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APHA's New York Chapter

James Mosley Lecture

The American Printing History Association New York Chapter with the Grolier Club, The Typophiles, and Type Directors Club, was pleased to sponsor two lectures by James Mosley at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, on Friday March 31 and Monday April 3, 2000 at 6 pm. Mosley toured the United States under the auspices of the Book Arts Press. The lectures were free and open to the public. 

James Mosley is Visiting Professor in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, a longtime Rare Book School faculty member, and (until April 2000, when he retires) Librarian of the St. Bride Printing Library, perhaps the world’s primary specialist reference collection relating to books and printing.

Professor Mosley's New York lectures included:

March 31, 2000 6 p.m.: "The Decorated Types of Louis Jean Pouchée."

Pouchée, an entrepreneur who gatecrashed the closed world of London typefounding during a volatile period at the end of the Napoleonic wars, was among the pioneers of mechanized typecasting. His spectacular decorative poster types of about 1820, which have miraculously survived intact, and of which a complete specimen was printed in 1993, give an unrivaled insight into the new world of the early 19th century, when goods and services were first made known by means of new and aggressive forms of printed publicity.

April 3, 2000 6 p.m.:  "Primitive Types: The Sans-Serif Letter from Neo-classical Icon to Tool of commerce." 

The sanserif letter is familiar as an innovation in commercial printing in the 19th century and also as a symbol of 20th century modernism, from the London Underground lettering of 1916 to the types of the German designers of the 1920s. Its origins, which have often been portrayed as the result of crude and involuntary simplicity imposed by the new technology of an industrial age, were in fact derived from the revival of the simple, geometrical inscriptional letter of the Roman Republican era, which made a direct appeal to two leading neo-classical artists in London: the architect John Soane and the sculptor John Flaxman. This lecture incorporates new discoveries made in the course of mounting the exhibition Primitive Types, which was shown at Sir John Soane's Museum, London, January -- April 1999.

The American Printing History Association www.printinghistory.org, The Grolier Club of New York www.grolierclub.org, The Typophiles and The Type Directors Club www.tdc.org promote various book- and type-related activities.

The Book Arts Press www.virginia.edu/oldbooks sponsors occasional bookish/bibliographical lecture tours especially (though not only) by foreign speakers.  

Learn about the Grolier Club of New York.

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