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ISO: De Vinne “Masculine Typography” Speech

From the Contact form:

Hello, my name is Florian and I’m a French student in typography!

I am currently writing a dissertation about gender and typography for my diploma, and one of my main references is the “Masculine typography” speech of Theodore Low De Vinne.

I have been looking for the American Bookmaker version of it for a while but in vain. As I have seen you quoted it a lot in an article from 2018, I was wondering if you might have it with you, and if so, if it was possible for you to share it!

Thank you very much in advance, have a good day!

Florian

Comments

  1. Paul Moxon, Website Editor 26 February, 2022 at 6:30 pm

    If someone can scan this article, please send it to me and I will forward it to Florian. website@[this domain]

    Reply
  2. Paul Moxon, Website Editor 4 March, 2022 at 9:01 am

    Florian: Sara Sauers (a former APHA VP for Programs and Assistant Professor at the Iowa Center for the Book) found the article online:

    We don’t have the paper copies at Iowa, but I found the “Masculine Printing” article at the HathiTrust.org website. I copied the link when I got to the page, and that’s what’s below. Not sure if it will work from that link, so the other link is to the issue page for the publication. It’s in November 1892. Looks like American Bookmaker became American Printer at some point.

    https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.319510019041171&view=1up&seq=152&skin=2021

    https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000677224

    Reply
  3. Paul Romaine 23 March, 2022 at 2:18 pm

    In addition to HathiTrust, Google Books has citations to DeVinne (either this speech or other writings); for example, John Southward’s printing manual Modern Printing p. 88 cites his dislike of the American trend of “aesthetic printing” of the 1870s and 1880s (highly elaborate letterpress printing, generally quite labor-intensive, intended to compete with lithography), which he contrasted with a (supposedly masculine) use of dark ink, strong contrasts of paper/ink/type, etc. More recently, Lothar Müller’s book White Magic mentions DeVinne’s essay (pp.233-234).

    Reply

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