Regional Chapters > New York
The New York Chapter
APHA's New York Chapter sponsors lectures, fields trips and other opportunities to meet fellow members on an informal basis. Events are free and open to the public.
Current Officers
Joel Mason, President
Paul Shaw, Vice-President
Jared Ash, Secretary
Fernando Pena, Treasurer
Past Events: New York Chapter
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Scott Kosofsky
On Wavering: The Aesthetics, Culture, and Technology of Once and Future Fine Books
The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York
Scott-Martin Kosofsky, president of Boston’s Society of Printers, is a book designer, editor, and author well known for his work on complex books in Jewish studies, art, and music. As a writer, Scott’s The Book of Customs: A Complete Handbook for the Jewish Year (HarperCollins, 2004) was winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Free and open to the public.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Romano & Ross: 60 years of Art and the Tipoteca ItalianaThe Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York
John Ross is a graphic artist and maker of artists’ books. He teaches printmaking at the New School. Claire Romano is a painter, graphic artist, and Professor Emeritus at Pratt Institute. In 1991 John and Claire established the High Tide Press, which issues limited editions of books designed, typeset, illustrated, and hand printed by John himself. Since 1998 John has worked at the Tipoteca Italiana in Cornuda, Italy, collaborating with its technicians to produce several new works. Free and open to the public.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Gordon Bond
James Parker (1714-1770): A New Jersey Printer on the Eve of Revolution
The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York
Gordon Bond, an amateur historian, is the author of a new book on James Parker published by the New Jersey Heritage Press. He serves as co-chairman of the committee working to establish the Woodbridge Township History Museum and Vice President of Amateur Astronomers, Inc. in Cranford, New Jersey. Gordon is currently working on a folk grave marker survey project in New Jersey with Stephanie Hoagland. Free and open to the public.
November 2, 2007
Production not Reproduction: The Influence of Offset Printing on Artists' Books
Panel at 6:30pm -- "Production not Reproduction: The Influence of Offset Printing on Artists' Books" at the Center for Book Arts. Exhibition and artists' talk, moderated by the exhibition's curator, Tony White. The event is co-sponsored with the Center for Book Arts, and the suggested donation of $5/$10 is waived for APHA-New York members.
May 22, 2007
Letterpress Unbound
Join us at The Grolier Club for a screening of video programs about letterpress master printers Ruth Lingen and Peter Kruty produced by Champe Smith & Sally Gardner. Ruth discusses type and printing, and shows some of the artist’s books she has collaborated on with artists Lois Lane, Chuck Close, and her one posthumous work with Alexander Calder.
Peter is joined by artist Mikhail Magaril in a meeting about their project together, The Nightingale, a book with Mikhail’s woodcuts in a Chinese style. In addition, Peter shows works he collaborated on with artists Lesley Dill, Shelagh Keeley, and Robert Peterson. Producers Champe Smith & Sally Gardner will be at the screening joined by the printers.
May 2, 2007
Mathieu Lommen
Boeken! Dutch Book Typography, 1907-2007
Columbia University, 435 W 114th Street, Butler Library, Room 523.
In this illustrated survey of classical Dutch book and type design from Art Nouveau to the digital era, Mathieu Lommen traces the various trends during that time: from books inspired by William Morris and the Arts & Crafts aesthetic to the influence of programmatic modernism after World War II and beyond to the rediscovery of microtypographic refinements in recent years. Some of the designers whose work will be highlighted include Jan van Krimpen, Harry N. Sierman, Bram de Does and the type designers of The Hague Academy.
Mathieu Lommen is curator at the Special Collections Library, University of Amsterdam. He is an editor of the scholarly journal Quaerendo and co-author of many books, including several in English: Dutch typefounders' specimens (1998), Bram de Does: Typographer & Type Designer (2003), and Sem Hartz and the making of Linotype Juliana (2006).
Co-sponsored by the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University; New York Chapter of the American Printing History Association; and the Type Directors Club. Free and open to the public.
December 11, 2006
Paul Shaw
From Milton to Mattresses: The Early Work of W. A. Dwiggins, 1905-1930.
