FIFTH ANNUAL APHA AWARD. At the January 26th Annual Meeting of APHA the Fifth Annual APHA Award was presented to Dr. J. Ben Lieberman for his contributions to the study of printing history. APHA President Catherine Brody presented the Award plaque to Dr. Lieberman and read its inscription: “This plaque, the 1980 Annual Award of the American Printing History Association, is presented to J. Ben Lieberman in grateful recognition of his important service advancing understanding of the history of printing and its allied arts.” As Prof. Brody’s presentation talk pointed out, Dr. Lieberman’s contributions to the encouragement of the study of printing have taken many forms. His abiding concern has always been to retain the humanistic values of true printing craftsmanship and preservation of the freedom of the press. Dr. Lieberman founded the American Printing History Association in 1973 to encourage the study of printing history and the preservation of printing artifacts as part of the humanistic tradition. He guided the infant organization in its role of encouraging individuals, institutions and other organizations to contribute to a common goal of preserving and using oral, written and printed source materials for printing history. Dr. Lieberman is a noted private press proprietor at his Herity Press, which he operates with his wife Elizabeth. He has long been active in the Chappel organizations of private presses, having founded the world chappel movement in 1956. The Herity Press was founded in 1952, when the Liebermans lived in San Francisco. It is now located at their home in New Rochelle. Star of their press, pridefully ensconced in their living room is the famous Kelmscott/Goudy press. This Albion was the press used by William Morris’ Kelmscott Press for the Kelmscott Chaucer. Later it was owned by Fred Goudy, the American type designer, and eventually came into the Lieberman printing shop.
Ben’s doctorate is in political science from Stanford. He began his career as a newspaper reporter in his home town of Evansville, Indiana. During World War II he was the Director of Informational Services for the U.S. Navy with the rank of Commander, and editor of the monthly magazine, ALL HANDS. He was professor in the Graduate Schools of Business and Journalism of Columbia, and taught at the University of California at Berkeley. He was consultant to the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of Education, worked with the UN’s Organization for Economic Cooperation, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the U.S. State Department’s foreign aid program. He was a public relations associate at General Food, worked as an economist at Stanford Research Institute, as the assistant general manager of the San Francisco Chronicle. He joined the international public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton in 1967 and became a vice president in 1970. He took early retirement only a few years ago to work on some personal projects.
Major among these was the establishment of the Myriade Press, which has published some valuable books in the field of graphic arts, including such valuable sources as GOUDY’S TYPE DESIGNS H. Zapf’s TYPOGRAPHIC VARIATIONS, and a second edition of Ben’s own valuable TYPE AND TYPEFACES. Ben’s publishing endeavor has done a real service to students of printing in making these books available, in the series he has named the “Treasures of Typography.”
One of the products of the Herity Press is publication of a “Check-Log” of private press names, compiled by Elizabeth Lieberman. This little book acts as a register of private press names and help private press props. to avoid duplicating a press name already in use. The CHECK-LOG has gone through many editions.
Ben’s book PRINTING AS A HOBBY has been published in both hard cover and paperback and has inspired many an amateur printer.
Ben Lieberman is also an inventor with patents on three different kinds of very simple small printing presses designed for home use. One of the presses, called the Liberty Press, has been bought by more than 10,000 beginners through his own company.
Presenting the Award plaque to Dr. Lieberman, Prof. Brody made the following remarks:
“Through his own extensive writing, through his publishing, through his printing, through his encouragement of private press printing and the chappel movement, but most of all for his ability to inspire all of us with his own ideals we thank Ben Lieberman today. Ben’s indomitable spirit can not be subdued, even by illness. We gave Ben a citation when he stepped down from the APHA presidency in 1978, and I simply want to repeat what we expressed then: ‘For both his indispensable contributions of the past, and the advice and support we shall receive from him in the future, we hereby express our deepest respect and gratitude.’ Ben embodies the very spirit of APHA. For all of his contributions to the study of printing history, I am proud to bestow upon him our Annual APHA Award.”
