Citations for APHA's 2006
Awards for Distinguished Achievement
This is a summary of the citation for the Individual Award to Elizabeth M. Harris, and the Institutional Award to the The John Carter Brown Library. Below the summaries are the introductions which were read by Awards Committee Chair, David R. Whitesell.
The American Printing History Association is pleased to announce the winners of its 2006 Individual and Institutional Awards for distinguished achievement in printing history.
Individual Award: Elizabeth M. Harris
Elizabeth M. Harris, former Curator of Graphic Arts in the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, is the 2006 Individual Laureate. Her varied publications record includes articles on 19th-century printing processes--compound plate printing, glyphography, nature printing, and map printing, to name just a few--and printing presses, such as The Common Press (with Clinton Sisson, 1978), and Personal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth-Century America (2004). Harris's innovative Smithsonian exhibitions on such topics as pochoir, printing for the blind, and American wood type are highlights of her distinguished career as an educator.
Introduction of Elizabeth M. Harris
Introductory remarks by David R. Whitesell
On behalf of the other members of APHA’s Awards committee—Julia Blakely, Patricia Fleming, and Jane Rodgers Siegel—it is my honor to present the 2006 American Printing History Association Individual and Institutional Awards for Distinguished Achievement in Printing History. I will not trouble you with details of our deliberations, other than to say how grateful I am to Julia, Pat, and Jane for their hard work and thoughtful counsel. One other person also deserves mention, and that is APHA Honorary Member Lili Wronker, who once again has provided the calligraphy for the awards certificates. Thank you, Lili! Oh, and I must not overlook APHA Executive Secretary Steve Crook, whose expert assistance is appreciated by us all.
Let me begin by asking: How many of you attended the 1991 APHA Conference in Washington, D.C.? I remember it well, not only because it was the first I attended, but because it remains one of the most varied and interesting conferences APHA has ever sponsored. An indelible memory is my visit to the National Museum of American History. There, by the printing and graphic arts displays, I encountered a group of children who were excitedly printing—not, mind you, with type and press, but with a fish! Before long a number of big APHA kids had gathered round, the more fortunate ones soon sporting their nature-printed T-shirts to envious friends.
The impresario of this scaly wayzgoose was none other than this year’s individual laureate, Elizabeth M. Harris, former Curator of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. My anecdote can only hint at why Elizabeth Harris has had a stellar career as scholar and educator. But let me tell you more, and rest assured that this is no fish story!
Elizabeth Harris came to prominence in the 1960’s with a series of influential articles on 19th-century printing and illustration processes. In these she demonstrated both the resolve and the expertise to tackle the difficult subjects that many avoided: compound plate printing, medal engraving, glyphography, nature printing, and map printing processes, to name just a few.
During the 1970’s Harris’s interests shifted from printing surfaces to printing presses. She collaborated with Clinton Sisson on the 1978 publication, The Common Press, an authoritative study of the Smithsonian’s 18th-century wooden hand press. Later Harris published catalogs of the Smithsonian’s remarkable holdings of printing presses and printing-related patent models. Her latest book, Personal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth-Century America, is both a definitive catalog of 19th-century small presses and an engaging study of their use by American amateur printers.
During her tenure at the Smithsonian, Harris was responsible for rescuing from oblivion many important artifacts and archives relating to printing history. As an educator Harris has had few peers, for her innovative series of Smithsonian exhibitions and catalogs on such subjects as pochoir, printing for the blind, and American wood type have introduced an entire generation to the allure of printing history.
Following her retirement in 1997, Harris returned to her native England. There she has set forth on a new adventure: that of raising goats and making cheese. I regret to say that her present responsibilities made a quick trip to New York problematic at best, and in the end it was not possible for her to be with us this afternoon. Although she cannot be here to accept the award in person, I hope that you will nonetheless join me in congratulating Elizabeth Harris for an exemplary life of achievement in printing history.
