PHIELD TRIP, July 12, 2007
Rare Book Department
Catholic University of America
Washington, DC


On Thursday, July 12, 2007 a devoted group of APHA / Chesapeake Chapter members including Mike Denker, Chris Manson, Ray Nichols, Jill Cypher, Mike Kaylor, Roland Hoover, and Jim Wilder, visited Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

The main intent of the gathering was to discuss a members' letterpress exhibition to be held in November. In the near future we will be contacting chapter members to encourage their submissions. We worked the details out about the exhibition and then moved on to the important stuff.

Books from the Rare Book Department. Here are a few photos.

Ahhh. Mike Denker, Chris Manson, Mike Kaylor and Jill Cypher discussing typography, printing techniques, paper, etc. It is the best when you can put your fingers right on the ink.

Lenore Rouse, curator of the Rare Books Department, at Catholic University standing with one of their collection's wonderful brass rubbings of Sir Roger de Trumpington who is in charge of department security.

Chris Manson is always excited by the illustrations so you always have to include a photo from such visits.

Mike Denker sneaking a peek over Ray Nichols who loves initial caps, both by hand and printed. Below are two nice examples.

Above: The photo above is from the 1483 German Bible printed by Koberger.

It is always great to see how much trouble page designers and compositers would go to for a 500-page book. It is hard to imagine that many books today would go to the similar 'digital' effort in its layout. Simply amazing. This incunable with the glosses around the main text is from a 1480 Venetian edition of Gratian's Decretum.

One of the highlights of the day was a leaf from Lenore's personal collection showing two instances of a sort having come out of the form and printed an outline of the type body. Below are closeups of this example from a 1480 Bible printed in Ulm.

The Rare Book Department has received a donation of a platen press and Lenore told a great story of the press' owner. Above Lenore is explaining some newspaper articles about the original press. Chapter members Mike Kaylor and Ray Nichols are going to pick up the press on Long Island and transport it to the University in early September. Below you can see samples of a newspaper the owner printed when he was twelve years old working with the same press. This is going to make a nice story. I'm sure we will have an update.

It was a nice day with the smell of books and things old.