Via the contact form:
I am trying to find information pertaining to a John A. Gray who owned a publishing house in New York City in the mid to late 19th century. There is a lot of information on Gray’s company but very little on Gray himself. If you have any information regarding Gray’s biography I would greatly appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction. I look forward to your swift reply. Thank you.
A roster of speakers guaranteed to promote lively discussion among colleagues both old and new has been assembled for APHA’s 2014 Annual Conference, Paper on the Press. This year the conference will be held jointly with hand papermaking group The Friends of Dard Hunter [Read more]
The Individual Achievement Award presented in January to Roger Stoddard (left) by APHA President Robert McCamant. Photo by Joel Mason. Stoddard’s business card ca. 1945 (right).
A transcript of Roger Stoddard’s remarks from his acceptance, of APHA’s 2014 Individual Achievement Award, at the January Annual Meeting, have been added to his award page.
As a retired Manhattan real estate broker and building owner, collecting images of New York buildings was almost second nature. I am attracted to the factories and headquarters portrayed on letterheads and billheads. I favor buildings that I can identify—especially if I had brokered the sale or leased premises there. [Read more]
Detail from Jost Amman’s woodcut “Buchdrucker” (The Printer) from Das Ständebuch (The Book of Trades), 1568. Wikimedia.
Occasionally, I field questions from site visitors about various aspects of printing history. I generally reply by email sharing what I can on the subject and then direct them to other sources. Here’s a query that our readership should be able to answer.
… how much time it would take to set a book in type and print it in seventeenth century Europe?
APHA is pleased to announce a new digital index for our flagship journal, Printing History. At the request of James P. Ascher, Vice President of Publications, and with the assistance of website Editor-in-Chief Paul Moxon, librarian and scholar Joseph Grobelny developed a completely new index to the journal. [Read more]
Interior spread of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, one of the 39 volumes of the Letterpress Shakespeare, published by The Folio Society, London. Source: foliosociety.com
In Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, the Great Seal of England was used as a nutcracker by the impostor prince. It sometimes feels like we use the heritage of the past in a similar way. It does solve the problem at hand, yet it could do considerably more. [Read more]
Two masters: Theodore Low De Vinne and Stan Nelson. Photo by Paul Romaine.
There was plenty of printing history all over town during the first few days of April. The main attraction was the New York Antiquarian Book Fair from the 3rd through the 6th. But there was also a demonstration at the Grolier Club by type historian Stan Nelson, timed to go with the De Vinne exhibit there, curated by Irene Tichenor [APHA president 1998–2002] and Michael Koenig. And then, for current practitioners and collectors of letterpress, there was a Fine Press Book Fair (sponsored by FPBA) at the Altman building on Saturday and Sunday. [Read more]
This fragment was discovered after removing the old packing on the tympan of the Kelmscott/Goudy Albion Press.
The Kelmscott/Goudy Albion press arrived at RIT on January 13, 2014. It had been expertly packed and carefully shipped 300 miles from Manhattan to Rochester, making what would hopefully be its last long-distance journey. The press has received a warm welcome at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection, with classes, friends, and reporters visiting to catch a glimpse of the famous machine, even while still disassembled. [Read more]
Samuel A. Jacobs was an American printer and a book designer. His work during the 1920s and 1930s placed Polytype Press and, later, Golden Eagle Press among elite modernist limited-edition printing establishments. Over those years, the American Institute of Graphic Arts selected a dozen of Jacobs’s books among its annual “Fifty Books of the Year.” Glenway Wescott’s Natives of Rock (1925) was one such book, the Covici-Friede edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1930) was another. [Read more]