“In grateful recognition of his outstanding lifelong contribution to the.development and understanding of the history of printing, through his painstaking and impeccable research, through his lucid and authoritative authorship of numerous definitive books and even more numerous articles, monographs and lectures, through his leadership in organizations devoted to printing and its historic role, and through his enthusiastic support of other scholars in the field and students he has inspired to serve the cause, Rollo G. Silver is this day, January 29, 1977, presented the 1977 Award of the American Printing History Association by unanimous vote of the Association’s Board of Trustees.”
His laureate address, “Writing the History of American Printing,” provided a broad program for APHA in the area of historical scholarship. The audience’s enthusiastic response indicated how well Prof. Silver crystallized APHA’s goals.
“The History of American Printing seemingly has already been recorded,” he noted, “in the newspapers, books, pamphlets, manuscripts and artifacts scattered throughout the collections in this country and abroad. The information is there. But the point is that we have to organize it.”
“It must be one of our major concerns to find out more about such American geniuses as Samuel Nelson Dickinson,” Prof. Silver emphasized, in describing some of Dickinson’s wide-ranging and important (but too little known) activities. Other specific projects he suggested were the compilation of lists of printing presses with descriptions and details of their manufacture, a series of exact reproductions of early American type specimens; updating of bibliographies on printing history; study of local archival records of printing concerns; and inventories of presses and other equipment of every printing shop in a given town or neighborhood.
Prof. Silver advised printing historians to forget about the Colonial printer for now, and concentrate instead on the technical developments of the 19th century. To do this, it will be necessary for historians to work closely with engineers, he pointed out. APHA can foster such cooperation, and can help the scholar in other ways, settling for nothing less than the highest standards. Full documentation should be insisted upon, he remarked; “let the policy be, ‘all the footnotes fit to print.'” APHA should similarly encourage joint efforts with art historians in recording and analyzing the aesthetics of printing and the various styles. “Printers who recognized and worked with the best of current trends (of art) … deserve a place in our history.” Prof. Silver summarized his recommendations by remarking that “with scholars and technicians working together, and with all the necessary footnotes, the history of American printing can be organized.” APHA hopes to be able to publish Prof. Silver’s address in full and distribute it to the entire membership.
John Lane, an independent scholar located in the Netherlands, held the 2003 Fellowship for his research on the type specimens of the Voskens/Maapa Foundry. Mr. Lane wrote in his proposal:
“In 1641 Bartholomeus and Reinier Voskens set up their Amsterdam typefoundry. Both moved to Germany in the 1650s, but Bartholomeus returned by 1668. His son acquired the Vallet and Blaeu foundries (both derived from that established by Nicolaes Briot ca. 1612) and his grandson cut types to 1710. From that time until A.G. Mappa bought it, the foundry added little new material. It had about 150 types by about 20 punchcutters.
“Mappa moved his typefoundry to New York in 1789, what was then probably the largest foreign collection of matrices ever brought to America. He had set up in Rotterdam (and later Delft) after acquiring nearly the entire Voskens foundry in 1780, and sold his New York foundry in 1794. His romans and italics were already old-fashioned when he acquired them, perhaps contributing to his lack of success in America, but his texturas, frakturs, hebrews and greeks appeared in the 1812 specimen of Binny & Ronaldson, who also had some of his other non-Latin types. Mappa’s collection played an important role in early American printing and typefounding.
“Over the years I have identified many types by Briot, identified 37 fragments as the remains of Vallet’s specimens sent to Oxford in 1672 (the oldest surviving Dutch specimens by any founder in this group), sorted out much of the chronology of the foundries and genealogy of the Voskens family, identified and dated many of the types, and even found Mappa’s request for permission to install a typefounding furnace when he set up in Rotterdam. Museum PlantinMoretus and Museum Enschede have the largest collections of (mostly undated) Voskens and Mappa specimens.
“In a catalogue of about 200 type specimens (ca. 1550-ca. 1850) at Plantin-Moretus, to appear in 2004, I will date each specimen, transcribe the title and imprint in full, report the format and sheet size, describe the paper stock(s), list the kinds of types (each with the range of sizes), indicate types added since the foundry’s previous specimen, and note punchcutters identified in the specimen and in published literature., with some additions from my own research (it will not be possible to give notes on each type individually). A very brief history of each typefoundry will include a chronology of its addresses, master founders and owners, and in some cases a family tree. The broad scope of the catalogue and limited funding has not allowed me to give the 12 Voskens and Mappa specimens and the foundry the attention they deserve.
