Cynthia Brokaw received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984. A specialist in late imperial Chinese history (ca. 1400 1900), she taught at Vanderbilt University, the University of Oregon, and the Ohio State University before coming to Brown in 2009. Her first work,The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China, examined the role of popular religious belief in the formation of social ideology. Her current research focus is the history of the book in China. Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods, based on archival and field work in China, is a study of a rural book publishing industry active in distributing popular texts throughout south China. She is now engaged in research on the role that print culture played in the re-integration of Sichuan province into the Chinese political and cultural mainstream over the course of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).
APHA is pleased to announce that the 2016 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship is awarded to Dr. Hazel Wilkinson, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, UK for the preparation for a monograph about the history of the Wild Court Press (1718-1785). Wild Court Press was a pioneer of literary and bibliographical innovations such as subscription publication for English works, multi-authored collections of poetry, and use of Dutch Elzevir type and the duodecimo format. At the annual meeting it was noted that seven of the 10 applications for the fellowship came from individuals in the UK.
Huiying Chen receives the fellowship from APHA President Robert McCamant. (Gwido Zlaktes)
APHA is pleased to announce that the 2015 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship is awarded to Huiying Chen for her proposal “Printing in Manchu Language in Eighteenth-Century China.”
Ms. Chen holds a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, with a double major in English Language and Literature and in Economics. She earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and is at present a doctoral student in history at the University of Illinois Chicago. She plans to use her fellowship to fund travel to Beijing in order to study original artifacts produced by the Imperial Printing Office under the Qing dynasty, between the mid-seventeenth century and the mid-eighteenth century.
Specifically she plans to focus on the printing of a series of dictionaries, beginning with the 1708 publication of a bilingual Manchu-Chinese dictionary, and expanding to a multi-lingual dictionary that involved printing in five languages: Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uighur, and Chinese. Although her dissertation will also take into account the role of state printing in relation to the imperial aims of the Qing dynasty, her fellowship research will concentrate on the printing of Manchu. As she explains in her proposal, besides the political significance of printing in Manchu, the actual printing process is also very important, although it remains little studied. Printing a foreign language was not new to the Chinese, since Chinese artisans had printed in other languages, such as Korean and Mongolian, as early as the sixteenth century. Manchu, however, would have been a challenge, because its written script was created only in the 1620s and was not standardized in terms of font, style, and format. Based on preliminary examination of some of the artifacts available only in Beijing, Ms. Chen believes that she can find out how the printing of Manchu took place and was developed in the Imperial Printing Office. In the judgment of the Fellowship Committee, this project will make a significant contribution to the history of printing in China, and will also potentially provide evidence for cross-cultural comparison between multi-lingual printing in China and polyglot printing in Europe.
Paul Gehl APHA’s 2015 Individual Award from President Robert McCamant. (Gwido Zlatkes)
Introduction by Michael Thompson
Chair, Award Committee, New York, January 24, 2015
The work of our individual award winner is directly related to our mission here at the American Printing History Association. Paul Gehl is the custodian, as the original deed of gift requires him to be called, of the Newberry Library’s comprehensive history of printing collection. He has overcome that somewhat anomalous historical appellation, however, and is better known in the halls of the Newberry as the George Amos Poole, III, Curator of Rare Books, and Custodian, John W. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing. According to Newberry president David Spadafora, he has the longest title in North America.
And he deserves it. Paul has been Custodian of the Wing Foundation since 1987 and has enriched that collection by through the acquisition of materials, exhibitions both of print & calligraphy, and the sponsorship of public lectures on various aspects of the book.
His formal training was as an historian, an A.B., M.A., and PhD. (the latter two from the University of Chicago), with a focus on late medieval/renaissance Italy, which gives him a critical understanding of the typeface innovations developed there which spread throughout early modern Europe. His experience as a fellow at the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti) and the American Academy in Rome have contributed to his scholarly publications on the books and printing, especially on the subject of school books in Renaissance Italy. He has also had fellowships at the American Council of Learned Societies and the Newberry Library / British Academy Exchange. His scholarly articles, well over twenty-five at last count, exhibit an uncommon breadth of learning in our important field of the printed word.
Paul has been active in our own organization as well as organizations sharing similar goals. He has served on boards or committees of, to name a few, the American Printing History Association, Bibliotheca Wittockiana in Belgium, the Caxton Club in Chicago, Hamilton Wood Type Museum in his home state of Wisconsin, and La Bibliofilía, an Italian periodical on the history of printing.
The 2015 winner of the individual award from the American Printing History Association is Paul Gehl.
