“How wonderful to have nothing to do, and to rest afterward.”
Isidore, Bishop of Seville, 560–636 CE
This is your editor’s wish for one and all before the year begins in earnest. From The Golden Hind Press Commonplace Book (1955), an edition of trial pages limited to fifty copies. A note on the page says: “Toward the close of his life the bishop composed a summary of his teachings, the Etymolgiae. The book had immense success and served as a manual of universal knowledge throughout the next five centuries.”
The Golden Hind Press, established in 1927, was the private press of Arthur W. Rushmore (1883–1955) who for many years had been the director of design and manufacture for Harper & Bros., Publishers and had five designs selected for AIGA’s Fifty Books of the Year.
Armandus de Bellovisu, Expositio super Thomae de Aquino libellum de ente et essentia. Padua: Matthaeus Cerdonis, 29 August 1482. Bridwell Library Special Collections, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University.
It is a commonplace in book history that early typography often served the purposes of the major universities, whose administrations and faculty quickly took advantage of the new printing press technology to supply books for its students. However, it is extremely unusual to find a copy of a fifteenth-century printed book that can be associated with a particular student enrolled during a particular academic term at a particular university within a particular class taught by a particular professor. [Read more]
Jethro Lieberman speaks about the press at Christie’s on the eve of the auction. Photo: Paul Romaine.
The Cary Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology announced today that it has acquired the Kelmscott/Goudy press, so named because it was first owned by William Morris then later Frederic Goudy. This famous iron hand press auctioned by Christie’s on December 6, expected to sell for between $100,000-150,000, actually fetched $233,000. [Read more]
Detail of an illustration by Arthur Rackham for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (Hodder & Stoughton, 1906), reproduced for the book by the Hentschel Colourtype Process.
Matthew McLennan Young began his talk by discussing Jacob Christoph Le Blon’s Coloritto, or, The Harmony of Colouring in Painting (1725). Le Blon invented tricolor printing in the primary colors (blue, red, yellow), occasionally adding black or another color to improve the result. In order to break down the colors into primary components much trial and error was required. Because Le Blon was self-taught, he looked at the printing “accidents” to help guide and refine his methods.[Read more]
Henry Fielding, The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (Limited Editions Club, 1943). Colored by Charlize Brakely, designs by T. M. Cleland.
Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator at Princeton University, spoke on “Adding Color: The Business of the Stenciller in Twentieth-Century Publishing.” Many scholars do not treat stencil as a printing art and yet pochoir (its French name) was closely involved with producing high quality color for the printing industry. [Read more]
Orbis Typographicus featuring text by Walter Crane & Hippocrates. Typeface: Delphin, Calligraphy by Hermann Zapf, 1980.
Orbis Typographicus is a letterpress portfolio tour de force that was released in 1980 after ten years of close collaboration between Hermann Zapf in Darmstadt and Philip L. Metzger of the Crabgrass Press in Kansas City. This title offers the reader a typographic world that only Professor Zapf could envision: full of alphabets and aphorisms, all handset and exquisitely printed by Metzger in a multitude of styles that make the reader believe that she is party to some wonderful typographic time travel. [Read more]
The 2014 APHA Awards Committee names Roger Stoddard as the recipient of the Individual Award and David R. Godine, Inc. as the recipient of the institutional award. Both awards are intended to recognize “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.”
Stoddard and Godine will speak at the APHA annual meeting to be held at 2:00 pm on Saturday, January 25, 2014. The meeting will return to the Trustees Room of the New York Public Library this year.
Detail of a color-printed intaglio illustration from: Salomon Gessner (1730-1788) Mort d’Abel (A Paris, Chez Defer de Maisonneuve, 1793, page 91). Courtesy of Columbia University RBML.
Jane Rodgers Siegel, rare book librarian at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, gave us a virtual tour of landmarks in her talk “Experiments in Color Printing in the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Centuries: A Survey.” Printed color was rare in book illustrations until the nineteenth century, when color printing dropped in cost and became widely available. [Read more]
Detail of Hans Baldung Grien (attr.), Title Border with Wrestling Putti, color woodcut from two blocks (red and black). Title page of Juan López, De libertate ecclesiastica (Strasbourg: Johann Schott, 1511). Cambridge University Library, shelfmark Acton.d.48.362. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
In her concise and well-illustrated talk on early color printing in Germany, L. Elizabeth Upper set a high standard for the speakers who followed her. Upper made her main point early and repeated it throughout the presentation: color printing from woodcuts in Germany in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was more common than previously thought. [Read more]
