Alexander Campos accepting Introductory remarks by Daniel J. Slive
The 2010 APHA Awards Committee has nominated The Center for Book Arts as the recipient of the APHA Institutional Award in recognition of the Center’s extremely active and accomplished promotion of both traditional printing and the contemporary exploration of the book as art object. Since 1974, The Center for Book Arts has made distinguished contributions to the recording, preservation, and dissemination of modern and contemporary printing history, and has done so through a remarkable education and outreach program. The Center for Book Arts was the first non-profit organization in the United States dedicated to the book arts and has become a model for similar organizations throughout the world. In its thirty-five years, the Center has pioneered many activities that may now seem typical of such an organization: classes on traditional and innovative techniques, galleries and publications dedicated to the book arts, and access to printing equipment and studio space.
Its extensive instructional program offers over one hundred courses, workshops, and seminars in letterpress printing and typography as well as bookbinding and other aspects of book production. Classes available in Fall 2009, for instance, included an introduction to hand typesetting, contemporary letterpress printing, digital letterpress, platen press, monotypes, and four-color printing from polymer plates. In the course of its tenure, the Center has educated and trained thousands of people including artists, teachers, librarians, book conservators, collectors, and others intrigued with, and engaged by, books and their creation. Many of these former students have themselves become teachers and have provided instruction privately, at other book arts organizations, or in academic institutions. Through this extensive and successful instructional program, the Center has contributed to the preservation and promotion of the vibrant art of printing.
The Center’s extensive documentation of modern and contemporary printing is represented by over 175 exhibitions. These have included shows dedicated to individual artists and imprints, production techniques, social and aesthetic themes, and presses from particular geographic regions. A highly selective listing includes individual exhibits devoted to the work of Lynne Avadenka, Julie Chen, Tom Phillips, Claire Van Vliet, and the Whittington Press; shows focusing on printing techniques ranging from letterpress to offset printed artist books to mail art; and a wide variety of thematic shows such as “The Altered Page” (an exhibition of selections from the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry), “Grimm & Grimmer” (historical children’s books and related contemporary artists’ books), and “No More Drama: The Saga Continues” (contemporary artists responding to Latin American telenovelas). The Center has also organized a particularly notable, and perhaps unique, series of exhibitions focusing on different geographic regions of book production in the United States and abroad. These have ranged from the Lower East Side to Northern and Southern California and beyond to Latin America, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Russia, and Iraq. In sum, the Center’s exhibition program, often documented by complementary exhibition catalogues, has provided practitioners, curators, collectors, and the general public access to a significant variety of modern and contemporary printing.
The Center for Book Arts’s remarkable record of exhibitions and instruction is strengthened by additional activities supporting the preservation and promotion of printing and the book arts. These include publications, lectures, artist services, access to studios and equipment, and numerous opportunities for printers and book artists to practice and develop their skills and their craft. In nominating the Center for the Book Arts for the APHA Institutional Award, the Nominating Committee is pleased to recognize both the Center’s longevity and the quality of its instruction, outreach, and support programs which have successfully contributed to the promotion of printing and printing history.
It is a pleasure to present this year’s American Printing History Association Institutional Award to The Center for Book Arts
The 2010 APHA Awards Committee has nominated Johanna Drucker, prolific author and internationally recognized authority in the book arts, as the recipient of the APHA Individual Award. This award is intended to recognize “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.” In nominating Johanna Drucker, the committee cites her significant series of scholarly publications which have contributed to our study and understanding of the intellectual and aesthetic contexts of typography, the history of printing, and the book as object; her lectures and exhibitions; and her teaching.