Remarks by Paul Gehl
Thank you, Michael; thanks to your committee; and thanks to the council and to the entire APHA .
I am moved by your kind words and grateful for the gift of this award. Having served on the awards committee for some years and studied its history, I know that you have put me in far more illustrious company than I usually keep. When I got the news my first thought was that I was really too young for an award of the sort, but then I realized I’m not as young as I tend to act. The bathroom mirror confirms this opinion, as does the occasional young person who nowadays offers up a seat on the bus.
In any case, I would like to take a few minutes of your time this afternoon to reflect on a few earlier winners of the APHA prize and what they and their work have meant to me, this by way of suggesting that the single most important thing in our printing history world is the spirit of collaboration. Certainly we vote our confidence in collaboration by joining APHA and remaining members. Such groups offer valuable places for exchange and fellowship, and in the particular case of APHA they advance a specialized field through publishing, conferences, and grants.
APHA and other groups are at the center of modern humanities, a field where collaboration increasingly relies on digital tools and digital communication. Some such collaborations are writ very large indeed. I think, for example, of the Toronto-based Iter, a consortium of medieval and Renaissance studies institutions that develops and distributes online resources. They offer thousands of tools, documents, and data bases, and they have recently adopted my own pokey little website about the Renaissance book trade, Humanism For Sale.
For me, however, much the most important collaborations are the small, gradual ones we achieve simply by asking and answering questions about our work, by looking at sources together, by reading and critiquing and editing each other’s work, and by publishing results that forward our common understanding of history. I tend to think of this kind of work as incremental or microscopic collaboration. Micro collaborations of the sort do often nowadays intersect with the big-data projects. I think for example of the Incunabula Short Title Catalog. The basic work and the maintenance have been in the hands of one of the big guys, the British Library. The concept is credited to Lotte Hellinga, though much of the actual work has fallen to one or two others, especially Martin Davies early on and more recently John Goldfinch. These people have made the ISTC work through hard, determined, detail oriented management, but they have also relied on collaborators world-wide for new entries, corrections to old ones, new locations and copies, and original published research which the compilers review and incorporate.
In the context of such a project, the work of individual, occasional collaborators is important, but it leaves few traces. The same is even more true for the kind of informal collaborations that I enjoy most about library work – meetings at reference desks, looking over shoulders in the reading rooms, e-mail exchanges about the minutiae of new research. Even within the community of professional historians, these things often go unrecorded.
Then too, a large part of the public for printing history is not other historians; it is printers, designers, collectors, and students. When I am faced with yet another group of first-year typography students, I often feel like a missionary in an old B-movie, likely to be an object of amusement, and maybe to end up in a kettle of hot broth. Or else, more typically, to be ignored altogether, since History (with a capital H) and historical thinking are not among the trending topics of our age. Witness the fact that when you Google “APHA award,” the first result is a prize given by the American Paint Horse Association, followed by the American Pharmacists Association.
Do let’s look at our own history, however, and think about the achievements of some of the APHA award winners past. I want to celebrate these people not for their outstanding, obvious achievements, which are for the most part detailed in the citations delivered at the time of their awards, but rather for their microscopic collaborations. I can do that best by recording their incremental effects on me but I am certain that many in the audience will have interacted in the same way with these same authors, scholars, and librarians. Surely you have done so with each other, and that is why you are here today.
Looking down the list, I see many people who have produced great and profoundly influential scholarship. For me at least, Robert Bringhurst, Robert Darnton, Joanna Drucker, James Mosely, Michael Twyman, Thomas Tanselle, Hendrik Vervliet, and Michael Winship stand out. Obviously, anyone who works on printing in the Renaissance has used Vervliet’s many publications, and anyone who works on U.S. printing history knows Winship’s book on Ticknor and Fields and his contributions to the History of the Book in America. In many cases, we are indebted to these scholars for major bibliographical projects too. Certainly I have devoured every one of their publications and learned a great deal from their methodology, from their conclusions, and often simply from discovering the myriad small facts they have uncovered and explicated.
But I have also been privileged to exchange many letters, e-mails, and conversations with these authors, and that is where I think I have personally gained the most. At the risk of embarrassing him, I would offer Michael Winship as an example. Many of you know, I think, that I trained as a medievalist, migrated to the Italian Renaissance, and have spent most of my life puttering about in the sixteenth century. In part because the Newberry holds important materials on modern calligraphy and design I have also found myself studying and writing about twentieth-century letter arts in Chicago. With working habits like these, my personal “Dark Ages” is the 19th century, so I am always happy when someone comes to the Newberry to study Bodoni, Didot, or DeVinne, stereotyping or proofing presses or wood type, or, like Michael, with a broadly comparative project about trade publishing in the 19th and early 20th century, something he did on fellowship with us in 2005. When a specialist settles in and starts asking questions, you have to think hard about what you have seen – often just in passing – that might be helpful. You start exploring sources you haven’t worked with before. More often than not, you start asking questions of the newcomer and that, in the case of an expert visitor like Michael, opens up worlds to explore. Soon, just for the sake of argument, you start expressing opinions about things you really don’t know much about. In the very best cases, the visitor leaves you understanding far more than you did when he arrived and feeling better about what you still don’t know.
