American Antiquarian Society, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Caxton Club, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Typophiles.
They have made a valuable contribution to printing history simply by making such a quantity of new and old books about books available, providing fodder to historians, and useful manuals to novice letterpress printers, binders and other practitioners of the arts of the book.
In addition to its bookselling and publishing activities, each October Oak Knoll hosts a fine press book fair, with lectures and panel discussions, the topics of which have included the history of papermaking, book illustration, book selling, institutional collecting, fine press printing and publishing. The Fine Press Book Association had its start at the Oak Knoll Fest in 1997. The Fest provides a delightful opportunity for book-makers and book-buyers to congregate and socialize, and for neophytes to be drawn into the world of well-made books.
It is an honor to present the 2007 [sic] American Printing History Association Institutional Award for Distinguished Achievement in Printing History to Oak Knoll, in the person of Bob Fleck.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 28, 2008, New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City. A reception followed.
And here we are again. I am Jane Rodgers Siegel, chair of the awards committee. My distinguished colleagues on the committee this year are Cathleen Baker, Michael Russem, and Vic Zoschak.
The criteria for the Individual award read in part: “The Award is for a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.” And the papermaker, printer and publisher Henry Morris has single-handedly contributed to the study, recording, preservation anddissemination of a good bit of printing history.
Sid Berger’s Forty-four Years of Bird & Bull: a Bibliography, 1958-2002, lists 66 items published by Henry Morris, in addition to 45 items printed for others and 37 items of ephemera; to bring us more-or-less up-to-date, I find in Columbia’s catalog eight additional items, including the Bibliography, published since, making 74 items published – so far. Perhaps we’ll hear soon what Henry has up his sleeve now.
Morris started Bird and Bull, one of America’s oldest private presses, in 1958 as an outlet for his new-found interest in hand papermaking – an interest sparked by a piece of fifteenth-century paper. Indeed, his strong interest in the art and history of handmade paper has resulted in a variety of books on Western, Japanese, and Chinese papermaking, and marbled and decorated papers, from Henk Voorn on Old Ream Wrappers (1969) toDard Hunter and Son, by Dard Hunter II (1998), the unforgettably largeNicolas Louis Robert and His Endless Wire Papermaking Machine(2000), and Sid Berger on Karli Frigge’s Life in Marbling (2004). Morris’s 2006 J. Ben Lieberman Memorial lecture describes his belief that “Paper: There wouldn’t be any Printing History without It.”
Bird & Bull has also published on the history of printing and book illustration, including John Feather on English Book Prospectuses (1984) and Gaylord Schanilec on My Colorful Career (1996); works on bookbinding include Bernard Middleton’s Recollections (1995). Henry’s significant collection of typographic numismatics led to several works, including his reprint of William Blades’ Numismata Typographica, the Medallic History of Printing (1992), and to his Trade Tokens of British and American Booksellers and Bookmakers, with Specimens of Eleven Original Tokens Struck Especially for this Book (1989).
Morris’s publishing program has been a boon to the historian of the book. He is correct when he writes “It pleases me to know that without the Bird & Bull, many books on worthwhile, albeit esoteric subjects would probably never have been published.” And all these works have been printed by letterpress from metal type on either Henry’s own handmade or on imported mould-made papers.
Aside from his serious and informative publishing program, Morris has also produced a steady stream of humorous and satirical work. Particularly, his additions to the history of the fictional island nation, the Republic of San Serriffe, have created a parallel and offbeat universe of the book, which many enjoy reading about in its various chronicles, even if we are just as glad we can never actually visit it.
It gives me great pleasure to present the 2007 [sic] American Printing History Association Individual Award for Distinguished Achievement in Printing History to the distinctive – and distinguished – Henry Morris.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 28, 2008, New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City. A reception followed.
(John Randle accepting) Introductory remarks by Daniel J. Slive
Whittington Press for Matrix: A Review for Printers & Bibliophiles
The 2009 APHA Awards Committee nominates the Whittington Press as the recipient of the APHA Institutional Award in recognition of the press’s renowned journal Matrix: A Review for Printers & Bibliophiles. Issued annually since 1981, Matrix has made distinguished contributions to the study, recording, preservation, and dissemination of printing history, and has done so utilizing a remarkable combination of authoritative scholarship and fine printing.
The Whittington Press was started in 1971 by John and Rosalind Randle in the Cotswold village of Whittington. The founding, according to the Randles, was “the result partly of an early enthusiasm for Caslon type, Albion presses and hand-made paper, and partly the wish to escape from London publishing jobs at the weekend.” The initial product of the press was Richard Kennedy’s A Boy at the Hogarth Press, which was published to general acclaim in 1972. Since that first successful book, the Whittington Press has printed and published over 180 titles including bibliographies, type specimens, collections of illustrations and printed papers, and other books about books. The press has also regularly issued Matrix, now in its twenty-seventh year.
