“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.
The 2006 Fellowship was held by Paul Shaw. The fellowship goes to support Mr. Shaw’s research on American designer, artist, calligrapher and illustrator William Addison Dwiggins (1880-1956) whose biography he is writing. There is no full-length, comprehensive biography of Dwiggins (WAD) and the standard bibliography lacks more than 150 items which his research has uncovered. WAD was incontrovertibly important to the history of American design and typography. Mr. Shaw writes:
“Dwiggins was a book designer, commercial artist, type designer, illustrator and calligrapher/letterer. He wrote extensively on various aspects of the graphic arts and, privately, created an entire marionette theater. In all of these fields he was an influential figure. Through his work for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Dwiggins brought the high standards of fine printing to mass market books. Similarly, with his type designs for Mergenthaler Linotype, he attempted to put machine composition on a par with foundry type.”
Although Dwiggins is best known for his work in these two fields, his career as a commercial artist from c.1905 to the end of the 1920s is equally deserving of attention. He was a leading figure in the transition from commercial art to graphic design, coining the latter term in 1922 to describe the changed nature of the business by that time. His work in advertising was summed up in Layout in Advertising (1928). As a commercial artist Dwiggins was highly revered by his contemporaries for his illustration, his decoration and his lettering. In the 1920s he developed a unique form of stencil illustration and decoration with Art Deco overtones. Independently of the English Arts & Crafts movement, he pioneered broad-pen calligraphy in the United States. His later lettering, despite echoes of Caslon and Bodoni, was often idiosyncratic. Combined with his stencil designs they made his mature work uncategorizable: neither pure Art Deco nor Bauhaus modern nor classical. With their mix of satire and common sense, Dwiggins’ writings—especially An Investigation Into the Physical Properties of Books (1919), Towards a Reform of the Currency, Particularly in Point of Its Design (1932), and A Technique for Dealing with Artists (1941)—were a sharp contrast to the earnest manifestoes and dull treatises of his contemporaries. In addition, for his own enjoyment, Dwiggins wrote fantasies and plays. The latter provided the basis for his private marionette theater. His marionette designs were applauded by specialists for their revolutionary method of articulation, and, more importantly, they inspired the M-Formula he used to design typefaces during the 1940s.
Mr. Shaw expects to include much previously unpublished biographical material, particularly from WAD’s childhood and his early career as a commercial artist. He further plans to complete his bibliographical research on WAD this summer.
The 2007 Fellowship was held by Renzo Baldasso. His proposal entitled, “Erhard Ratdolt and the Visual Dimension of Early Printed Books” seeks to establish how graphic representations by Ratdolt and other 15th century printers shaped new reading habits as well as the approach of readers to texts.
Renzo Baldasso is currently a PhD candidate at Columbia University in the Department of Art History. He has published numerous articles, conference papers, and reviews focusing on early scientific illustrations and diagrams.
The Committee found this project compelling in that Baldasso aims to “[reconsider] the pioneering efforts and achievements of early printers that defined the visuality of the printed book, setting it apart from that of illuminated manuscripts and hand-finished printed books.” Baldasso’s education in science, history of science and art history makes for an interesting background and promises informed scholarship. He will use the Fellowship award for a one month residency in Washington, DC, to conduct research at local repositories.
The 2008 Fellowship was held by Pablo Alvarez and Keli E. Rylance. The Fellowship Committee’s citation follows:
Pablo Alvarez of the University of Rochester and Keli E. Rylance of Tulane University were chosen as this year’s recipients of the Fellowship. Their proposal is to analyze one of only two known extant copies of Institución y origen del arte de la imprenta, y reglas generales para los componedores (Institution and Origin of the Art of Printing, and General Rules for Compositors) written by Spanish printer and compositor Alonso Víctor de Paredes, ca. 1680. This text pre-dates Moxon’s Mechanic Exercises by about three years. Alvarez and Rylance will examine the copy of Paredes’ text at the Updike Collection at the Providence Public Library in preparation for comparison of the two texts. The other known copy is at the Biblioteca General e Histórica de la Universitat de València (Spain). Their goal is to publish a scholarly bilingual edition of the Instituciónfollowing the high standard set by Herbert Davis & Harry Carter in their 1958 edition of Joseph Moxon’s Mechanic Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing.
The committee was impressed by Alvarez and Rylance’s commitment and careful consideration of the challenge in bringing an obscure text to light, we liked the international scope of the proposal, and its contribution to printing history.
