Keynote

Michael Winship

Good, but not so Fast or Cheap | Full text

Michael Winship, the Iris Howard Regents Professor of English II at the University of Texas at Austin, was an editor for A History of the Book in America and has published extensively on American literary publishing of the industrial era.

Presenters

 James Berkey

Controlling the Press, Losing the Battle: Ambiguity, Agency, and Print in Civil War Soldier Newspapers | recap

James Berkey is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Brandywine. He has published articles on soldier newspapers from the Spanish-American War in The Journal of Transnational American Studies and The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. His article, “Splendid Little Papers from the ‘Splendid Little War’: Mapping Empire in the Soldier Newspapers of the Spanish-American War,” won the 2012 Proquest/Research Society for American Periodicals Article Prize. He is currently at work on a book-length project about Civil War soldier newspapers and recently published an essay from this project in Timothy Sweet’s Literary Cultures of the Civil War.

Joshua Brown

Rise and Fall: Political Cartoons, Caricature, the Civil War, and the Transformation of Visual Satire | recap

Joshua Brown is executive director of the American Social History Project and professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is author of Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (2002), co-author of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (2005), co-producer of award-winning digital and documentary projects, and an illustrator/cartoonist. The recipient of grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Council of Learned Societies, his current project is a study of the visual culture of the American Civil War.

Jennifer Chuong

Fast and Slow Printing: Paper Marbling and Letterpress in Early America | recap

Jennifer Chuong is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, specializing in American art. Her dissertation, The Chargeable Surface: Investment, Interval and Yield in Early America (1760–1820), analyzes transatlantic experiments with the physicality of surfaces across four areas of material and visual culture: the decorative arts, print, painting, and the book arts. Jennifer holds a master’s of science in architectural history from MIT and a bachelor’s of architecture from Cornell University. Prior to beginning her graduate studies, she worked at the Boston firm, Höweler + Yoon Architecture.

Jeffrey Croteau

“The Cheapest and Most Eligible Mode of Shedding Light on Masonry”: Anti-Masonic Almanacs, 1827–1837 | recap

Jeffrey Croteau is Director of Library and Archives at the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library in Lexington, Massachusetts. He earned his MLS from Queens College and his MA in English from the University of New Hampshire. His article, “From Blind Man’s Bluff to the Poor Blind Candidate: David Claypoole Johnston’s Anti-Masonic Illustrations for New England Almanacs,” which was originally presented at the 2010 CHAViC conference, appeared in the Autumn 2012 issue of the journal Imprint. He presented a paper on American circulating libraries at Library History Seminar XIII in 2015.

Lynne Farrington

A Very Good Book Indeed: Selling Bibles by Subscription in Nineteenth-Century America | recap

Lynne Farrington is Senior Curator, Special Collections in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. Among her collection responsibilities is the American Subscription Publishing Collection, comprising canvassing and sample books, books-in-parts, ephemera, and related publications. In 2002 she curated the exhibition “Agents Wanted”: Subscription Publishing in America and in 2016 she spoke at Rare Book School in Philadelphia and at the annual SHARP conference on American subscription publishers and German-American readers.

Christine Garnier

Assembling the Runaway: Self-Liberation and Visual Games of the American Civil War | recap

Christine Garnier is graduate student in the History of Art and Architecture program at Harvard University specializing in the art of the United States during the long nineteenth century. As a master’s student at Tufts University, she wrote a thesis that examined racialized vignette designs for American paper currency. Her exploration of race in print has expanded to other media, including chromolithography, etching, woodcut, and halftone technologies. For her dissertation project, she is focusing on how these print technologies shape constructions of race in American material culture.

Vincent Golden

Mistakes and Mishaps in Early American Newspapers and What They Can Tell Us | recap

Vincent Golden is Curator of Newspapers and Periodicals at the American Antiquarian Society

Amelia Hugill-Fontanel

Multitudinous Tints: An Inventor’s Pursuit of Instantaneous Multicolor Printing | recap

Amelia Hugill-Fontanel is associate curator at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is an art historian and editor who contributes to numerous publications about Cary Collection holdings, including those about graphic design, calligraphy, wood type, and typefounding. As manager of the Cary technology collection, she is responsible for teaching and maintaining nineteen different presses and several hundred fonts of metal and wood type. She has lectured for APHA, College Art Association, the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, TypeCon, The Typophiles, the U.S. Government Publishing Office, and Yale University.