“With this APHA fellowship I expect to be able to compare these specimens with related ones at Enschede and elsewhere, allowing me to better establish the chronology of specimens and types, note additions not present in all copies, describe the paper stock even in specimens comprising less than a whole sheet, and fully describe specimens when the Plantin copy is incomplete. It would also allow me to use the Plantin-Moretus and Amsterdam archives (correspondence with those who sent the specimens, records of the firm’s addresses, etc.) to date the specimens more precisely, improve my history of the foundry and build a foundation for dating and identifying more of their types.
“Any material I cannot use in my catalogue will bear fruit later in a bibliography of Dutch type specimens, catalogue of seventeenth-century Dutch printing types, histories of the Dutch foundries, and perhaps a note in Printing History on Mappa’s types in American specimens.”
Susanna Ashton, Assistant Professor of American Literature at Clemson University, held the 2004 APHA Fellowship for her project “Impressions: William Stanley Braithwaite and Constructions of Type.” The Fellowship will be used by Dr. Ashton to complete her current book project, Bound: Black Men as Book Men, 1820-1920. The first part of Ashton’s book deals with the close connections that developed between printing and slavery in the United States. Her first chapter entitled “Stereotypes,” studies “slaves who labored under printers in the 18th century and how the ‘wonders of print’ came at an especially vexed price for slaves living in the pre-Civil War America, not because of its inaccessibility but because of the way books were often considered more sacred and consequential than the humans who produced the labor to print them.”
Subsequent chapters deal with the Post Civil War era and the legacy of tension over the role of print that slavery had left America. She considers bibliophiles and authors Charles W. Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois and the various ways reconstruction fueled a new generation of African Americans ready to reassert control not only of book, but of print as both a material and an imagined phenomenon. The APHA fellowship will help her complete research and writing of her final chapter on the black printer, poet, and editor William Stanley Braithwaite. Ms. Ashton describes this part of her book:
“William Stanley Braithwaite trained with a printer and a publisher in the late 19th century, and grew up to be a poet, an editor and a literary critic. But what interests me most, as key to understanding his work and his role in American culture, was his work as a printer, publisher and book trade professional. He founded what was arguably the first black-owned publishing company, B.J. Brummer and Co. in 1922 and it is this intimate knowledge of books, print, type and the material production of books that shaped his literary work. For in Braithwaite I see the historic tension between African Americans and books, reworked for the 20th century. No scholars of Braithwaite’s work have put him in the tradition of African-American printing and book culture. My study, which will merge literary and historical analysis, will attend to how he connected his work with the material and with the imaginative book.”
Dr. Ashton will use this APHA fellowship to research the ephemera produced by B.J. Brimmer and Co., and to examine Braithwaite’s printed books and letters.
The 2005 Fellowship supported Mr. Hidy’s research on Boston’s Society of Printers. The Society is celebrating its centenary this year with a special volume. The fellowship, providing an award of up to $2,000 for research in any area of the history of printing, will be used by Mr. Hidy research the Society’s role in perpetuating classical design while also embracing modernist ideas. Mr. Hidy’s proposal explains his purpose and the Society’s importance to American typographical design:
“Classical design implies “a long established style of acknowledged excellence”. This contradicts a fundamental principle of modernism which grew out of the Bolshevik revolution, insisting on a symbolic break with the past. While this repudiation made sense for many Russians, and for designers living in war-torn Europe or emigrating to America, it was less appealing to American designers and printers who revered the classical tradition of Ben Franklin and Isaiah Thomas. [….]
“However, rather than rejecting modernism, the classical-leaning SP members tended to support a pluralist view, with modernist ideas from members such as W. A. Dwiggins and Carl Zahn commingling with the classical ideals of D. B. Updike and Roderick Stinehour. At the same time, modernism met with less resistance elsewhere, winning over The American Institute of Graphic Arts and numerous other institutions where design was taught and promoted.
“…[T]he prevailing premise of twentieth-century graphic design histories … tell the modernist story in detail, while omitting, or touching lightly, the endurance of classical design.”
Mr. Hidy’s research on the Society intends to bring greater balance to the history of twentieth century graphic design.