John Randle noted in The Whittington Press, a Bibliography 1971–1981that “Matrix came about partly because we had projects in mind which would not quite make a book, but which nevertheless needed publishing, and partly because, although the Americans had their Fine Print, we in England, with the notable exception of Albion, seem to be poorly provided with a journal devoted to fine printing in its finest sense, from practical printing to book collecting.” The first issue, printed in an edition of 350 copies, consisted of 76 pages. The number of pages included and copies printed have since increased with recent issues of approximately 800 copies containing over 200 pages. In Printing at The Whittington Press, 1972–1994, Mark Batty has described the combination of physical and intellectual content of Matrix that differentiates it from other journals devoted to printing history. “In its pages can be found enormous editorial diversity, and daring and maverick experiments in production in the form of foldouts, tip-ins, bind-ins, specialist papers, and various printing methods for illustrations. This varied content is held together by a consistent design style involving careful and conservative use of typography. This facilitates elegant legibility and a background framework to project the strong editorial.”
Matrix has covered a range of topics in printing history since 1981 including substantial articles on typefaces, typesetting, and founding (including hieroglyphical and hieratic types and exotic typefaces); papermaking, fine papers, and decorated papers from around the world; wood-engraving and other illustration processes including pochoir and autholithography; book design; and major British printers and publishers. As noted above, numerous articles have included specimens of type, paper, and illustrations which have complemented and enhanced the texts. Contributors to Matrix have included significant figures in printing and scholars of printing history (including several APHA laureates). A selective listing of this remarkable gathering of authors includes Nicolas Barker, Sebastian Carter, Roderick Cave, John Dreyfus, Vance Gerry, Jerry Kelly, David McKitterick, Ruari McLean, Henry Morris, James Mosley, Stan Nelson, and William S. Peterson.
In a critical appreciation of the first thirteen issues of Matrix, typographer and printing historian John Dreyfus concluded, “A vast amount of experience is stored up in Matrix. All this can be invaluable to those who have to take decisions about fine printing, either as practitioners, as patrons, or as collectors.” A decade and a half later, Matrix has remained an essential resource for all readers engaged in the study and appreciation of printing.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 24, 2009, New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City.
The 2009 APHA Awards Committee nominates typographical historian and author Robert Bringhurst as the recipient of the APHA Individual Award. This award is intended to recognize “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.” In nominating Robert Bringhurst, the committee notes his significant series of publications which have contributed to our study and understanding of the broad cultural contexts of typography.
Bringhurst’s highly important and influential manual, The Elements of Typographic Style, was first published in 1992. Eloquently written, Bringhurst’s work engages the reader masterfully with aesthetic, cultural, and historic approaches to understanding and practicing typography. Richard Eckersley noted in Bookways (Number 9, October 1993), “It is a breadth of vision one associates with the Renaissance, a vision that persisted into the eighteenth century, when publishers were also writers, translators, compositors, printers, papermakers, and, above all, readers.” Paul Koda, writing in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (Volume 89, Number 4, December 1995) concluded that the work “will be retained as a milestone in book making and book history. . . . The Elements of Typographic Style belongs on all our shelves.” Printer, publisher, and designer Gerald Lange, in Abracadabra (Number 7, Spring 1993), wrote that the manual “combines the practical, the theoretical, and the historical in a manner that is a delightful pleasure to read and of value not only to the amateur but to the professional as well.” Bringhurst has revised The Elements of Typographic Style five times, most recently in 2005, with substantive additions to the text. Now in its third edition, the manual has also been translated into ten languages.
Following the initial publication of The Elements of Typographic Style,Bringhurst produced a series of detailed essays on specific aspects of typographic history. Published in Serif: The Magazine of Type & Typography, these include:
“On the Classification of Letterforms,” Serif (Number 1, Fall 1994).
“Holding Ideas in the Hand: The Physics & Metaphysics of Renaissance Letterforms,” Serif (Number 2, Winter 1995).
“Painting with Ink & Steel: The Roman & Italic Types of the Baroque Age,” Serif (Number 3, Fall 1995).
“The Invisible Hand, Part I: Neoclassical Letterforms,” Serif(Number 4, Spring 1996).
“The Invisible Hand, Part II: Roman & Italic Type in the Romantic Age,” Serif (Number 5, Fall 1997).
An additional essay on typography, “The Typographic Nude,” was published in Critique in 1997. In October 2000 Bringhurst delivered the keynote address at APHA’s 25th Annual Conference, published in Printing History 46 under the title “The Voice in the Mirror.” (This was not his first presentation at APHA, as he also delivered APHA’s 1993 J. Ben Lieberman Memorial Lecture.) Bringhurst’s recent publications include The Solid Form of Language (2004), an extended essay on language, writing, and typography, and The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada (2008), a survey of English and French-Canadian books and book design from the early 19th-century to the present.
In addition to his own writings related to printing history, Bringhurst has also been involved in making the work of others readily available. He is responsible for the 1999 second edition, revised and updated, of A Short History of the Printed Word. He and Warren Chappel are co-authors of this second edition. He also edited, and provided an introduction to, the 1991 English translation of Jan Tschichold’s The Form of the Book.
In his publications, Bringhurst has influenced the way students, scholars, curators, and practitioners of typography approach, consider, understand, collect, and create. His placement of type within a larger cultural context—as an object of serious art historical and anthropological study—is an important contribution to printing history.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 24, 2009, New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City.