Drucker’s important scholarly book publications include The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (1995); The Century of Artists’ Books (1995, Second edition, 2004); Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics (1998); and The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art (1994). In addition to these scholarly monographs, Drucker has published more than one hundred critical and scholarly articles concerning contemporary art, visual culture, graphic design, artists’ books, and the book. A selective listing of articles which focus on printing history and typography includes: “Graphical Readings and the Visual Aesthetics of Textuality” (2005/2006); “What is a Letter?” (in the volume Education of a Typographer (2004)); “Typographic Intelligence” (in Typographically Speaking: The Work of Matthew Carter (2002, reissue 2004)); “The Artist’s Book as Idea and Form” (2000); “Experimental Narrative and Artist’s Books” (1999); “Collaborative Ty/opography” (1999); “The Art of the Written Image” (1997); and “The Myth of the Democratic Multiple” (1997). Her contributions to the study and dissemination of printing history also include the publishing of book reviews and shorter pieces; participating on panels and in symposia; delivering scholarly and critical lectures (including APHA’s 2001 Lieberman Lecture); and curating exhibitions. Several of her works have been published for international distribution, with translations into Catalan, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Complementing this prodigious activity, Drucker has also contributed to the understanding of printing history through her teaching. Since 2008 she has served as the inaugural Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. From 1999 to 2008 at the University of Virginia she held the Robertson Chair in Media Studies and served as Professor, Department of English, and Director of Media Studies. She has also held positions at Purchase College, SUNY; Yale; Columbia; Harvard; and the University of Texas at Dallas.
In her publications, presentations, exhibitions, and teaching, Drucker has challenged and influenced the way in which scholars, students, curators, and practitioners of typography consider, understand, collect, and create. Her placement of letterforms and books within a larger cultural context — as worthy objects of serious intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic concern and engagement — is an important contribution to printing history.
It is a pleasure to present this year’s American Printing History Association Individual Award to Johanna Drucker.
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The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 30, 2010, New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City.
The Alabama program has been a leader in its field, offering a book arts MFA since 1987. This degree program builds on a tradition of printing and book-history training that goes back even further, to individual courses and workshops offered to library science students starting in the 1950s, often by pioneers in the revival of historical printing arts in the Unites States, including Gabriel Rummonds, R. Hunter Middleton, and Carolyn Hammer. The present program’s goal for its MFA students is particularly sensitive to the need for historical knowledge and historically informed creativity. In the words of its own prospectus, it aims to produce “book artists who have well-honed technical knowledge of the various facets of contemporary bookmaking, and who have an understanding of the historical evolution of the book including its materiality, and the role of the book in society. Courses explore the reconciliation of modern sensibilities with historic craft.” The degree program includes two required book history courses that cover the essentials of bibliographical analysis and physical description and an introduction to the cultural impact of printing across five centuries. The program is grounded in the belief that mastering the best practices of the past (that is, recreating historical excellence) is the best preparation for future artistic achievement. In this way, the Alabama program has fostered traditional values in modern printing. In particular, we note that the Alabama program employs three fully credentialed faculty in printing, book binding, and the history of the book, and that they teach both students in the MFA program and graduate students and undergraduates in other university departments. As such, the book arts faculty have a significant role in disseminating appreciation for the historical study of the book among many students of library and information science and beyond. This is an important dimension of higher learning in our age of “digital everything.”
Its extensive instructional program offers over one hundred courses, workshops, and seminars in letterpress printing and typography as well as bookbinding and other aspects of book production. Classes available in Fall 2009, for instance, included an introduction to hand typesetting, contemporary letterpress printing, digital letterpress, platen press, monotypes, and four-color printing from polymer plates. In the course of its tenure, the Center has educated and trained thousands of people including artists, teachers, librarians, book conservators, collectors, and others intrigued with, and engaged by, books and their creation. Many of these former students have themselves become teachers and have provided instruction privately, at other book arts organizations, or in academic institutions. Through this extensive and successful instructional program, the Center has contributed to the preservation and promotion of the vibrant art of printing.
Of course, the true effectiveness of any educational program lies in the quality of its alumni and in their achievements. Alabama’s program excels in this regard, too, having produced such outstanding educators as Inge Bruggeman (Oregon College of Art), Kate Martinson (Luther College), and Katherine McCanless Ruffin (Wellesley College), to name only a few. These alumni and others have filled leadership positions in organizations like the New York Center for the Book and the Guild of Bookworkers. Most impressive is the number of graduates who have maintained their contact with the foundations of fine printing nurtured in the program by establishing private presses that have produced and continue to do work of quality. The Alabama program has had broad influence in other ways too, through an exciting cultural exchange with book artists in Cuba, and as a leader in the foundation of the new College Book Arts Association.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 29, 2011, New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City.
