The Minnesota Center for the book arts has been an exceptional advocate for the field of book arts for 35 years. MCBA’s facilities, programs, and community stimulates and guides conversations across the breadth of the materials and traditions of the book arts, and between the craft of printing and emerging conceptualizations of the book.
From its position as one of three anchors of Open Book, MCBA creates community as a physical space in a historic area of Minneapolis, in collaboration with The Loft Literary Center and Milkweed Editions. MCBA’s studio and classes are essential to passing on to new practitioners in the art of printing and related skills and by challenging traditional notions of the book. MCBA’s awards, fellowships, mentorships, residencies, classes, and exhibitions cultivate learning at all levels—from the best-known book artists to young children. MCBA is extraordinary in its ability to expose new audiences to the printing, papermaking, bookbinding, and craft. The center is embedded deeply in its local community, even while its exhibitions and artist programs influence the field internationally.
MCBA’s mission is “to lead the advancement of the book as an evolving art form.” Its lifelong learning approach enables practitioners and enthusiasts to take part in shaping the future of the book and to gain a deep appreciation for the traditional printing crafts. I would like to nominate the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts for the American Printing History Association’s 2019 Institutional Award, in recognition of its past and present leadership in the field of book arts, and for its substantial contributions to creating greater appreciation for traditional and emerging strengths of the field.
Rich is a former professor at West Virginia University, Morgantown and the author of “Origin of the American Point System for Printers’ Type Measurement”, the standard reference on that subject. It is clearly written, well-illustrated, and easily understood by the general reader. More recently, he wrote “Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype—The Origin of Digital Typesetting”, published by the University of Tampa Press. This very thorough history of the invention and development of this essential American typesetting system fills a gaping void in the history of machine composition, providing an in-depth look both into the rich history of the Philadelphia company that created the Monotype system, and even at some of the people who have made use of Monotype equipment in the 21st century. I cannot overstate the value and significance of this book. And don’t miss the appendices which contain wonderful extra detail.
As if two essential books are not enough, Richard L. Hopkins was the driving force behind the establishment of the American Typecasting Fellowship in 1978, as well as helping to ensure its continued existence through his regular publication of the ATF Newsletter—usually printed letterpress in whole, or in part. Richard (Rich to his friends, who are legion) edits this deluxe document, often writing the bulk of its contents. The ATF meets biannually and its members strive to keep alive the traditions of metal type and its manufacture. This organization is unique in the world, and it is the direct offspring of the ideas and inspiration of Richard L. Hopkins.
In concert with the ATF Rich opened up his home and foundry yearly to conduct weeklong sessions of hands-on instruction in the operation of typecasting machinery. His Monotype University provided essential training in the use of complex equipment and has been the springboard for a wide range of type-making wannabes. A new generation has found inspiration through this instruction.
In his own words, “My goal through writing, typecasting, and printing is the preservation of the equipment and the technology associated with letterpress printing and the making of printers’ metal type.” He has accomplished all of this and more. Richard L. Hopkins life’s work embodies everything that the American Printing History Association strives for, thus this nomination for this prestigious individual Laureate Award.
Richard Minsky obtained his first printing press at the age of 13 to replace rubber stamps he had been using. In 1968, he graduated cum laude in economics from Brooklyn College. Minsky was awarded a fellowship at Brown University, where he received his master’s degree in economics. He pursued a Ph.D. at The New School for Social Research, but left after two years to pursue bookbinding, art and music. He studied bookbinding in Providence, Rhode Island with master bookbinder Daniel Gibson Knowlton, whom he met at the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library at Brown University. In 1974, Minsky founded the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan, the first organization of its kind in the United States dedicated to contemporary interpretations of the book as an art object while preserving traditional practices of the art of the book. In 1978, he was named a US/UK Bicentennial Fellow in Visual Art by the National Endowment for the Arts and the British Council. In 2004, Yale University Library acquired Minsky’s archive of published fine art editions and other works. The Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University hosted an exhibition of 50 years of Minsky’s work from August to November 2010 in the book trades and related arts.
Wei Jin Darryl Lim is a professional graphic designer and emerging book historian from the Republic of Singapore. As a master’s student at the University of Reading, he studied typographic history from a non-Western, postcolonial perspective. His current doctoral research focuses on the transnational history of books, graphic design, visual communications, and print technologies. With degrees from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore and the University of Reading, UK, Lim has close to a decade of professional experience working as a graphic designer and more than two years of experience in teaching design, including as an adjunct lecturer for the storied and prestigious Glasgow School of Art. At present, he is earning his PhD in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication from the University of Reading under the supervision of professors Rob Banham and Fiona Ross. In addition to the 2019 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship, Lim won the Ernest Hoch Award and the Design History Society’s student travel grant in 2018, as well as a Bibliographical Society grant in 2017. His project, “Constellations of Printing: Muslim-Malay Lithography in the Straits Settlements, Sumatra, and Riau Archipelago, 1848–1900,” is really among the first of its kind. The project will provide not just a survey, but also a rigorous material analysis of lithographed books from nineteenth century Muslim-Malay communities. The project is interdisciplinary, combining research in printing and typographic history within the broader sociopolitical context of maritime Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago.