Elizabeth Harris has prepared some remarks for this occasion, and I will now call on Jane Rodgers Siegel of the Awards Committee to deliver these on her behalf.
Acceptance Remarks of Elizabeth M. Harris
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Greetings from Dorset, Thomas Hardy country.
I am enormously moved and grateful to the APHA for this award, and to the Awards Committee for conveying the news of it and now giving you my response. The news was a complete surprise, and it revived some beautiful memories that I will keep with me in my very different new world of goat and cheese farming, in this agricultural county of Dorset in the south of England. Many memories in fact, but I’ll mention just a few. One project that gave me particular pleasure was working on the history of printing for the blind -- not only because I’ve always found languages in all forms to be intriguing and this turned out to be a rich field of them, but because I met and learned from some inspiring people, blind and sighted. Then, quite different, there was an exhibition on nature printing -- the idea of getting an object to produce its own portrait has surely appealed to humans for as long as we have made pictures, if we can include that stencilled image of a hand on a cave wall. The nature printing exhibition came to life, I thought, with our weekly demonstrations of fish printing on t-shirts, but this activity divided my colleagues. Is it worthy of a museum of sober scholars to be squashing fishes on to t-shirts? Oh yes, I did enjoy that controversy. And finally, research into 19th century small presses, which spread over my last 15-plus years at the Museum, fed the puzzle-loving part of my head: it was fun, and full of little surprises and new friends, and if it wasn’t always easy that just made it better. I will add that the small press puzzle is certainly not solved. I hope someone else will take it up.
And now I’ve come to Dorset. Dorset has not just farmers but several good writers and poets to its name. Apart from Hardy himself, there was William Barnes, born in 1801 on a tenant farm, a bright lad who grew up to be a legal secretary, a minister of the church, a schoolteacher, a philologist, and a poet, as well as a sometime wood and copper engraver, and who finally bought some land and dabbled in farming again. He is remembered as a poet, but it is his philology that I like. He divided his poems between those in “national English” and those in “Dorset dialect.” Barnes grieved for the passing of the old ways of farming. I could tell him that not everything would pass: 150 years later his Dorset dialect survives, and I use his poems as a tutorial. When I arrived here I met my neighbour, a good farmer and a wise man, my own age, who had not set foot outside this county until recently. I liked him, but it took about a year for me to understand what he was saying because he speaks straight from William Barnes. He was quicker to understand me, but that wasn’t instant either. Not just the accent but the words and grammar of Dorset are different from “national English,” and they constantly delight me.
Several years ago I made some presentation to APHA, and I was at that time quite troubled by the thought that the historian who publishes is almost bound to modify history, not simply add to it, in ways that he may not intend. A museum may choose to collect and teach about everyday life in the past, as we did, but instantly those collected everyday relics cease to be everyday and become iconic: major records of the past. The work that Clint Sisson and I did on the Franklin Press seems to have spawned a host of Franklin press replicas, which is certainly a measure of success but, objectively, is it a good thing? Doesn’t it imply that the Franklin press is more important than other contemporary presses that survive? The very term “common press” is often capitalised (as Moxon did but for different reasons) and manages to convey not common but special. All this was beginning to bother me. My own version, I guess, of the physicist’s observation that in measuring something, you always alter it.
Well, I’m pleased to report that I was wrong. It is quite natural not only for historians to disappear, but also whatever they may consider to be their legacy. What remains is not in our own control. When I left the Smithsonian I decided to bequeath my ongoing research files to a colleague or two. I’m told those files no longer exist -- and well, perhaps that’s not a bad thing. On the other hand I find that my personal printing past, the one in my head, refuses to be left behind. I try to be a cheesemaker, but keep turning back into a printer. The two cheese presses I use in Dorset, which I built from trees that fell in my Maryland woods (American black walnut, Black Locust, and Eastern Red Cedar) are unmistakably related to Ramage’s portable wooden presses, and like his printing presses they were designed to be dismantled and flat-packed for travel. Thanks to them, I feel I understand Adam Ramage better than I did when I was sharing a museum with his presses. And now that I am outside my old printing world there are other questions I would like to ask him, starting with -- really now, Adam, why Honduras mahogany? I’m no longer so sure that it was tougher or more durable than his local woods: a woodworking neighbour tells me it is considered rather light among hardwoods. Was it fashionably exotic in 1810, and if so to what extent did Ramage himself create that fashion? Or was it just available in Philadelphia: who was importing Honduras mahogany, and who else was using it?
