APHA is pleased to announce that the 2018 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship has been awarded to Jordan Wingate, a Ph.D. student in English at the University of California, Los Angeles. [Read More]
What does it mean to strive for a feminist praxis when the subject of your work is not printers but printing? If there are no human agents in your story, how do you make it an inclusive one that invites everyone to participate? In this talk, Dr. Werner draws on her experience of writing a book introducing handpress printing to explore how to create a feminist history of printing. Looking at how scholars, theorists, artists, and poets have talked about the acts of printing and being a female maker, she weaves a practice of historical connections and present acts that makes a case for the necessity of opening our field to all questioners. [Read more]
Elizabeth Yale opened the presentation with a discussion of the role of historical books as the impetus for new book arts. She discussed the experiments that Isaac Newton wrote about in his notebooks, particularly one involving fragmenting light through prisms, the experimentum crucis. These experiments reflect Newton’s conversation between knowledge, visualization, and making, which inspired artists in two shows that she curated with Julie Leonard Micrographia (2015) and Handy Books (2017). Riter’s talk centered on one work: Peter and Donna Thomas’s printing of Celia Finne’s A Record of 17th Century Papermaking. The book is the seventeenth-century diary of an English woman who traveled to papermaking facilities, among other places, and took extensive notes. The Thomases printed their edition in miniature on seventeenth-century paper sourced from unfinished documents. It was supplemented with Donna’s illustrations of paper mills, annotations, and a paper sample paired with one of Finne’s descriptions of that paper. This book is an example of the relationship between materiality, narrative, and recordedness. The book is about seventeenth-century paper and made of this material, offering a feeling of historical resonance while also challenging the reader’s assumption of what seventeenth-century paper is like. Julie Leonard’s presentation also discussed two exhibitions that she worked on regarding scientific books and their makers. She drew inspiration from a 1995 Smithsonian exhibition on the same topic to help make Micrographia and Handy Books. Like the Smithsonian exhibit, these shows invited artists to examine historical books and consider both their content and their role as functional objects. Some artists made works that considered how the books changed over time, either in their physical aging process or in how audiences read them. Some artists created contemporary interpretations that are analogous to their historical predecessors. Leonard discussed many examples from the two exhibits and how artists created different interpretations of the same concept.
Dear APHA member,
Who has made major contributions to printing history? Who is making these contributions today? The American Printing History Association presents two annual awards, one to an individual and one to an institution, as a way of recognizing “a distinguished contribution to the study, recording, preservation or dissemination of printing history, in any specific area or in general terms.” Year upon year, there have been excellent nominations submitted making the selection process terribly challenging. [Read more]
Via the Contact form:
I am interested in the earliest banning of books. I looked at your History of Printing Timeline, and it mentions France, in the 1500s, under penalty of death. [Read more]
Via the Contact form:
How were newspaper printing plates recycled after use? I am particularly interested in any research/institutions/blogs that discuss the way plates might have been used as construction materials. [Read more]
Cover: An experiment in multitudinous tints, William N. Weeden’ color printing process, is preserved in several small specimens, made as a proof of concept while visiting England in July 1886. Image: “Proposed Alphabets for the Blind, Under Consideration of the Society of Arts for Scotland,” listing twenty different alphabetical systems for the blind, primarily drawn from Europe. Image courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind.
Printing History 24, produced by the team of Brooke Palmieri, editor; Michael Russem, publication designer; and Katherine Ruffin, Vice-President for Publications, is being mailed to APHA members this week. [Read more]
Wood type from the Hamilton Teaching Collection in action. (Photos: Sarah Bryant)
On August 23, Jim Moran, Director of the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, escorted a large set of wood type to the fifth floor of the University of Alabama’s Amelia Gorgas Library, where the university’s MFA in Book Arts program operates its type lab and bindery. [Read more]
Via the Contact form:
I’m planning on starting up a ‘retro printer’s’ business, where I use vintage printing machines to give an authentic classic look to whatever the customer brings in (so far, most interest I’ve received has been from artists and a small local museum). I’m doing research on the different machines of the 19th and 20th century and was wondering whether the same printing machines used to print letters in newspapers and magazines were also used in factories for printing brand names and things such as that.
Rowan Gillespie
Brooke Palmieri, editor, and Michael Russem, designer, are putting the finishing touches on Printing History 24, which will be printed and mailed to all APHA members in the few weeks. Advertising space is available for purchase. Sizes and prices can be found here.
To reserve space for an ad, please email publications@printinghistory.