The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York
W.A. Dwiggins is best known today as a type designer for Mergenthaler Linotype and a book designer for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. But before he was associated with either of those two companies he had already established a reputation as one of the leading commercial artists in the country. In recognition of this, the AIGA awarded Dwiggins its gold medal in 1929. His experience working for jewelers, furniture companies, vacuum cleaner manufacturers, canned food purveyors, tobacco companies, paper mills and others led him to coin the phrase “graphic design” in 1922 and formed the basis for his 1928 book, Layout in Advertising. This talk will focus on Dwiggins’ early career, looking not only at his advertising work but also his close connection with Alfred Bartlett and D.B. Updike. Most of the work to be shown will be unfamiliar.
Paul Shaw is both a graphic designer and a design historian. As the principal of Paul Shaw / Letter Design he has won awards from the AIGA, Type Directors Club, Art Directors Club and Print magazine. As a design historian he has written about written about blackletter type, Bartolomeo Sanvito, George Salter, Morris Fuller Benton and W.A. Dwiggins. Paul teaches the history of graphic design and the history of typography at the School of Visual Arts; and calligraphy at both Parsons School of Design and University of the Arts. He is currently working on a full-length biography of W. A. Dwiggins.
October 27, 2007
Poetry into Print Panel and discussion
The Morgan Library and Museum
Poetry into Print Panel and discussion including: Jerry Kelly, graphic designer; Mindy Belloff, Intima Press and Studio on the Square; and Alicia Martinez and Richard Kuczkowski, Poetry in Motion [subway project]. This is the inaugural meeting of the New York City Book Culture Seminar. Free admission. Tea and cookies to follow. Reservations are necessary since the seminar is limited to 44 participants. You will receive a confirmation of your registration. The New APHA poetry portfolio, Verse into Type, will be available for viewing. Sponsored by the American Printing History Association, with assistance from the Bibliographical Society of America, The Morgan Library and Museum, and the Palmer School of Library and Information Science of Long Island University.
June 2, 2004
Mark Batty
The complexities, trials and tribulations of making a new edition of Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing
This edition brings new scholarship to Moxon's Mechanick Exercises (1683), the first book ever written on printing and printing types. The text, edited by John Lane, has been extensively annotated and expanded for scholars and artists in the fields of printing, typography and the graphic arts. John Lane, a leading bibliographer and historian of type and printing, has based this edition on that of the Oxford Univesity Press (1962), edited by Herbert David and Harry Carter.
Before founding Mark Batty Publisher in 2001, Mark Batty was president and CEO of the International Typeface Corporation, and director of marketing for Letraset. He is president of the Association Typographique International (ATypI), and a board member of the Fine Press Book Association. Free and open to the public.
March 9, 2004
Justin Howes
Typographical Monstrosities: The Grotesque in Nelson's England
The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York
An account of the fierce debates which greeted the appearance of sansserif letterforms on London posters and store-fronts between 1803 and 1805. On this subject, Howes says "the topic emerged as a result of hunting down Updike's 1918 joke about the 'Fashionable Egyptian Sign-boards' that had quite shocked polite taste in London a century earlier: 'An Irishman describing the Egyptian letters, which at present deface the metropolis, declared that the thin strokes were exactly the same as the thick ones.' One writer (anonymous) said 'Yet let us hope it is merely the folly of the day, a fungi [sic] which will disappear as speedily as it has arisen.' It is through these debates that a modern vocabulary for the discussion of letterforms evolved."
Howes is a British typographer, type designer and historian. His recent book design projects include the British Library's new study of the Dove's Press by Marianne Tidcombe; The Golden Cockerel Press, by Roderick Cave and Sarah Manson; editions of Wycliffe's and Tyndale's New Testaments; and bibliophile editions for the Roxburghe Club.
November 13, 2003
Peter Bain
Film Type
The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York
During the display type era in New York, wherein film and photographic media freed type design from the constraints of metal, designers embraced phototypesetting and made the city a center of new typeface design. Bain will discuss this period, present specimens and offer a critique of display typography.