Quite a different case obtains when you collaborate only at a distance, something that has typified printing history from the beginning (since no one can get to see every pertinent book) but which is much more possible and faster today. If any of you have collaborated with Hendrik Vervliet, winner of the APHA prize in 2011, you know how intense an e-mail correspondence can be. Hendrik deals in micrometric measurements of Renaissance types and he somehow knows that the best example of the fleuron or the ampersand he needs to measure is in a library near you. Still, when ten or twenty years later he finally publishes his results, it gives no small pleasure to know that you supplied maybe six of the –what? ten thousand?– examples he has used to build a complicated mosaic of evidence. This is microscopic collaboration for sure! Along the way, there are wonderful and ordinary and awful books to see, many of which would never have come into your hands without the questions collaborators like Hendrik ask.
There are still further-removed collaborations too, ones where you may not even recognize the dynamic. For this phenomenon I can single out Robert Bringhurst. Certainly I have read and used his important published work, but I don’t think we have met more than once or twice and then only in passing. We have exchanged a letter or two as well. But when I came to review Kay Amert’s book about Simon de Collines, which Bringhurst carefully pieced together from her fragmentary work, I discovered that Kay had been testing his ideas on me. Bringhurst was Kay’s principal sounding board for decades; he’s the guy she would go to in order to try out her original and sometimes tendentious theories. Then, when she had refined them and convinced herself, she would throw them at me. Sometimes she would toss out Bringhurst’s conflicting opinions instead. I cannot claim to have added anything to her arguments or his, but I certainly learned a lot from the process, not least of which confirmation of a lesson that had been growing on me for years, namely, never to trust the accepted opinions of early twentieth-century type historians. They simply did not have anything like the tools or the masses of evidence we can now adduce, and so they were almost always more opinionated than right. Did Bringhurst teach me this lesson? Certainly not directly, but at least in part by osmosis through our mutual friendship with Kay.
Since I have spent 80% of my professional life at the Newberry Library, I reserve a special place in my printing history pantheon for library workers, whether credentialed librarians or others who find themselves in the position of creating or making library collections available. Of course, we all have tales of indifferent and even obstructionist librarians, but I don’t think they are representative, and certainly some of my most exciting discoveries were really their discoveries presented to me with surprising modesty.
Two of the library workers on the APHA award list worked at the Newberry. Donald Krummel received the APHA award in 2004, 35 years after he left the Newberry for a distinguished career at the library school of the University of Illinois. We claim him, but his real claims to fame are associated with his work at Urbana and at Rare Book School. The highest calling in my book is that of teacher and those who teach bibliography are the noblest Romans of all. Don has inspired several generations of library school students and he has also preached bibliography and printing history to generations of musicians, since music bibliography is his specialty. At the Newberry, I have benefited from catalogs and reports he prepared or supervised back in the sixties, and his notes and memos in the archives, but even more from many fruitful conversations over the years about past or pending acquisitions. He has been unfailingly generous in telling me things I needed to know, especially things I didn’t know I needed to know, as well as many things I genuinely didn’t need to know but know now.
Last but not least, I would like to pay a brief tribute to my predecessor as curator of printing history collections at the Newberry, James M. Wells, who received the APHA award in 1986 and who died this past Labor Day. I cannot claim to have contributed much to Jim’s professional work, though he did once commission me, shortly after he retired and I took over, to do a bit of research that he could present to an old friend and Newberry trustee as his own work. The occasion is memorable not for the harmless deception involved, but because the deal we made was that he would spend whatever this businessman gave him as an honorarium on a meal for the two of us at a well-known top-tier restaurant. Believe me, for $500 in 1987, we wined and dined very well indeed.
Jim’s other collaborations with me – his contributions to my work – were less tangible, though sometimes in their own way just as tasty. The first task of any new curator, of course, is to familiarize himself with the collection he is charged with developing and to gain some clear ideas about its research potential. I had a head start in this, since I had been at the Newberry for six years in other capacities and heard Jim talk formally and informally about the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing. I also had his many articles to go on. Jim had done the same a generation earlier, and he had drawn the collected wisdom of those who had written about the Wing collection into a file he called “the founding documents.” He even had the file cataloged separately as a manuscript. When I assumed the Wing Custodian’s title in 1986, he carefully avoided interfering with my self-education, but he pointed me in the direction of those “founding documents” and gave me a firm push.