Back again to cheesemaking: when my first wheels of hard cheese needed to be dated and numbered I tried all kinds of clever devices but in the end I fell back on what now seems obvious: movable type. So I brand the cheeses with bookbinder’s brass type blackened in the flame of a candle (it’s better than printing type because, apart from the matter of lead and antimony in your cheese, type metal melts in a candle flame. It melts, in fact, at a lower temperature than some cheeses).
Printing history was my life for 35 years, and after all it still is. Printing, I am happy to tell you, will not leave you when you leave it.
Elizabeth M. Harris, January 2006
Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.
Introduction of the John Carter Brown Library's
Director, Norman Fiering
Introductory remarks by David R. Whitesell
When in 1552 Francisco López de Gómara dedicated his history of the conquest of Mexico to Charles V, he said: “Most excellent Lord[,] the greatest event since the creation of the world … is the discovery of the [Americas].” His comment was echoed two centuries later by Adam Smith, who probably did not realize how prescient these 1776 remarks would be: “[T]he discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.”
Although quick to import and exploit the New World’s resources, Europe was slow to export one of its own chief resources: printing. A press was established in Mexico by 1539, Peru by 1584, and Cambridge by 1640, but many locales in the vast American hemisphere did without during much of the colonial period. Efforts to collect, preserve, and study the printing history of the Americas were likewise delayed until undertaken by pioneers such as Thomas Prince and Isaiah Thomas.
From its founding in 1846 as the private collection of John Carter Brown—and since 1901 an independent center for advanced research in history and the humanities located at Brown University—the John Carter Brown Library has been at the forefront of these efforts. That the JCB has carefully assembled what is probably the world’s finest collection of primary printed sources pertaining to the discovery, exploration, and history of the colonial Americas—North and South—might be reason enough for an award. But the JCB and its dedicated staff have consistently excelled in applying these unequalled resources to the practice of printing history.
The contributions of George Parker Winship, Lawrence C. Wroth, and Thomas R. Adams—to mention only a few JCB staff—to the history and bibliography of colonial North American printing and cartography are well known. Of equal importance are the JCB’s model fellowship and exhibition programs, which have enabled scholars from around the world to study its holdings and to disseminate their findings, not only in books and articles, but in exhibition catalogs of permanent value. Knowing that American imprints are usefully studied in conjunction with their European counterparts, the JCB has long paid these close attention, culminating in the monumental six-volume bibliography, European Americana.
More recently, under the direction of Norman Fiering, the JCB has done much to cultivate “book history” in Latin America. In 1987 the JCB hosted a landmark conference on “The Book in the Americas,” and I am sure that many of you have seen the superb traveling exhibition and catalog which complemented it. The JCB has also been enlarging its enviable holdings of Latin American and Brazilian imprints, which it plans to document in several forthcoming book catalogs. By cataloging these to the highest standards, and by sharing the information with bibliographical databases such as the online Latin American STC, the JCB is once again laying the groundwork which will pay rich scholarly dividends.
For over 150 years the John Carter Brown Library has made printing history its special province, an enduring achievement which the American Printing History Association gratefully recognizes with this award.
Acceptance Remarks of Norman Fiering, Library Director
Note: APHA presented its 2006 Institutional Award to the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University for its leadership in collecting, preserving, and promoting the printing history of the colonial Americas, North and South. [Read the citation.]