Peter Bain is a typographic designer, and principal of Incipit, a studio whose work includes typeface design, lettering, and typography. His interests include the history of typefaces. In 1998 he co-curated, with Paul Shaw, the exhibition "Blackletter: Type and National Identity," at the Herb Lubin Study Center for Design and Typography at Cooper Union.
December 10, 2003
Lili Wronker
The Hebrew Alphabet from Antiquity to the Compute
The School of Visual Arts, 209 East 23rd Street, New York
The video is described as a visual journey covering letters in stone, manuscripts, paintings, signs, printing, typography, and calligraphy, incorporating photography by Erich Wronker and videography by Anita Weber and Michael Tiranoff.
Lili Cassel Wronker has been active in the books arts for over sixty years. She has been a book jacket designer, children's book illustrator, and calligrapher. She and her husband Erich were proprietors of a private press, The Ron Press. Her involvement in many organizations includes membership in the Typophiles and founding membership in the Society of Scribes and in APHA.
December 11, 2002
Liana Lupas, Curator of the Scripture Collection
The Library of a Single Book
The American Bible Society Library and Archives
The Library of the American Bible Society includes more than 55,000 title in over 2,200 languages and dialects, dating from the thirteenth century to the present. Dr. Lupas will show and discuss a unique visual history of the art of the printed word.
Liana Lupas is Curator of the Scripture Collection at the American Bible Society. She is past Professor of Classics at the University of Bucharest, Romania; at Columbia University; and at Hofstra University
May 21, 2002
Virginia Smith
Kabel to Corbu: The Spirit of Modernism Pervading All the Arts
The Grolier Club,47 East 60th Street, New York
Virginia Smith with speak on relationships between typography of the Early Modernist period and design in other fields, including architecture and haute couture -- material covered in her forthcoming book Visual Set: Typography and the Design Arts. She will show results of her recent research in the Imprimerie Nationale in Paris, in the archives of the Louvre and in private collections, including original photographs of the famous Art Deco Exposition of 1925 in Paris, and rare period photographs taken when Le Corbusier's "white boxes" of the 1920's were first built.
Virginia Smith is Professor of Art at the City University of New York, and a past president of the American Printing History Association.
April 26, 2002
David Small
Beyond Printing: Design for Dynamic Display
The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York
David Small's work presents a compelling vision of how computers can redefine the paradigm of printed typography. His experiments ask fundamental questions about how reading, writing and. expression are evolving in response to computer technology. The result is a personal vision of the future of computer-mediated typography.
David Small is Principal of Small Design Firm, Inc., in Cambridge. His Ph.D. at the MIT Media Labs focused on the display and manipulation of complex visual information. His thesis, Rethinking the Book, examined how digital models, in particular the use of 3-D and dynamic type, will change the way designers approach large bodies of information.
November 9, 2001
Alastair Johnston
Alphabets to Order
The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York
Typographer and letterpress printer Alastair Johnston discusses his recent Alphabets to Order: The Literature of Nineteenth Century Typefounders' Specimens (published by Oak Knoll Press and The British Library). Johnston surveys the inseparable visual and literary experiments of the anonymous craftsmen who set English and American type specimen books during the "typographical explosion" of the 19th century.
With the arrival of display types, the specimen books became the "playground of the compositors." Johnston will show "the controlled chaos" of 19th century typefounders' specimen books, and discuss some of the "labyrinthine byways" he traveled in exploring these texts. "Lost in the stacks I encountered poison candy, vice and superstition. Then found some peculiar books, lost to time, that revealed the reading habits, politics and whimsies of typestickers of yore" --some of which may be compared to the later work of concrete poets and dadaists.
Alastair Johnston is a typographer and letterpress printer at the Poltroon Press in Oakland, California, which he founded in 1975 in partnership with Frances Butler. He is well known as a historian, lecturer, and author on books and type, and edits The Ampersand, published by the Pacific Center for Book Arts.
October 11, 2001
John Randle, The Whittington Press
Papers and Prospectuses
The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York
John Randle, proprietor of The Whittington Press, will show and discuss two unique publications of his press:
Fine Papers at the Oxford University Press. A descriptive catalogue, with text by John Bidwell, assembled in 1999 to present samples from among 20,000 sheets of hand- and mould-made papers dating from 1890, forgotten leftovers rediscovered and bought from Oxford University Press in 1986.This book remains the most comprehensive account of British hand-papermaking to date.