For much of the next ten years, Jim would get inquiries and requests for help from professionals he knew around the world. He understood his retirement in a very thorough sense, however, and always sent the questions directly on to me. Invariably I would learn something, and even more importantly, it put me in direct contact with members of Jim’s large network of collaborators, for the most part people of his generation not mine. Good friendships developed this way, some professional ones of course, but also others that have become deeply personal.
Moreover, although Jim Wells resisted doing any real work after retirement, he was always willing to let me pick his brain. As I came to think of it, Jim was always there when I needed him and never there when I didn’t. His memory was prodigious, so I could take questions about provenance and past donors to him for answers. These were never quick answers, mind you. Jim was an accomplished raconteur, so a question about a particular book purchase would elicit information on others acquired from the same bookseller, then an extended biography of that bookman or his partners, including marriages, children, lovers, rivals in the book trade, other sources of income, and vivid details of the bookshop’s premises and the dealer’s favorite foods, wines, and restaurants.
And then there were the wonderful things Jim Wells collected that I have been exploring with delight ever since they gave me a stack pass in 1986. Jim was interested in the research potential of everyday printing, ephemeral printing, and technical and advertising literature that was not much studied when he took over the Wing collection in 1951. One example will serve for many. I remember visiting him some years after his retirement and recounting how a young musicologist on fellowship was consulting a stereotype specimen book of theatrical cuts that Jim had bought a good thirty years earlier. He remembered the book immediately and said, “How great! A Philadelphia foundry selling cuts to riverboat entertainers, right? I couldn’t imagine who, but I knew someone would want that book one day!” At the time, I was just pleased that he was pleased. But on further reflection, I would maintain that book buying is a kind of collaboration too, and may just be the most important collaborative thing we do – collecting and preserving research materials for the future, that is for a future full of fruitful collaborations.
So much for today’s sermon to the choir. If you are in this room, you are already committed to collaborations of one sort or another. I hope my few notes on the subject in the context of APHA have given you a chance to reflect on how important this phenomenon is.
Thank you for your attention and thank you again for this award.
Jadwiga Tryzno addresses APHA members after receiving the 2015 Institutional Award from President Robert McCamant. (Gwido Zlatkes) | Book Art Museum English language video.
Introduction by Michael Thompson, Chair, Award Committee New York, January 24, 2015
Jack Ginsburg, a noted collector of artists’ books from South Africa, is a person old enough to have lived most of his life during the apartheid regime in his home country. In a presentation he made recently, not too far from here at a conference sponsored by the Center for the Book Arts, he commented that during the apartheid era when he returned home to South Africa from abroad he was always asked by immigration authorities two questions:
Do you have any guns?
Do you have any books?
Both, it seems were viewed as threats to the authoritarian regime.
In the hands of an individual not controlled by the state a printing press is a weapon, and we in the American Printing History Association should not forget that. We should not let the first word in our title, “American,” make us complacent, or allow us to forget the challenges faced by others like us living in political environments that are suspicious of, and actually hostile to, the uncensored printed word.
In a country where fine printing and historic printing techniques were almost entirely eradicated under communism, the Book Art Museum in Łódź has taken on the important role of ensuring the continuity of the art of fine printing. They restore and preserve vintage printing equipment, cultivate printing skills, and perform outreach to the community. The museum originated from Correspondance des Arts, a small press started by the husband and wife team of artists Janusz and Jadwiga Tryzno in 1980, at a time when the Tryznos were actively involved in underground printing for the Solidarity movement. Their press became a Foundation in 1990, and in 1993 the Tryznos opened the Book Art Museum in Łódź.
Currently the Correspondance des Arts publishes artists’ books with original graphic material and with unconventional bindings of various sizes and shapes, but always related to the history of the book. The press makes books that question the intersection of various artistic disciplines, like images, sounds, and motion, and such books then experiment with the relationship between and among them. These books and many artists’ books made by other artists and presses are collected in the Book Art Museum where they are used for lectures, presentations, and educational meetings.
The 2015 winner of the institutional award from the American Printing History Association is the Book Art Museum of Łódź represented by Jadwiga Tryzno.
Response by RES on receiving the 2014 Laureate Award of APHA from President Robert E. McCamant on January 25, 20 14 in the Trustees Room of the New York Public Library.
