“Materialities of American Texts and Visual Cultures”
On April 9–10, 2015, curators, conservators, and scholars from various disciplines will convene at Columbia University to discuss new approaches to American print and visual cultures generated by the recent humanistic interest in materiality. [Read more]
APHA’s Annual Meeting on January 24 in New York began as usual with officer reports on membership, programs and finances. President McCamant gave his report, saying that 2014 had not been momentous, but “we’re about as strong as we were a year ago in terms of members, and many of our activities are accomplishing very good things.” He praised the website and its developers, but noted that it garners only moderately better traffic than the old one and asked, “Are we failing to back it up with sufficient social media activity? Is there a fundamental disconnect between the subject matter APHA covers and online communication?” (An online content task force is now addressing these concerns. Membership is invited to comment on this post, or privately via the contact page.) [Read more]
Via the contact form:
As a librarian at Plymouth State University, I am seeking the expertise of someone with an interest in industrial papermaking.
Plymouth State is home to a collection of thousands of photographs of the Brown Paper Company of Berlin, NH. A great many of these photographs were taken in the company mills in the early twentieth century and show their papermaking process and equipment. Currently the photographs do not have enough data attached to them to make them easily searchable. Together with two student employees, I have undertaken a project to add information to the photographs to facilitate folks finding and using them.
Fig. 1. Press pass printed by the Army of the Potomac, ca. April 1862 .(Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Graphic Arts Collection)
William Conant Church (1836–1917) of Rochester, New York was known for his newspaper work before, during, and after the American Civil War. He contributed to newspapers such as The New York Chronicle, The Sun (New York), the New York Evening Post, The New York Times, the Army and Navy Journal, and The Galaxy Magazine. [Read more]
Page spread from The Trained Printer and the Amateur: and the Pleasure of Small Books by Alfred W. Pollard, Lanston Monotype Corp., 1929. Title on cover: “New Series of the Centaur types of Bruce Rogers and the Arrighi Italics of Frederic Warde. Cut by Monotype and here first used to print a paper by Alfred W. Pollard.” (RIT Cary Collection)
At 6:30 p.m. on Monday, 17 November, the 2014 Lieberman Lecture sponsored by the American Printing History Association took place at the Melbert B. Cary Jr. Graphic Arts Collection in the Wallace Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Professor Herbert H. Johnson delivered an excellent address entitled “History of a Type Design: Centaur by Bruce Rogers. With a Footnote on Its Erstwhile Companion, Arrighi, by Frederick Warde.” Professor Johnson skillfully demonstrated how Rogers was able to orchestrate the association of his roman type with the complimentary one of Warde’s italic font. [Read more]
The American Printing History Association welcomes proposals for its 40th annual conference: “Printing on the Hand Press & Beyond” to be held at RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester, NY, October 23–24, 2015. Proposals are due by March 15, 2015. PDF [Read more]
Spread from Hortus Conclusus a bilingual artist’s book by Leslie Smith.
This panel featured two book artists intent on having paper play a role in enhancing the meaning of their printed work. [Read more]
Paper, Print & Publishing, Book Binding Establishments, 1880. (Russ White)
A new digital humanities project from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo could potentially offer deeper understandings of the history of printing, publishing and the allied trades. Through the use of digital mapping tools, users can manipulate data to analyze historical changes in the manufacturing, distribution, sales and consumption of paper and printed material. [Read more]
Carl P. Rollins, Printer to Yale University from 1920–1948, founded the Bibliographical Press in the Yale University Library in 1927. Rollins taught a course titled “Eighteenth-Century Printing Office Practice” at the press in order to provide graduate students, librarians, and faculty members hands-on experience with typesetting and printing on the hand press. In addition, Rollins taught his students how to make paper by hand. The handwriting is by Rollins. (Courtesy of the Carl Purington Rollins Papers, Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, Yale University)
I always hope that APHA conference sessions will reveal not just the ‘what’ and ‘how,’ but the ‘why’ of printing history and the allied arts, moving conversations beyond technical applications alone—always a deep well for practitioners—into the realms of significance. [Read more]
The 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association will take place on Saturday, January 24 at 2 pm in the Trustees Room of the New York Public Library. Friends of the book arts past and present are urged to attend. APHA’s annual honorees will be present and make presentations:
The individual honoree is Paul F. Gehl, the George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and the Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing at the Newberry Library, Chicago. Gehl has been Custodian of the Wing Foundation on the History of Printing since 1987 and has enriched that collection by his judicious acquisition of materials, exhibitions both of print & calligraphy, and sponsorship of public lectures on various aspect of the book. In doing so, he has also enriched the broader community of lovers of print, calligraphy and the book. [Read more]