These acceptance remarks were delivered by Library Director Norman Fiering at APHA’s annual meeting held at the New York Public Library on January 28, 2006, and have been slightly revised for presentation on the web.
On behalf of the JCB, I want to express our gratitude for this recognition from APHA. I hope I do not appear immodest when I say that, taking the long view, the Library deserves it, and not because of anything that has happened there since I have been the Director, although I have tried to do my part.
APHA is 30-some years old; the JCB is more than 150 years old, and so strong is the tradition at the Library of attention to printing history that one might say that the JCB was a division of the American Printing History Association before there was such an Association.
One thinks immediately, of course, of two of my predecessors, George Parker Winship and Lawrence Wroth, whose combined service at the head of the JCB covers about fifty years. Their contributions to the field in the first half of the 20th century were seminal. Some of Winship's most fundamental work was done after he had moved from the John Carter Brown Library in 1915 and taken a post at Harvard, but he left an indelible impression on the Library (to use a printing metaphor).
For Winship, I am thinking, for example, of "Early Mexican Printers," published in 1899; Rhode Island Imprints, 1727-1840, published in 1914; "French Newspapers in the U. S., 1790 to 1800 " (1920); Gutenberg to Plantin: An Outline of the Early History of Printing (1926); and most well known, perhaps, The Cambridge Press, 1638-1692, published in 1945.
Wroth was thirteen years younger than Winship and came to the JCB in 1923. His Printing in Colonial Maryland had appeared the year before. His work on Abel Buell of Connecticut, the first type-cutter and caster in English America, appeared in 1926. And in1931, he published his much esteemed The Colonial Printer, which concerned British America, but like Winship, Wroth was hemispheric in outlook. He wrote on the book arts in early Mexico, and on the origins of typefounding in North and South America. He was also keenly interested in prints and maps, and in 1946, with Marian Adams, published a catalogue of American Woodcuts and Engravings.
The tradition at the JCB goes back even earlier, to John Russell Bartlett, the first librarian, less well known than his successors, perhaps, but an extraordinary bookman in every sense. He served as John Carter Brown's personal librarian from 1855 until Brown's death in 1874 and then continued in that role for John Carter Brown's widow and sons until his own death in 1886.
Bartlett compiled the first catalogues of the John Carter Brown Library, known as the Bibliotheca Americana, beginning in 1865. Those early catalogues remain splendid examples of bookmaking, aside from their exemplary content as bibliographical records. The catalogues were awarded a medal at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876.
During most of the years that Bartlett served the Brown family as librarian, he was at the same time the elected Secretary of State of Rhode Island, offering estimable service in that post, among other things assembling for the first time the earliest archives of the state and publishing them in ten volumes under the title, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations 1636-1792. That Bartlett arranged to have fifty copies of this publication printed on large paper, at his own expense, shows a consciousness of the importance of presentation.
Bartlett was always into projects, as a lexicographer, historian, bookseller, documentary editor, bibliographer, extra-illustrator, and distinguished artist. We will be publishing this spring a brief autobiographical memoir left by Bartlett, which records a life of remarkable accomplishment.
I want to quote from a not untypical page, representing Bartlett's unflagging energy and enterprise:
When the late rebellion broke out [i.e., the Civil War], I commenced the collection of slips from the newspapers relating to it. I thought the war might last about a year; nevertheless, having begun the work, I continued it, scarcely omitting a day without clipping & pasting. I think that I labored on an average three hours a day for four years.
After mentioning the several newspapers from which he clipped articles, he continued:
At the same time, I collected all the pamphlets and books appertaining to the war that I could lay my hands on. . . . My collection finally increased so much that towards the end of the war, I found that a catalogue was necessary, in order that I might know what I had. I therefore with much labor made a catalogue. When it was completed, I thought it would be better for me to include in it every thing that had been published relating to the war, whether I owned it or not. I accordingly carried out this plan, and furthermore included in it the titles of all publications appertaining to American Slavery. This seemed properly to belong to the subject, as it was the cause of the war, while emancipation was its result. Then, in order that others might derive benefit from my labors, I published the catalogue, under the title, The Literature of the Rebellion. . . .