I’ve brot you a memento for the archive. It’s a business card printed between 1945 and 1950 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Printing Merit Badge. It is perfect in every way, except perhaps for the inking, which we might call “exuberant.” It reads: “DEALER IN STAMPS I ROGER ELIOT STODDARD 1 244 HARRIS AVENUE I NEEDHAM 92, MASS.” This is a copy on white paper. I have another on the seldom-seen blue, which I plan to present to Terry Belanger—printer to printer—in a private ceremony after the meeting.
APHA
Marcus has warned me about this, “No Money,” he says. Well, money would tarnish the purity of the award. Can you imagine handing a check to my pal Rollo Silver in 1977? Back home Alice would put her foot down: “Quit gazing at that check, Rollo. Get to the bank and cash it while they’ve still got the money!” Certainly not! This is the Wild Card of awards, unpredictable from year to year. I was incredulous when Helen announced it to me. But, when Michael Russem, president of the Society of Printers, announced it at the December meeting so buddies began to congratulate me, then I believed. (Actually, what I’ve been hoping for is a loving cup, big like the ones you get for winning a sweaty game of tennis, something I can get my arms around when no one is looking. Is that what I get?) Well, no sweat, no cup I guess.
So, I stand with Maya Angelou: “It’s a wonderful treat. It’s a blessing. It’s important to stay in an attitude of gratitude.” {She’s a poet!}—<< National Book Awards, 20 Nov. 2013.>>
About this response, my personal trainer advises: make a selfie-or words to that effect, and I always take his advice, so:
We go back a ways, A-P-H-A and R-E-S, back thirty years to 1984 at Columbia when you invited me to speak. In those days I was creating exhibitions with titles “Materials for the Study of Publishing History” and “Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained.” On April 23 in my keynote address to the RBMS I declared that “You can see that there is a morphology of the book,” so on September 29 at Columbia you endured my ruminations on that very theme of “Morphology and the Book?” How many of you were there? You printed it in your journal in 1987, thank you, and it was selected by my savvy editor Carol Rothkopf for my Library-Keeper’s Business in 2002.
I began in typical Rare Book School fashion: “Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification.” {Then a great whoop went up from the audience. Afterward I would congratulate Terry Belanger on penetrating my humor.} Just so you can see where I was going, I continue: “I divide the whales into three primary books . . . The Folio whale . . .the Octavo Whale . . . The Duodecimo Whale.”
After expanding on my Melville moment, then you became the first to hear a string of my tough-minded Kleinigkeiten:
“Whatever they may do, authors do not write books. Books are not written at all. They are man-u-fac-tured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics and other engineers, and by printing presses and other machines.” (p. 33). That’s even funnier when rendered into French by the other Roger, Merci bien M. Chartier.
“Books are manufactured to be bought and sold, given and displayed. Sometimes they are read.”
“The newspaper is the invention of the printing press. It is the serial, modular process of the press itself, but set on automatic: two empty chases to be filled with type each week no matter what.
And there is contemporaneity, the ability of the book to camouflage itself to blend in with its surroundings. I want to return to that point later.
Then, in 1995 you invited me to Charlottesville for more at a time when I was drafting entries out of worksheets for my bibliography of early American poetry, so I was learning to my dismay how little is known about early American printing. I thanked Kathy Morgan (that wise woman who enticed RBS to re-locate in Charlottesville, establishing Virginia as the locus for collecting and disseminating the skills needed to safeguard our special collections) and her staff for making it possible for me to collate another 121 early American poems during my visit. So, you received (quite courteously) on 21 October 1995 at Charlottesville: “Oh, Mr. Jefferson-after all these years, why do we know so little about the books of your time?” And I answered my own question: because we haven’t done the work; so I challenged the audience to attribute printers of unsigned books, find the lost copyright entries, work on trade bindings, and the like. That one went the Printing History—Carol Rothkopf—Library-Keeperway also, but I’m still waiting for responses.
Finally, on 26 January 2002 here in the public library you invited me to eulogize my beloved colleague Hugh Amory when you presented your Individual Award to him posthumously. You printed that in the journal, but it remains uncollected, and I remain in mourning.
Now about that contemporaneity, assimilation, and camouflage. After all the years of poking and prying, slamming them down on the table, and keeping lists I am still trying to learn something about books. For instance, I have established two special departments in my librarian’s library at home. First is Picture Frames. There are half a dozen publications from European museums because they have bigger and more telling collections than ours. But, Robert Lehman collected frames, and the late genius Christopher Newbery made a handsome 465-page illustrated catalogue (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007) identifying genres, national styles, and provenance. If you do not believe that frames are the book bindings of art, just take a look at Newbery’s fine work.
