We have a F.P.Rosback foot powered perforator with fixed punches. The back of the machine indicates that it is a No. 6 Special Model Adjustable Multiplex Punching Machine. We are trying to find more information about this machine but don’t know how to start. From what I can tell it was built when the company moved to Benton Harbor [MI] as it has the city name on the back of the face of the machine. Can you help me understand where to start to find more information?
Robert Oldham with J. J. Lankes’ 1845 Hoe Washington hand press at The Tampa Book Arts Studio. (Richard Mathews)
In North America, there are over 1,150 recorded hand presses of all types, makes, and vintages. They range from the press used by the first recorded English colonial printers, Stephen and Matthew Daye, in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1639 (now in the collection of the Vermont Historical Society), to the eighteen reproduction tabletop Albion presses built by Steve Pratt in Utah, between 2001 until his death in 2012. [Read more]
Specimens of Holly Wood Type, Borders, Reglet and Furniture, Manufactured by Hamilton & Katz, Two Rivers, Wisconsin, ca. 1884. Courtesy of the RIT Cary Collection.
The 40th Susan Garretson Swartzburg ’60 Memorial Lecture at the Wells College Book Arts Center will coincide this October with the 40th Annual American Printing History Association conference. Professor David Shields will deliver his talk “Muster Hundreds! Towards a People’s History of American Wood Type,” at 5:30 p.m. on October 21, at the Wells Stratton Hall Auditorium in Aurora-on-Cayuga, New York. This is one day before the APHA Printing on the Handpress & Beyond activities begin at RIT in Rochester, New York. Why not come a day early to enjoy both![Read more]
The lost Mergenthaler factory, ca. 1890, Locust Point, Baltimore. (Courtesy of RIT Press)
Baltimore, Maryland, is well known as the birthplace of the typesetting machine that revolutionized publishing: the Linotype, invented by German immigrant Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1886. However, it has not been widely recognized that Baltimore also played a pivotal role as the original manufacturing center for the machine that replaced Gutenberg’s handset typesetting method, a mechanical marvel that Thomas Edison called “the eighth wonder of the world.” [Read more]
APHA’s 40th Annual Conference, Printing on the Handpress & Beyond, hosted by the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection is now open for registration. Workshops, tours, demonstrations, lectures, famous printing presses, excursions in Rochester and Upstate New York, a vendor fair, and great camaraderie all await you! Printing on the Handpress & Beyond will examine and show you the creative ways these earliest printing machines are employed today by printers, artists, scholars, and educators. Program information and registration are now available
Hello — I am working on a short biography/history book for children that describes the night John Dunlap printed the broadside announcing independence, looking closely at each detail: the Caslon types he used, the paper, the ink. I have read everything available, or tried to. Is there someone I could speak to who might be able to suggest other titles about printing history and the conditions of the day, or someone who could direct me to a press similar to Dunlap’s so that I might try setting type and pulling a proof for myself? Thanks, Jenny Green
The speaker roster for “Printing on the Hand Press & Beyond,” is now confirmed. APHA’s Fortieth Annual Conference will be held at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York from October 22 to 24, 2015. Pre-conference workshops will take place on Thursday, October 22. A vendor fair and the keynote address will kick off the full conference on Friday, October 23. Saturday will bring several tracks of presentations which draw from the expertise of an international group of printers, educators, designers, and historians. Registration information will be forthcoming soon!
I know what it means to be out of sorts. As a young printer in the 1970s I was setting up my own press. I ordered Bembo in two sizes and the spacing material and got started. One of my first projects was a wonderful poem by Thom Gunn, Lament, that I turned into a small book. It was about 150 lines, and I ran out of word spaces—3-to-ems. I tried 4-to-ems, but that set the words too tightly, and I didn’t want to have to use thins (like a brass or two coppers) to make up the added space. The only solution was to call the foundry from whom I had bought the type and get some more spaces. It took time for my check to get to them, and time for the spacing matter to get to me, and in the meantime I walked past my press a dozen times wishing I could get to work. [Read more]
Left: Portrait photo of Alexander Washington Collins from The Inland Printer, May 1918 (courtesy of the Berkeley Updike Collection, Providence Public Library). Right: title page from Alexander Lawson’s Press of the Good Mountain edition of Henry Lewis Bullen’s, Only a Compositor, 1962 (from the author’s collection).
The Pittsburgh compositor Alexander Collins (1870–1918) was an ordinary printshop journeyman, never prominent, and he remains obscure. Collins, however, surfaced briefly in the early twentieth century, an appearance that gives us a glimpse at a tradesman’s world on the edge of change. Collins worked for a big-city commercial printing firm. His thirty shopfloor years overlapped those of nineteenth-century industry titans De Vinne and Hoe as well as an emerging group of differently distinguished printers such as Bruce Rogers, Will Ransom, and Dard Hunter. Exceptional twentieth-century printing was shifting from shopfloor to salon. Printerdom, a workplace culture filled with tradesmen like Collins, would change as well. [Read more]
Arrows are nearly everywhere we look. They designate and control the movement of information, people, and machines. However, the use of the arrow as a symbol is thought to be less than four hundred years old. In early maps and diagrams the arrow is often illustrated as a variation of an archer’s arrow complete with point, shaft, and fletching. Over time the arrow becomes increasingly simplified and abstracted to the degree that the only recognizable feature of the original archer’s arrow is simply a triangular point for the head. This endures as the most elementary characteristic of every arrow regardless of its application and meaning. [Read more]