We see in this account that familiar, quite logical sequence, one act leading to the other, almost like destiny: collecting, cataloguing, publishing. That catalogue of works relating to the Civil War came to a massive 477 pages, and once more, Bartlett tells us regarding presentation: "Of this work 250 copies were printed in royal 8vo, and 80 copies in 4to."
In this instance, Bartlett was primarily interested in content, not in the history of printing as such, but he was immersed in print throughout his life, a phenomenon not uncommon in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was, in my opinion, the high point of book culture in the West.
Book collecting and cataloguing are obviously a kind of preparation for the study of the history of printing, as such, a point that I will come back to.
One of Bartlett's specialties was extra-illustration, the original hyper-text, taken literally. He could expand a work of two volumes into a work of ten volumes with his left hand, and did so in several instances. He lists in his memoir 21 books to which he gave this treatment. For example:
Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Sculptors, 2 vols, extended to ten volumes with 2,000 illustrations. Marshall's Life of Washington, 5 vols. Extended to ten volumes. Drake's Dictionary of American Biography, 1 vol., extended to 7 volumes, with 1,135 portraits.
Enough about Bartlett for the moment.
Again going back to the beginning of the 20th century, and the JCB as a proto- division of APHA, there is Daniel Berkeley Updike, the founder of the Merrymount Press and the author of Printing Types, Their History, Forms, and Use (1922), in two volumes, a work that has been referred to as the printers' bible.
Updike was a close friend of one of John Carter Brown's sons, Harold Brown, who died prematurely in 1900 at age 35, and because of that association, as well as for other reasons, Updike did all of the early printing for the JCB.
At the Library we take for granted these productions for forty years by our "house printer," so to speak, but Updike collectors are dazzled. In 1916 Updike joined the Board of Governors of the Library, at that time called the Committee of Management and consisting of only five persons. He remained a member of the Committee, and thus was intimately associated with the JCB, until just before his death in December 1941.
In 1935, Updike gave the JCB a bible printed at Lyons in 1550 by Sebastian Gryphius. In the JCB annual report for that year, the gift was recognized as follows: "The book is surely one of the great works of typography of its time. It is printed in folio, in double column in a large letter, and it notably demonstrates the clarity, dignity, and elegance that mark the best French printing of the first half of the sixteenth century."
At Updike's death, the Library's Committee of Management included in its memorial minute these words: "In the business of the Library, Mr. Updike gave of the best he had in judgment and action. . . . His devotion to the ideal of quality in doing and thinking, his reliance upon simple integrity in the large and small things of life, made him incomparable as an adviser and friend."
Bartlett, Winship, Updike, Wroth, takes us up to about 1960. That's a great legacy, which I would not dare to say has been continued in its full glory since then. My immediate predecessor, Tom Adams, is certainly one of the pre-eminent bibliographers of the second half of the twentieth century, but he made no substantial contributions to the technical history of printing, although he became an expert on the London printers Mount and Page. Adams is renowned for his fundamental bibliographies of both British and American political pamphlets printed during the revolutionary period, 1764 and 1783.
Less well known is Adams's bibliography of English Maritime Books Printed before 1801, compiled with David W. Waters, which in 1995 the JCB published jointly with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, in 400 copies. Maritime books may appear to be an esoteric subfield in the history of printing in England before 1800, but in fact it is central to the history of English printing in this period.
It has been said (and maybe it's true) that the most frequently printed "genre" of all books printed in England in the eighteenth century was the maritime book, in all of its many facets–– navigation manuals, seamanship manuals, shipbuilding manuals, hydrographic texts, navigation tables, books on tides and currents, books on health at sea, books on gunnery, books on nautical instruments, and so forth.
