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]
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.
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.org by Sunday, July 29. Your ad should be submitted by Tuesday, July 31, as a high- resolution, press-ready grayscale PDF file in an attachment.
Registration is open! The American Printing History Association’s forty-third annual annual conference will be held jointly with the Friends of Dard Hunter at University of Iowa Center for the Book in Iowa City, Iowa, October 25–27, 2018, with both pre- and post-conference events. Full Conference information here.
My research concerns the printing and colour separation of US comics from their origins in New York newspapers of the 1890s onwards. I was lucky enough to discuss my work with Prof Haven Hawley in Florida a few months back when I attended a conference at UFL. I will visit NYC in September. The main research questions I hope to answer on this trip concern the adoption of the Ben Day mechanical tinting method by the earliest Sunday newspaper colour pages in 1893 and 1894. E.g. were these papers the first to use Ben Day tints in letterpress printing, or were other periodicals, books etc already using them, either in colour or B&W? [Read more]
The speaker roster is now confirmed for “Matrices: The Social Life of Paper, Print, and Art,” our joint conference with the Friends of Dard Hunter (FDH). APHA’s forty-third annual conference will be held at University of Iowa Center for the Book Iowa City, Iowa, October 25–27, 2018, with both pre- and post-conference events. Registration and other information are still in development. Please stay tuned.
As a consequence of a research project focused on events of June 1858 upon which I am currently working, it has come to my attention that purchasers of issues of The London Times in the 1850s had to cut pages in order to read them. [Read more]