Hendrik D. L. Vervliet is Professor and Library Director Emeritus of the University of Antwerp, and has been a leading researcher on the history of types in the early modern period for over forty years. His body of work is one of the largest and most important contributions by a single scholar to the history of Renaissance typography and the history of the book more generally.
Vervliet’s many studies of early type have led to precise identifications and descriptions of individual fonts and dates for their use by various printers in several European cities, thereby offering for the first time a clear understanding of the relationships between type founders and printers in a period of great design innovation. This kind of work has already changed our notions of originality and imitation in the field of type design, and it will enable future researchers and critics to even better assess the aesthetic history of Renaissance typography. Vervliet’s most recent book on Paris types and printers of the sixteenth century offers an outstanding, up-to-date model of bibliographical analysis, close type comparison, and historical judgment as applied to typography.
Vervliet has also edited numerous source documents and facsimiles relating to printing and type history. These range from annotated portfolios of type specimens to the correspondence of important publishers with the great intellectuals of their day. Most impressive in this latter regard is his edition of the correspondence of Justus Lipsius. Vervliet was the sole editor of the Annual Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries from 1974 to 1990, when, upon his retirement, it was determined that this enormous international project could only be continued by a large team of editors. Under Vervliet, this indispensable reference work chronicled the progress of book history during the fertile period that saw the birth of the new history of the book. It remains a standard reference.
The 2012 APHA Awards Committee nominates the CODEX Foundation of Berkeley, California 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.”
The mission of the foundation we recognize today is stated with admirable succinctness thus: “The Codex Foundation exists to preserve and promote the hand-made book in the broadest possible context as a work of art and to bring to public recognition the artists, the craftsmanship, and the rich history of the civilization of the book.” Although a relatively young institution (it was founded in 2006), the foundation has fulfilled this mission admirably, largely through its sponsorship of an eponymous biannual gathering of professional and amateur book artists, publishers, educators, scholars, and collectors. This CODEX festival has been variously described by APHA members as a collection of “superb practitioners, scholars and artists,” “vibrant in inspiring new people towards an interest in the book arts,” and “pulsing with excitement.” This combination symposium and book fair draws participants from Asia, Europe, Central and South America, and the Middle East. The foundation has embodied the excitement and intellectual content of its international festival in a major published collection, book art object (2007), and in a series of monographs on topics relating to the handmade book. The series includes important writers and artists like Robert Bringhurst (Canada), Alan Loney (Australia), and Ulrike Stoltz and Uta Schneider (Germany). In 2011 the foundation, in collaboration with Mexican partners and Stanford University Libraries, has inaugurated CODEXMEXICO with events and exhibitions in Guadalajara and (later this year) in Mexico City.
Most importantly to APHA, the Codex Foundation promotes the idea that there is great value, both historical and contemporary, in the handmade book. For its founders and directors, the collecting and studying of printed books in traditional historical terms is complemented by the work of printers who seek to breathe new life into old technologies. This is not merely preserving old technology; it is making it alive and relevant to today’s art world. The resulting emphasis on both innovation and respect for tradition represents historic preservation at its dynamic best. We commend the Codex Foundation for so high-minded a philosophy and above all for putting it into practice.
It is a pleasure to present this year’s American Printing History Association Institutional Award to the CODEX Foundation.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 28, 2012, New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City.
The 2012 APHA Awards Committee nominates the Reverend Michael F. Suarez, S. J., internationally recognized authority on book history, editor, bibliographer, teacher, book collector, and poet as the recipient of the APHA Individual Award. This award, of course, addresses only one dimension of the remarkable career of Father Suarez, in that it is intended to recognize “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.”