To take just one example from Adams and Waters, almost at random, a work called The Boate Swaines art, or the compleat boate swaine, by Henry Bond, first printed in London in 1642. This book appeared in later editions in 1664, 1670, 1676, 1677, 1695, 1699, 1716, 1726, 1736, 1764, 1772, 1775, 1781, 1784, 1787--140 years and at least 15 editions!
Another instance, even more staggering, is Andrew Wakely, The Mariners compass rectified. This book first appeared in London in 1665(maybe even earlier but no copies have survived) and was re-issued 57 times––that's right 57 times––before 1800. The last one in the 18th century was published in 1796, 131 years since the first edition was printed.
The JCB owns 11 editions of Wakely's Mariners compass, of the 57 issued before 1800, and we would be happy to acquire more, a fact that may need explanation. Our mission, unchanged by hardly a hair since 1846 when the Library was founded, is above all to collect and preserve contemporary printed and manuscript records relating to the history of the Americas, North and South, during the colonial period.
Maybe half of the JCB collection consists of works printed in the Americas (from the beginning of printing in this hemisphere in Mexico in ca. 1540) and half of works printed in Europe about America, beginning with seven pre-1500 editions of Columbus's "Letter" from 1493 announcing his discovery. We collect European maritime history because the European conquest of the oceans was the precondition of the discovery, exploration, settlement, and development of the Americas, and hence an integral part of the story. War, commerce, empire, at the time, all depended upon prowess at sea.
To come back now to John Russell Bartlett as a collector of Civil War material and what might be called inadvertent or indirect contributions to printing history. The JCB, I often tell people, is one of the few rare book institutions in the U. S. that collects intensively on a large scale. I mean we collect intensively not just for one or several authors, or one or several printers, or a particular geographical region, but intensively for the whole of the history of the Americas, from Hudson Bay to Patagonia, from 1492 to ca. 1825 in seventeen different European languages, plus Native American languages.
Eleven editions of Wakely's Mariners compass is not unusual at the John Carter Brown Library. We have 30 editions of Antoniode Solís's Historia de la conquista de Mexico, first published in Madrid in 1684. We have copies printed not only in Spain, but in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, England, Germany, and Denmark, all before 1800.
When as a committee at the Library we make our acquisitions decisions from week to week, one rarely hears the argument that we should not buy a particular work because we already have ten editions or three translations; more often that fact is presented as a good reason to buy, because we are striving for totality: copies of every single title printed in the Americas to the end of the colonial period in each country, in every edition, and similarly, copies of every European book with a mention of the Americas before 1825. We can never achieve that totality, but it is a guiding aspiration.
We do not routinely collect to document printing history as such, but of course, the JCB, because of its policy of intensive collecting––i.e., its goal to become denser and denser as a collection, not broader in time or space––is a marvelous resource for the study of printing history.
This leads me to a few final remarks about more recent initiatives at the Library. Our holdings of works printed in the Spanish empire in America are unrivaled in the world (7,000 titles in all)––with the strongest concentrations for Mexico and Peru, the two principal centers of the press in the early years, but also including Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, and so forth. Naturally, we felt an obligation to promote the study of printing history in Latin America, which Bartlett, Winship, and Wroth all had taken an interest in.
Moreover, the rising fashion in the early 1980s of the study of the history of the book in France, England, Germany, and the U. S., gave us a good opportunity to call attention to Latin America. In 1988, we organized a memorable international conference at the Library entitled, "The Book in the Americas: The Role of Books and Printing in the Development of Culture and Society in Colonial Latin America." One of my greatest regrets as Director of the JCB for twenty-three years is that we never did publish the papers from that unprecedented conference, which all of those who were present still recall with appreciation. Those papers were full of new information, especially new information made available for the first time in the English language.
I referred earlier to that compelling natural sequence of collecting, cataloguing, publishing, with the last meaning printing on paper. That sequence is generally short-circuited these days to: collecting, cataloguing, visit it online. Institutions now take inordinate pride in the fact that they have abandoned publication on paper, but I am not convinced it is such a great virtue in all cases.