British Private Press Prospectuses, 1891-2001. An account by David Butcher of the prospectuses issued by British private presses, both famous and less well-known, that traces the development of the private press during the twentieth century. This work contained a portfolio of rare, original prospectuses from a collection assembled by Randle over the past fifteen years.
The Whittington Press, founded in 1971 by John and Rosalind Randle, will have published by early 2002 some 160 titles, including belles lettres, collections of wood-engravings and other imagery, bibliographies, type specimens, and the internationally acclaimed annual review for printers and bibliophiles, Matrix, now in its twenty-first year.
December 15, 2000
Jerry Kelly
Gallery talk and reception for the exhibition "The Fine Art of Letters: The Work of Hermann Zapf"
The Grolier Club, New York
Hermann Zapf, recognized as one of the foremost type designers, calligraphers, and typographers of the twentieth century, has designed more than 200 typefaces, including Palatino, Optima, Zapf Chancery and Michelangelo. His manual of calligraphic styles, Pen and Graver (1949), set a standard for several generations of calligraphers; his calligraphic broadsides, book jackets, and limited edition silk-screen prints have been reproduced widely.
Jerry Kelly is a designer, printer and calligrapher working independently in New York, and a partner in the Kelly/Winterton Press. He has also been a designer/representative of the Stinehour Press, and The Press of A. Colish. He has taught at Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, and Queens College. He is author of articles in journals including AIGA Journal, Matrix, Fine Print, Calligraphy Review, and Bookways. He also co-authored with Martin Hutner, A Century for the Century (1999).
November 13, 2000
Jean Bourges
Odyssey of the Printable Palette
The Grolier Club, New York
The idea of enabling artists to prepare color work in a more readily printable form has been a century in realization. Jean Bourges will discuss the science and art of "getting color to the paper," color choice, specification of pigments, inks, paints, and other colorants. Her father Albert Bourges, at first an engraver, wanting to involve artists in platemaking and resolve the disparate viewpoints of artists, invented the Bourges Color Notation System, and later Bourges Artists' Shading Sheets. Jean Bourges is the author of Color Bytes (1997). Before joining her father to start a new company, she worked as an engineering draftsperson in the U.S. Army Map Service.
March 31, 2000
James Mosley
The Decorated Types of Louis Jean Pouchée
April 3, 2000
James Mosley
Primitive Types: The Sans-Serif Letter from Neo-classical Icon to Tool of commerce
APHA’s 34th Annual Conference, “The Book Beautiful,” meets in Newport, Rhode Island, October 16th–18th, 2009, during our 35th anniversary year. The program has been published and registration is now open. William S. Peterson, emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland and editor of APHA’s journal, Printing History, will deliver the keynote address.
The recent issue of the Newsletter contains an announcement of the upcoming annual conference in Newport, Rhode Island; various notices of interest; chapter news from across the country; articles by Paul Moxon on the Vandercook and by Frank Romano on the typographic point; and a trustee profile of Russell Maret. Download it in PDF form here.
You'll read in the summer newsletter that from the fall issue 2009 (number 172) onwards the Newsletter will only be available in electronic form on this website. It will no longer be printed and mailed to members, a significant cost savings that may have an unexpected benefit: going electronic will make it possible for us to produce more newsletters each year. For the time being the design of the newsletter will remain the same, so those who wish to print it out will have the recognizable and familiar object to hold. Soon though we will reformat it somewhat for easier reading on your i-Phone or Blackberry. Of course we will continue to archive the newsletter on the website, so that all back issues will be available. We are also investigating ways to feed the publication to interested subscribers.
The excellent Brian Frykenberg is stepping down from the editorship of the Newsletter after the next issue and we need are seeking an active and well-connected member to replace him. The new editor will come just as we are migrating from print to electronic, a great opportunity for a creative, web-savvy person to expand and enhance our beloved workhorse. Contact Martin Antonetti, the VP for Publications, at mantonet@smith.edu if you are interested or know of someone who might be.