Second, there is Camouflage. Oh, I have Thayer’s pioneering Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909) and DPM Disruptive Pattern Material (2004), 2 vols. in their camouflage paper dust jackets and khaki slipcase. It is not easy to find additions, my most recent being Leo Fabrizio’s color photographs of Bunkers (2004) showing how the Swiss camouflaged their defenses from the 1880s through 1995. Their battle cries [sic] are “Masking,” “Deception,” and “Fraud” to which one might respond: “One thousand years of peace and freedom, and what do you get?” But their work is arresting and beautiful; sometimes it even fools the eye!
A visit to Paris could concentrate your thoughts on books. Whenever I would pass by the Louvre with its relief decorations in imitation of sea coral, I would think of c. 19 book bindings gilt-stamped with coral rolls. Once when I was strolling out at night I came upon a dress shop with lighted windows displaying the very same fabric I had found Jean de Gonet using in his atelier just a day before. Gonet is the perfect example of a book artisan who reflects contemporary culture for his startling effects. Please spend some time with Antoine Coron’s grand tribute to the great master, Jean de Gonet Relieur (Bibliotheque nationale de France, 2013). Benoit Forgeot will explain it all to you in the current issue (No. 2, 2013) of Bulletin du Bibliophile, and offer a well-deserved tribute to Coron.
I admire Ralph Lauren for his invention and good taste, but I don’t necessarily want to see books inspired by his designs. What I want to see is the influence of Alexander McQueen! How many of you can visualize one of his designs? The librarian who charged out his Savage Beauty (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011) to me from the Fine Arts library told me that she had attended the exhibition, but that it was so crowded that she could hardly see a thing. How many of you were there?
Remember his super-sized hounds tooth fabric or the exploding bird print after Escher? All the interlocking fabric prints and the shocking silhouettes in your face and the slabby lipstick?
We have Nick Waplington’s Working Progress (Damiani, 2013) to document the extreme concentration, joy, and fun he expressed at work and the Met catalogue posing his designs like Greek statues, so books are doing their job of perpetuating life, but what about a double apotheosis of the divine McQueen with bookmaking?
Do my attempts to link books with their contemporary culture get it wrong way round? Or, did man create books in his own image? Are books the most humane of his inventions? So much for Selfie! But you are not through with me yet.
In conclusion, I’m going to tell you a story—meine Grosse Fuge—but, no it’s a short story, and I hope that you will like it. It’s about a totally forgotten volume of printing history and its creator, one of the great American originals. His name is Rush Christopher Hawkins, and he was born in Pomfret, Vermont, on September 14, 183 1, and he died on October 25, 1920 here in New York City.
He was a self-made man, that is, he created himself. With nothing more than a common school education, he prowled around—almost like computer hacking, until he found himself in the law, for which he had a natural aptitude for learning and representation. In one office in 1853 he was able to collect debts that had been considered bad, and that was the start of his fortune. In polite society here in New York he would meet, woo, and marry in June, 1860 Annmary Brown, granddaughter of the ancestor for whom Brown University was named, niece of John Carter Brown the Americanist, and cousin of John Nicholas Brown, who would become a good friend of her husband.
In July, the Ninth New York Volunteers formed up around their young Colonel, and they would become known as ‘Hawkins’s Zouaves’ for their colorful Algerian-style dress uniforms. They fought well and honorably, but their Colonel retired without a promotion, perhaps on account of his attempts to unseat the do-nothing general George B. McClellan. President Lincoln would never forget his meetings with the impetuous young colonel who was to receive only by brevet in 1866 the rank of brigadier general.
Even before he left home and starting at the age of seven Hawkins had collected one sort of book or another, but here in New York at the bookshop of George P. Philes in 1855 he bot a dumb book that would bring on his epiphany: Regulae of Innocent VIII, a slight quarto of a dozen leaves, obviously early-printed but without imprint or date. Researches led him to Panzer and Hain and pointed to Stephan Plannck as printer, but he began “consideration of a larger theme.” “A new and greater motive for collecting had been discovered.”
For him, printing “was in the forefront of all civilizing forces.” “Before the year 1501 printing presses had been set up in about 238 places, all in Europe but one”‘ and “My plan was to obtain if possible a copy of the first book issued from each of the first presses, and failing in that to obtain specimens from them though not of the first issue.” For him the spread of printing meant the dissemination of learning, not just a story of strolling printers and runaway apprentices, but the founding of Western civilization itself.
Hawkins knew that he needed advice as well as supply, so he courted many of the greatest librarians of his day. When he asked our Justin Winsor for the name of the greatest living librarian, without hesitation Henry Bradshaw of the other Cambridge was the response. Later, when he asked the same question of Bradshaw, then Winsor was the response.