Baird Jarman

Beaten to the Punch: Fake News Illustrations of the 1860 Boxing Championship | recap

Baird Jarman is an Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he teaches courses on American and European visual culture of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. He holds a BA and MA from Williams College and a PhD from Yale University. His doctoral dissertation examined medieval knight-errantry symbolism in the turn-of-the-century Holy Grail mural in the Boston Public Library. He is currently preparing a book on American political satire from the Civil War and Reconstruction era that investigates connections between the pictorial press and the professional theatre world.

Michael Knies

“American Novelties are Foolishness!”: British Judgements on the American Typeface and Printing Invasion, 1878-1890 | recap

Michael Knies is Special Collections Librarian and Associate Professor at Weinberg Library University of Scranton. Along with university archives and rare books, he is in charge of an assortment of special collections including the Zaner-Bloser Co. Penmanship Collection and the Passionist Congregation Archives. His research interests include late-nineteenth-century American penmanship. He has also published in anthracite coal mining history.

Christina Kraus

“Pointing the Moral” or “Adorning the Tale?”: Illustrations and commentary on Vergil and Caesar in Nineteenth-Century American Textbooks | recap

Christina Kraus is Thomas A. Thacher Professor of Latin at Yale University, where she and teaches in the Classics department. Her research is on the format and content of commentaries, concentrating on those published in the United States and Britain in the nineteenth and early-mid twentieth centuries. She has edited two volumes on the commentary format and published one piece on the paratextual elements in nineteenth-century American commentaries on Tacitus’ Agricola.

Mathieu Lommen

Lettering from Neo-Gothic to Art Nouveau: Nineteenth-Century American and European Lettering Manuals | recap

Mathieu Lommen studied Dutch language and literature at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), where he is senior curator of graphic design at the Special Collections Library. Recent publications include Dutch alphabets: new examples of writing & lettering (2016, with Peter Verheul), Irma Boom: The Architecture of the Book (2013), and The Book of Books: 500 Years of Graphic Innovation (2012), and “Lettering in the ‘age of ugliness’: nineteenth-century Dutch lettering model books,” in Quærendo 46 (2016).

Shawna McDermott

Phrenology and Childhood: Visual Portrayals in the Periodical Press 1850–1900 | recap

Shawna McDermott is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies connections between childhood, race, visuality, and periodicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Julie Mellby

Printed, Pasted, and Published: Edward Wilson’s Photographic Magazine | recap

Julie Mellby is the Graphic Arts Curator within Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library at Princeton University.

Amanda Nelsen & josef beery

Flying and Rolling in the Hand-Press Period: Book Production Efficiencies | recap

Amanda Nelsen serves as Rare Book School’s Director of Programs & Education, a position that she has held since 2010. In addition to managing RBS’s year-round course schedule and overseeing course development, she leads hands-on, instructional demonstrations at the School, including letterpress printing and bookbinding. A practicing book artist, Nelsen earned an MFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, and she holds a certificate in bookbinding from North Bennet Street School. She is a 2008 recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant.

Josef Beery is a printmaker and letterpress printer. He demonstrates printing on the common press to students of Rare Book School and teaches the history of the book and printing to undergraduates at the Virginia Arts of the Book Center. Josef directs marketing and sales at the University of Virginia printing office. He is also the creator of the BookBeetle a desk-top screw press ideal for printmaking, book arts, and teaching the history of the book and printing.

Kate Phillips

The Topsy-Turvy Networks of Civil War Era Illustrated Envelopes | recap

Kate Phillips is a PhD candidate in History of Art at Yale University, where she studies American visual and material culture, and the history of photography. She holds a BA from Haverford College, an MLIS from the Palmer School of Library and Information Science, and an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her dissertation will examine American printed ephemera from the Civil War to the Great Depression.

