Left: The Model 5 Linotype and Cpl. Jimmie Kreiter in Pneumonia Hollow, Chaumont, France. (GPO 20101229029) Right: Jimmie Kreiter and the General Pershing Linotype at GPO, 1950s. (GPO 20101229028)
A few days before the U.S. Government Printing Office History Exhibit opened in 2011, one of our maintenance supervisors brought a man whom he introduced as his father in to the new main room of the exhibit area, looking concerned. [Read more]
University of Iowa Center for the Book Student Amy Childress visiting the Stone Creek. (Kimberly Maher)
Conference participants visited exhibitions and artists’ studios around the downtown area on this tour. One exhibition in the public library’s special collections displayed handmade paper and works using handmade paper from their collection. The downtown shops had a window exhibition that participants enjoyed both from the inside and outside. The community studio, Public Space 1 (PS1), had the Spooky House exhibition; PS1 just remodeled the exhibition space, and the display was also good for this Halloween season. [Read more]
Nicole Donnelly, foreground, leading Yoga for Papermakers at the Paper Points North annual Friends of Dard Hunter conference at the Banff Center, 2015. (May Babcock)
As someone who suffers from insomnia and monkey mind at night, meditation and yoga have always been some of the recommendations that I have received from people. Meditation is a practice that I try to do daily, but somehow it just helps to calm the anxiety that comes with the fact that I didn’t get to sleep. This presentation grabbed my attention because more than being yoga, it was yoga for papermakers. The demonstration, scheduled right after lunch, attracted only four people. Nonetheless, the instructor was highly motivated. [Read more]
Peeling off the sheet. (Lisa Dunseth. More photos on the Northern California Chapter’s Flickr.)
Tim Barrett, our esteemed host from the University of Iowa Center For The Book, instructed seventy-seven conference attendees, in seven one-hour sessions, on how to make paper. Although none of us in my tour even came close to the “2,000 sheets-per-day” rate we certainly enjoyed trying. [Read more]
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]