Jordan Wingate is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of California, Los Angeles, also where he earned his master’s in English. He recently secured the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Dissertation Fellowship from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Wingate has published articles in the journal American Literature, and he has had reviews published in MAKE Literary Magazine and Ampersand. His awards include a 2013 California Rare Book School Scholarship, the Critical Hit Award, and the 6th Annual David Sedaris Humor Writing Contest. Wingate’s project, “Philadelphia’s Black Printmen, 1787–1841,” attempts to reframe the historiography of the Black press by uncovering new and overlooked material on press operators of color working in Philadelphia during the post-Revolutionary era.
L-R Nina Schneider, APHA President, George Barnum, Government Publishing Office Agency Historian, Chris Sweterlitsch, APHA Chesapeake Chapter Secretary (Casey Smith)
The U.S. Government Printing Office, now known as the Government Publishing Office, has provided printing and dissemination support functions to the U.S. Government for major historical events for nearly 156 years. In 1862 production began on the printing and distribution of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, perhaps the most historically significant job ever undertaken by the GPO. In late 1964 GPO produced the Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, commonly known as the Warren Report. Over that period and into the present, GPO has reflected the changing technologies, techniques, workforce, and standards of the printing industry in general.
In order to make its historic resources available to the public, GPO reactivated its history program, with dedicated staff, to serve the agency and outside researchers.
This history program includes:
- GPO history exhibit space—the only permanent public display of printing history in Washington, DC;
- Special displays on timely and topical themes such as the Civil War, machine typesetting, and the Congressional Serial Set;
- Publications under GPO imprint;
- Educational opportunities, including lectures, for staff and the public;
- The digitization of GPO’s photo collection; and more.
For its efforts in preserving and documenting its history, which reflect the history of the printing industry, as well as making those resources available to the public, I am pleased to present the U.S. Government Publishing Office with the 2017 APHA Institutional award. George Barnum, Agency Historian, will be accepting the award on behalf of GPO Director, Davita-Vance Cooks–please join me in congratulating the GPO!
Remarks by George Barnum, Agency Historian, U.S. Government Publishing Office:
With thanks to the Awards Committee and the Trustees, we’re very pleased and very honored to receive this award, and to find ourselves among the distinguished roll of previous laureates.
The Government Publishing Office has had a program for collecting, preserving, recording, and interpreting the history of the agency off and on for about the last 30 years. In 2010, after a few years of there having been no designated agency historian, I was appointed with the immediate task of marking our 150th anniversary in 2011. In preparing these remarks, I looked back over the list of the History Program’s projects of over 30 or so years. I’m pleased to say that it’s a good long list, and that a satisfying amount of it has taken place on my watch, with the inspiration and collaboration of many people, not least my immediate boss Andrew Sherman, and my predecessors James Cameron, Daniel MacGilvray, and Barbara Shaw.
We published a new official history in 2011 (and a second, revised edition of it last year), published (this very week) a book of over 200 photographs (and will shortly make that collection available on the internet), created a 2000 sq. ft. ongoing history exhibit that highlights the industrialization of the printing and binding trades in the late 19th and early 20th century, GPO’s prodigious output, and the people who have spent their working lives as part of the GPO family. We preserved a marvelous collection of wood display type that is now used by the students at the Corcoran College/George Washington University. There have also been many smaller projects including a series of bi-weekly lunchtime history talks for the staff (and anybody else who happens to be around).
My fellow GPO employees often say to me after a history talk or other presentation, “Oh, I just love history.” Grateful as I am for their interest, this comment always takes me back to the prospective library school students I used to interview on “career night” when I taught in the at Kent State in the early 90s:
Me : What makes you want to get an MLS?
Prospective student : Oh, I just love books.
To those folks I generally suggested an application at Barnes and Noble rather than a master’s degree. But in the almost-decade that I’ve been GPO historian, I think I’ve started to understand what my co-workers mean.
Government agencies, like many other organizations, are particular, peculiar ecosystems. Their particularity derives from their object of providing a benefit – a service, generally – to people, largely without payment of a fee or much reference to any qualification other than citizenship (and sometimes not even that). GPO is particular and peculiar because it has at its core not only this somewhat abstract duty (embodied in the free and open provision of Government information to the public) but also the very concrete, hands-on mission of an industrial workplace. We actually make stuff.
And while what we make has changed radically in the last 20 or 30 years from primarily ink-on-paper documents (which we still produce an awful lot of) to a mix that includes almost every kind of digital information product you can name, the presence of GPO’s mission is always shining through.
This combined sense of being in the service of the American people and at the same time part of a long tradition of craft-based industry is in the broadest sense what sparks my co-workers’ involvement, investment, and pride in the Office, which I see demonstrated all the time. And from that, I feel, grows the respect and interest they have for the history of the Office. I’ve been very lucky to have had the time, support, and resources to look rather closely this thing we call (in a kind of shorthand) “the GPO way.” It has roots in a lot of things – apprenticeship, the traditions of the printing and binding trades, patriotism, wartime experience, progressive workplace reforms.
