Richard-Gabriel
Rummonds to Deliver
2005 J. Ben Lieberman Memorial Lecture
September 24, 2005 4 p.m. at the University of San Francisco
For Immediate Release [PDF
version (121K)]
The
2005 J. Ben Lieberman Memorial Lecture will feature fine press printer and
printing historian Richard-Gabriel Rummonds who will be speaking at the University of San Francisco's Del Santo Reading Room on the Lone Mountain campus on Saturday
afternoon September 24, 2005. Mr. Rummonds's talk is entitled “Abandoned by a
Married Man: the Long and Treacherous Path to the Iron Handpress.” The lecture is
scheduled for the day after APHA’s annual conference.
Richard-Gabriel
Rummonds is among the twentieth century’s most pre-eminent handpress printers.
For nearly a quarter of a century, he printed and published illustrated limited
editions of contemporary literature on iron handpresses, primarily in Verona, Italy, and Cottondale, Alabama. His imprints, the Plain Wrapper Press and Ex
Ophidia, reflected his painstaking attention to fine design and presswork. In
1984 he founded the pioneering MFA Book Arts program at the University of Alabama. He also has taught typography and type design at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, where he presently lives.
Richard-Gabriel
Rummonds may be best-known to APHA members for his Printing
on the Iron Handpress (1998), a step-by-step manual for printing students,
contemporary printers, and printing historians. Rummonds’s instruction book
drew upon historical practices but modified them for the needs of contemporary
printers. Rummonds’s most recent book is the magisterial Nineteenth-Century
Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress (2004). The two-volume book
includes an extensive anthology of selections from printers’ manuals, ranging
from Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683) to John Southward’s Practical
Printing (1900).
Mr.
Rummonds came to printing through his writing of poetry and short stories. As a
book designer in New York in the late 1960s, he discovered the
nineteenth-century handpress, and studied early printers’ manuals in order to
learn how to operate these presses. Mr. Rummonds spent nearly two decades in Verona where he printed and continued his researches. He remarks that he began by
self-publishing his own work, but ended up wanting to learn how printing was
done in the past. Nevertheless, Mr. Rummonds is no antiquarian: “knowing how to
print in the nineteenth century doesn’t tell us how to print in the twentieth.”
Mr.
Rummonds has retired from printing but he stays busy. His current writing
projects include a screenplay, Orfeo in Paradise and a memoir, Fantasies
and Hard Knocks: My Life As a Printer
Mr.
Rummonds’s press and personal archive is held at the New York Public Library;
his personal set of Plain Wrapper Press and Ex Ophidia books is at the University of Oregon; and his technical reference library is at the University of Utah. In addition, major collections of his printing are also held at the Biblioteca Civica di
Verona, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the University of Georgia, the Uni versity of Texas, Austin, and the University of Liverpool as well as the University of San Francisco. A number of exhibitions have featured his work, including a
major retrospective in 1999 at the Biblioteca di via Senato in Milan, Italy.
The lecture
will take place on the University of San Francisco’s Lone Mountain Campus in
the Del Santo Reading Room on September 24, 2005 at
4:00 pm. A reception will follow the lecture. The lecture is co-sponsored by
the Gleeson Library Associates, and is free and open to the public.
Getting to Gabriel Rummonds’ Lieberman
Lecture from the Sir Francis Drake Hotel
Public Transportation: Several bus lines service the University of
San Francisco Lone Mountain campus. The best ones are the 32 Balboa and the 5
Fulton. Take the 32 Balboa or the 5 Fulton on Market Street at Powell. The 32
Balboa bus stops at the base of the Lone Mountain campus. Once there, one just
has to take a flight of stairs from Turk Street. The 5 Fulton route runs
parallel to the 32 Balboa, 2 blocks south. Bus fare is $1.25 (.35 for seniors).
Please note: the Balboa bus travels through the heart of the
tenderloin. While a safe bus line, you may see urban grittiness and should be
ready to conduct yourself accordingly. Use commonsense.
Cab: Cab fare from Union Square is about $10-$12 plus
tip. Shared cab rides are a good option--just look for other conference goers.
Tell the cab driver to go to the University of San Francisco Lone Mountain
campus on Turk Street. You can get out on Turk Street and walk up the stairs, or
for handicapped access take the driveway on Turk (just before Parker) to the top
of the Lone Mountain campus to avoid the stairs.
About the Lieberman Lecture
APHA’s Lieberman
lecture, given annually at a different institution by a figure distinguished
in the history of printing or the book arts, commemorates J. Ben Lieberman
(1914–84), founder and first President of the American Printing History
Association. Past speakers include Roderick Stinehour, Jack Stauffacher,
Johanna Drucker, John Randle, G. Thomas Tanselle, Claire Van Vliet, Barry Moser,
and Paul Needham.
For the most
current information about the Lieberman Memorial Lecture visit the APHA website, www.printinghistory.org or contact the Vice-President for Programs, Paul Romaine programs@printinghistory.org
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