At the JCB I have continued to operate in the faith that for many purposes the printed book is the ultimate convenience, and we have no less than five real, not virtual, publications in the pipeline that are simply specialized subject catalogues of a particular part of the JCB collection as a whole: a catalogue of our Portuguese and Brazilian Books, a catalogue of books with American Indian language content, a catalogue of our Chilean imprints, a catalogue our Peruvian imprints, and the final two volumes of a catalogue of our holdings of works in the German language (all relating to America, of course). In all of these areas the JCB's holdings are matchless or nearly so, and hence these printed catalogues will serve as yardsticks against which to measure similar collections elsewhere.
None of these publications will sell more than 300 or 400 copies, and of course, they are expensive to compile and produce. Moreover, all of the data, i.e., the cataloguing records on which these books are based, are available online, and what is worse, because we are actively continuing to acquire books in all of these areas, these printed catalogues will be out-dated a month after they are published.
We have words like "bibliomania" to refer to insane book collecting. Is there a word to describe an insane desire in the cyber-era to continue to put into print bibliographical data or specialized subject catalogues? Typomania? Vanity?
Our typomania goes even further because the JCB supports the use of letterpress whenever it can prudently do so. Our letterhead and some other official JCB publications are printed letterpress, which we do for reasons beyond the aesthetic, although that alone is compelling. We do it on principle. Institutions heavily invested in the history of printing should help to support the traditional trades.
With regard to teaching and research in the field, the JCB, along with several other rare book libraries, offers, thanks to Bill Reese, a fellowship every year for research on book history and the history of printing.
On a grander scale, in 2001 several members of the Library's Board of Governors came up with $1 million to create an endowed visiting professorship in historical bibliography and the history of the book. Named in memory of Charles H. Watts II, who served on our Board for twenty years, the JCB makes arrangements with either the History Department or the English Dept. at Brown University to appoint this visiting professor each year, who teaches a semester-length course, in the Library, on book history.
This course is for credit at Brown University, which is necessary if undergraduates are going to pay attention, but, regrettably, no academic department wants to host true technicians in the history of the book or in typography; so the education the students receive in the history of printing is relatively superficial. Book history in only the most general sense is the norm.
You are all no doubt familiar with this problem, which has arisen on various campuses, of how to fit the history of printing into the present organization of the disciplines and the passing trends in academe.
The Rhode Island bibliophiles group, the John Russell Bartlett Society, which was founded at the JCB in 1983, offers a prize for undergraduate book collecting, the Margaret B. Stillwell Prize, and the dream was that the Watts professorship would stimulate that interest on campus and increase the sophistication of young collectors. That may be happening at Brown, but to a limited degree thus far.
We have the resources on the Brown campus right now, thinking of the John Hay Library as well as the JCB, to substantially direct undergraduate attention to the study of printing and to "rare books" as objects, but this potential has not yet been fully realized. It's a worthy goal, however, and we may yet get there.
Once more, on behalf of the great institution that I represent, and its distinguished past, I want to express my gratitude to APHA for the honor it has bestowed upon us.
Norman Fiering, Director
John Carter Brown Library
January 28, 2006
Posted with the author’s permission. Copyright remains with the author.
The awards were presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Printing History Association, on Saturday, January 28, 2006, in the Trustees Room (2nd floor), New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City. A reception followed.
The complete program, registration form and conference hotel information are now available for APHA’s 35th Annual Conference, “Learning To Print, Teaching to Print,” in Washington, DC, October 15th–16th, 2010, at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Download the program and hotel information. Download the registration form.
The Summer 2010 issue of the Newsletter is comprised of a story about the revival of UCLA's Horn Press; the program of the upcoming 2010 annual conference; a reminder of the 2010 Lieberman Lecture; chapter activities from across the country; a review of the 2010 Hofer Lecture; and the bicentennial of George Phineas Gordon. Download it in PDF form here.