Rose Roberto

(Re)using Images: The Wood Engravings of the W. & R. Chambers Firm | recap

Rose Roberto is undertaking an AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Reading in collaboration with National Museums Scotland. Her interdisciplinary research covers nineteenth-century printing history and visual culture. Prior to this, she served as subject librarian for visual arts, design, and museum studies at the University of Leeds. She has authored scholarly articles in the Art Libraries Journal and the Journal of the Society of Archivists. She is the series editor for the Art Researchers’ Guides to different cities around the UK and Ireland, published by the Art Libraries Society (ARLIS).

Michael Russem

Ornament and the Printed Book in America | recap

Michael Russem is a freelance book designer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His clients include David R. Godine, Harvard University Press, the Bibliographical Society of America, and New York Review Books.

Emily Sneff

The Substance and Style of the First Printings of the Declaration of Independence | recap

Emily Sneff is Research Manager of the Declaration Resources Project in the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. She holds a BA in History from Johns

Hopkins University. Before joining the Declaration Resources Project, she was a member of the curatorial team at the American Philosophical Society Museum for two exhibitions on Thomas Jefferson. She is responsible for administration, research, and web content in pursuit of the Declaration Resources Project’s mission to create innovative and informative resources about the Declaration of Independence.

Hilary Anderson Stelling

“The best and most universally approved system of illustration . . .”: Jeremy Cross’s The True Masonic Chart | recap

Hilary Anderson Stelling is Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library. She has curated exhibitions on topics ranging from Masonic decorative arts and neon signs to colonial history and contemporary photography. Stelling contributed to the award-winning publication Curiosities of the Craft: Treasures from the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts Collection. She is a graduate of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and holds a certificate in genealogical research from Boston University, Center for Professional Education.

Amanda Stuckey

A Library for the Blind: Tactile Literacy and the Nineteenth-Century Embossed Book | recap

Amanda Stuckey is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the College of William & Mary, where she is completing a dissertation on the intersections of book history and the rhetorics and representations of disability in the nineteenth century. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Omohundro Institute, and the Institute for American History, Literature, and Culture at the University of Virginia. Most recently, she is the recipient of the American Printing History Association’s Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship, put toward researching embossed books produced at the Perkins School for the Blind.

Kathleen Walkup

Work through a Gendered Lens: Images of Women in the Printing Trades | recap

Kathleen Walkup is 2016–17 Trefethen Professor of Book Art at Mills College, where she directs the Book Art Program. Her research interests include the history of women in print culture and conceptual practice in artists’ books. Her talk, The Book is a Public Place, is published in the anthology Threads (Granary Books/Cuneiform Press, 2016). Curatorial work includes Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists Books from Women’s Studio Workshop (Grolier Club, New York, and eleven other sites). A solo exhibition of her letterpress work is being planned for 2018. In the summer she writes a seasonal blog, New Irish Journal.

Laura Wasowicz

From Plantation Bitters to Mi Abuela Facil: McLoughlin Brothers as “Manufacturers” of Children’s Picture Books | recap

Laura Wasowicz is Curator of Children’s Literature at the American Antiquarian Society. Since 1987, she has worked to acquire, catalog, and provide reference service for the AAS collection of 26,000 American children’s books issued between 1650 and 1899. She has written articles on various aspects of nineteenth-century American children’s book publishing, picture book iconography, and child reading habits. She is the editor of the Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Book Trade Directory, available on the AAS website. She holds an MA in Library Science from the University of Chicago and an MA in History from Clark University.

Jonathan Daniel Wells

Amateur Print Culture and the Origins of Desktop Publishing in Nineteenth-Century America | recap

Jonathan Daniel Wells, Ph.D., is Professor of History in the Departments of Afroamerican and African Studies and History, and Director of the Residential College, at the University of Michigan. He is the author or editor of ten books, including The Origins of the Southern Middle Class: 1820–1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge University Press, 2011); The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century (LSU Press, 2011); The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America (2017) and A House Divided: The Civil War and Nineteenth-Century America (second ed., Routledge, 2016) in addition to articles in academic journals and chapters in books. He is currently working on two book projects related to the Fugitive Slave Crisis in the antebellum North.