One might, perfectly sensibly, ask why a Government agency, and not necessarily a glamorous one either (the State Dept. or NASA we are not) needs a history program at all. I’m reasonably sure that nobody in this room would ask that, but you can be assured that it’s a question that will be asked in the days ahead. If the question is about the significance of the work that my three predecessors and I have done, off and on, for 30 years, here are some thoughts:
- The audience outside our walls for what I do is diverse and probably larger than ever owing to the history exhibit being open to the public five days a week (where we see “regular” people who just turn up, scheduled groups, and lots of people who are in the building for appointments). We’ve also found new ways to engage via the internet. I get direct inquiries, we actively use social media, and we constantly find new ways to interact (like the APHA blog, for example). We’ve seen a big increase in the number of inquiries we get from people doing family history, asking us for information about a grandfather/aunt/uncle/cousin who worked at GPO. We clearly have a significant spot in American printing history, and we have been able to engage with that in many new ways during my time as historian.
- For the people charged with leading the agency, the history program provides information and insight into the place, the workforce, and the culture that can assist in making more nuanced and (we hope) successful decisions. I feel very fortunate that the two agency heads under whom I have been historian, Davita Vance Cooks, the current Director, and her immediate predecessor Bill Boarman, the 26th Public Printer, have believed in that role and valued that insight.
- For the workforce, regardless of the shade of their collar or the part they play in the operation, it provides context, continuity, and an ongoing connection to that sense of mission that seems to have been part of the fabric of the place since we were created by Congress in 1861. What our history program documents is a rather extraordinary marriage of a big printing and binding works with a Government agency. Interpreting that helps our employees understand their role as part of something that’s more than simply a 40-hour per week obligation.
And ultimately the public are beneficiaries of the sense of service and pride in work that comes out of it. My own understanding of GPO’s 156 years is that, owing to that sense of service, there has been a continuing, uninterrupted stream (a river, really) of innovation and adaptation to constantly changing technology, as well as to constantly changing requirements and expectations. It caused us to rise to the challenges of changing economic conditions, world wars, technological revolutions, and yes, political upheaval. It saw us grow to be the largest printing plant on the planet, and has likewise guided us as those numbers of people and machines have decreased while our mission remains unchanged. What is always there is the drive to fill the orders of our Government customers as expeditiously and economically as possible, and to make the product of that work, which has already been paid for by the taxpayer, not only a good piece of work but as broadly and readily available as possible, which we do in a variety of ways, not the least of which is our long partnership with libraries in the Federal Depository Library Program. Without that extra spark, what I look after is only a large file of photographs of industrial machines. It’s my privilege and my joy to document and interpret that particular and peculiar marriage.
Looked at through the lens of study, recording, preservation or dissemination of printing history, (which the APHA Award honors) I am both very proud of the breadth and variety of the list of accomplishments, and humbled by the Awards Committee and Board of Trustees judgment that ours is a “distinguished contribution.” We are very grateful. And while I’m on the topic of gratitude, I must also recognize Chris Sweterlitsch, who wrote the nomination, for which we’re also exceedingly grateful. I’m delighted to accept the 2017 APHA Institutional Award on behalf of the Director of the Government Publishing Office, and the 1700 proud and dedicated men and women of the GPO, a bunch of whom “just love history.”
Since the 1960s Lisa Unger Baskin has been collecting works concentrated on “women at work.” Her collection and research have placed special emphasis on the role of women in the book trades and related arts; reminding us that women were also instrumental—and influential—in the printing trades. Lisa has opened her library and home to countless scholars, students, and bibliophilic groups. She knows the story of every book and tradeswoman involved—and she knows how to tell those stories. For over forty years Lisa has run her own private public library.
In her collection, recently placed at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture within the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, one can find early illuminated manuscripts by women, early woodcut illustrations by women, one of the first books to be typeset by women, the work of women printers, and work of women binders, as well as the work of women publishers. Often, this work of was carried out to further the cause of women—thus putting printing to its most important use: instigating social change.
The fellowship committee received and reviewed 22 applications, many of them quite strong. We had no difficulty, however, in agreeing unanimously on Amanda Stuckey as the fellowship recipient for 2017. A PhD candidate in American Studies at the College of William and Mary, she is writing a dissertation on “Reading Bodies: Disability and the Book in American Culture, 1789-1886.” Her well-structured proposal addresses a subset of this topic, printing for the blind, and she plans to use her APHA fellowship to support a research trip to the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, MA. From an early period Perkins, the first school for the blind established in the United States, engaged in printing for the blind, and their library and archives will provide an excellent source for studying this history.
The 2010 competition and award for the Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship was deferred for one year.
Cary curators Steve Galbraith and Amelia Fontenal accept APHA’s Institutional Award from APHA president Robert McCamant, January 30, 2016. (Nina Schneider)
APHA Awards committee statement forthcoming.