Bradshaw and Hawkins were more of a couple than you might think: Bradshaw seeking information from books, Hawkins seeking information about them, so that he would know which ones to buy. Of all his many librarian friends “Bradshaw was the most genial and companionable of them all,” Hawkins would report, and hls library friends were legion, a roster of the most learned. There were Leopold Delisle, genius of the Bibliothèque Nationale and Alfred Pollard, fifth ‘generation’ of his British Museum library friends, genius of all that happened there and leader of the New Bibliography. His friend of longest standing was Father Antonio Ceriani of the Ambrosian Library in Milan.
His book dealer friends were tops: Albert Cohn of Berlin, Anatole Claudin of Paris, Bernard Quaritch of London, but there was hardly a European city where he did not have a fruitful scout.
So, what did the general accomplish with these recruits for his new army?
In 1884 he issued a report—and here’s your book, printed in 300 copies by Theo Lowe De Vinne: Titles of the First Books from the Earliest Presses established in different Cities, Towns, and Monasteries in Europe, before the end of the Fifteenth Century, with Brief Notes upon their Printers. Illustrated with Reproductions of Early Types and First Engravings of the Printing Press. By Rush C. Hawkins, New-York: J. W. Bouton, 706 Broadway. London: B. Quaritch, 15, Piccadilly. MDCCCLXXXIV. [1884, the foundation year of the Grolier Club]
It is a small folio in beveled cloth boards, 16 leaves of prelims, then [146] pages of text, it has one of those fancy, slightly rubricated title pages typical of De Vinne, who would become virtually printer to the Grolier Club in those days; Hawkins was elected to membership in 1885.
The “First Engravings of the Printing Press” are two variants (1507 and 1520) from the imprints of Josse Bade, and there are 25 illustrations by photo-lithography of full pages or openings from the books, mostly from Hawkins’s own copies.
By then Hawkins had scoured the literature to find 236 books “for which we have reasons for regarding as the earliest of the first printers in the places specified.” He takes you from Mentz [for Mainz] 1454 for B42 to Cetinge, Montenegro 1494 for a Slavonic service book. “Many of the works described have been personally examined; the names of the printers, dates, places of printing, number of leaves, and sometimes of lines, have been verified, and here are correctly stated.”
It is a cut-and-paste job, as you will learn from the “Corrections”—but remember that Hawkins had to say what to cut and where to paste it.
There are plenty of references to standard works, but Hawkins is a presence throughout. He is a visitor to Althorp with access to Lord Spencer’s books. He uses the Bibliotheque Nationale in person, and cites their “Notice des objets exposes,” a source unknown to me, until I found that Leopold Delisle sent a copy to Harvard (rec’d. 4 Dec. 1889). It turns out to be one of those exhibition guides typical of European museums for exhibits that are merely numbered or lettered in the vitrines and galleries.
Perhaps it is the greatest incunable exhibition of all time, starts with 54 block books, moves on to the two Gutenberg Bibles, etc.
Pp. 69-70: “I compared, at the Bibliotheque Nationale, the first books of Besançon, Dole, and Dijon, and ascertained to my own satisfaction that Peter Metlinger must have been the first to set up a press in each of these towns. I found that the books of Besançon and Dijon were printed with the same fonts of types, and the one of Dole with those of the second size used in printing the other two,” he says.
And the lawyer speaks: p. 35: “The many seemingly naked assertions to the effect that this book was the first printed at St. Orso, have crystalized themselves into an accepted fact; and since so many learned writers have accepted this set conclusion, I must confess that I am not bold enough, in this instance at least, to disagree with them.”
And, P, 56: “I have an edition of “St. Augustini Sumrna Soliloquiorum animae ad Deum,” issued by this printer at Winterberg the same year as the above, with the same types. It may have been the first production of his Winterberg press. See plate No. 20 (page of my book).
I leave Hawkins now by quoting Henry Bradshaw’s parting words to him after their final meeting in Cambridge “My dear General I can never forget that you are an American and take an interest in early printing.”
There were lasting effects from the General’s pursuit of the First Books. He continued to acquire them, and in 1909 he persuaded Alfred Pollard to spend about six weeks in Providence in order to make an historiated, British-Museum style catalogue of his collection by then named the Annmary Brown Memorial to honor his late wife. Oxford University Press printed the book for him in 1910. He chose Miss Stillwell for his librarian, and among her works she compiled the Second Census of Incunabula in America, and her former student assistant Frederick R. Goff would edit the Third, and that laid the foundation of the ISTC file. Hawkins’s books are at Brown, if you ever want to see them.