In this specific regard, then, the Association recognizes that across some twenty-five years, Michael Suarez has published notable works in the academic study of printing and publishing history, has taught undergraduates and graduate students alike to understand the importance of the book as an object, and has encouraged the production of new historical scholarship by others. In the first of these fields, scholarly publishing, we cite above all his many important articles on publishing and the book trade in seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century Britain. Suarez’s 1996 book Traficking in the Muse is a study of poetic canonicity as established by publisher Robert Dodsley. In addition to these direct contributions to the history of printing, he is co-general editor of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (in progress) and has co-edited one volume of it. As a teacher, we recognize his long career at LeMoyne College, Fordham and Oxford Universities, and the University of Virginia. As a mentor and facilitator of other scholars, he is probably best known for his work as co-editor of and contributor to the Oxford Companion to the Book (2010) and of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (2009), but he has also been a contributing or advisory editor to the Oxford Chronology of the Book and The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th edition, and he edited the six-volume edition of Dodsley’sA Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1997).He has also edited the collected essays of D. F. McKenzie, and authored a number of original methodological talks and essays on writing and using book history. We commend as well his willingness to give frequent public lectures on topics related to book history.
In September 2009, Michael Suarez assumed the directorship of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, a forum in which he is already making important new contributions to the study of bibliography, printing and book history, curatorship, and librarianship. The APHA award comes with our sincere best wishes for the future success of his own work and that of the Rare Book School.
It is a pleasure to present this year’s American Printing History Association Individual Award to Michael Suarez.
The 2013 APHA Awards Committee names Sebastian Carter as the recipient of the APHA Individual Award. This award is intended to recognize “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.”
It is almost as if the description of the award was crafted for him. Until 2008, when Carter shut it down, he was proprietor of the Rampant Lions Press. It was founded by his father Will Carter in 1924, giving it perhaps the longest run of a private press in United Kingdom. Apart from being an intelligent designer of books, he is also a smart publisher and a scholar. He is author of Twentieth Century Type Designers (published first by Trefoil in 1987, and a later second edition by Lund-Humphries in 1995), a definitive book on the subject which has been reprinted many times since its first release. He is also the UK editor of Parenthesis, the journal of the Fine Press Book Association. He is an articulate writer about typography, printing, and book design. His articles in Matrix, the Times Literary Supplement, and Parenthesis–on printing history, book design, and typography–have been enjoyed by scholars and general readers since the 1960s. His contributions to Matrix alone would merit some special honor.
A sampling of the titles of his books and articles establishes the range of his contributions: The Book Becomes, The Making of A Fine Edition, 1984; In Praise of Letterpress, 2001; Painting With Type, 2007; “Arnold Fawcus and the Trianon Press” (in Matrix 3), 1983; “Victor Hammer” (in Matrix7), 1987; “Stanley Morison and Jan Van Krimpen: A Survey of their Correspondence,” (4 parts in Matrix 8-11), 1988-1991; “Letters & Things. Wood Engraved Initials of Eric Gill (in Matrix 15), 1995; “The Golden Cockerel Press, private presses, and private types,” 1996; “Steven Heller and Lita Talarico: Typography Sketchbooks” in the Times Literary Supplement, 2012.
He guest-edited a number of The Monotype Recorder on Eric Gill in 1990, and contributed a section called “The Morison Years” to the centenaryRecorder in 1997. He is a co-author of the History of the Monotype Corporation to be published by the Printing Historical Society. He contributed a number of entries to The Oxford Companion to the Book(2010).
He was born in 1941 in Cambridge, England. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital, and King’s College, Cambridge, reading English and Architecture and Fine Arts. He then worked as a designer with the London publisher John Murray, followed by two years in Paris with the Trianon Press. Back in London he worked for the Stellar Press and Ruari McLean Associates. In 1966 he married Penelope Kerr and moved back to Cambridge to join his father at Rampant Lions. He became a partner in 1971 and took over the business in 1991.
It is a pleasure to present this year’s American Printing History Association Individual Award to Sebastian Carter.
