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.

Response by 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.