So, I dedicate this moment to Rush Christopher Hawkins, the first American incunabulist and his 1884 book on The Titles of the First Books from the Earliest Presses, and I thank you for the great honor you have given me today.
APHA is pleased to announce the 2014 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship is awarded to L. Elizabeth Upper of the Warburg Institute, University of London. The APHA Fellowship funds will be used to support travel to visit the two dozen or so friskets (ca.1480-ca.1630) she has learned of scattered around the UK, France and Switzerland. Direct visual analysis will help her determine what texts they were used to print, and the texts in whose bindings they survived the centuries – the glossiness of the deeply textured crust of printing ink makes it almost impossible to take photographs usable for this kind of analysis. The Fellowship will also support costs of permission fees and official photography for the article she will write, which will be submitted to Printing History.
Roger Stoddard accepts APHA’s 2014 Individual Award from President Robert McCamant. (Joel Mason)
Introduction by Michael Thompson, Chair, Award Committee New York, January 25, 2014
Roger Eliot Stoddard was born in Boston, graduated from Brown in 1957, and began his career and an assistant curator and then curator of the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays at that institution. In 1965 he began a long professional association with Harvard University, and in particular with the Houghton Library.
His research has been broad in scope, but a recurring subject has been poetry in America. His first major publication was Pamphlets Unrecorded in Wegelin’s Early American Poetry (1969), and it was followed by The Poet and Printer in Colonial and Federal America (1983). His landmark study of glosses, catchwords, and signatures of early printing, appearing in Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained (1985) won the Northeast Book Show Award in 1986 and an American Library Association Award in 1987. Most recently, with David Whitesell as editor, Roger compiled a landmark bibliography published last year by the Bibliographical Society of America (in cooperation with the Penn State Press) entitled A Bibliographical Description of Books and Pamphlets of American Verse Printed from 1610 through 1820. It is a comprehensive culmination, comprising over 800 pages and 1300 entries, of his early work previously mentioned.
In recognition of this work, and of other lectures, articles, and books too numerous to mention, I am happy to announce that the 2014 individual award by the American Printing History Association will be given to Roger Stoddard.
David Godine accepts APHA’s 2014 Institutional Award from President Robert McCamant. (Joel Mason)
Introduction by Michael Thompson, Chair, Award Committee New York, January 25, 2014
Publishing in print or in electronic media is today mostly undertaken by one of six large firms: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, the Penguin Group, Random House, and Simon and Schuster. Known as the Big Six, only two are US companies (Simon and Schuster and HarperCollins), two are German, one British, and one French. Coincidentally or not, that arrangement and order of arrangement roughly follows the size of the respective market capitalizations of the stock markets in the four countries involved. In contrast, on its website, David R. Godine, Inc., describes itself as “a small publishing house located in Boston, Massachusetts” producing about twenty to thirty titles yearly that “reflect the individual tastes and interests of its president and founder David R. Godine.” This is not, in other words, just another business venture.
Those tastes and interests include art and photography, music and food, Judaica, nature and gardening, fiction and poetry, and what Mr. Godine calls “regional books” (which of course to him only means New England). Perhaps more to the point here, at APHA, the interests include typography, with such backlist titles as An Essay on Typography by Eric Gill and Personal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth Century America by Elizabeth M. Harris, and many other titles. David R. Godine, Inc. is also the exclusive licensed distributor for the backlist of the Black Sparrow Press, founded in 1966 by John Martin to publish out-of-the-mainstream writers in small finely printed editions. Black Sparrow remains alive as an imprint of Godine.
The eponymous originator of this publishing house, David R. Godine himself, began his professional life, after graduating from Dartmouth and Harvard, with Leonard Baskin and Harold McGrath but soon opened his own print shop in an abandoned barn where he printed, by letterpress, his first books.
Among the titles involving printing history that have been published by this institution are Into Print: Selected Writings on Printing History, Typography and Book Production by John Dreyfus (1995), Suzuki Harunobi: A Selection of His Color Prints and Illustrated Books by Jack Hiller (1970), Art of the Printed Book 1455-1955: Masterpieces of Typography . . . from the Morgan Library with an essay by Joseph Blumenthal (1974), The Printed Book in America by Joseph Blumenthal (1977), and Early Children’s Books and Their Illustration by David Gottleib (1975), just to name a few.
In recognition of this long dedication to keeping publishing alive and of human proportions, and in recognition of the role printing history has played in that work, I am happy to announce that the 2014 institutional award by the American Printing History Association will be given to David R. Godine, Inc.
