APHA National Conference "Saving the History of Printing"
New York City, October 10th - 12th
Friday: Grolier Club
by Ray Nichols & Jill Cypher
The Grolier Club served as the backdrop for the formal start of "Saving the History of Printing."
The Grolier Club had one of the normal exceptional exhibitions on "Love and Loss in virginia Woolf's Intimate Circle." Above is the poster outside of the Grolier Club.
The gang getting set for things to happen. Center front is Gerald Cloud, from Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library and a co-organizer of this year's conference and Barbara Heritage (front right) of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.
Standing in the middle is Paul Shaw who spoke on W.A. Dwiggins at the Chesapeake Chapter's September meeting at The Catholic University.
APHA attendees were offered a special sneak preview screening of Typeface, a new 45-minute documentary about the Hamilton Wood Type Museum by Justine Nagan (shown below), produced by Kartemquin Films (Hoop Dreams, 1995).
Below are two images from the film.
Below are three images from a visit made by Jill Cypher and Ray Nichols to the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in September, 2006.
And yes, they did make some fairly large wood type.
APHA members were welcomed by Eric Holzenberg, Director of the Grolier Club. Second from the right in the photo below is current APHA president, Paul Romaine, sitting between Ryan Roth of the Rare Book School and Jill Cypher.
This year's keynote address was given by James Mosley, professor at the University of Reading, United Kingdom and was titled “After Updike: Writing the History of Type and Letters”
D.B. Updike’s Printing Types: their History, Forms and Use (1922) is one of the most readable and best-illustrated accounts of its subject ever written. In almost a century both the subject and its potential readership have developed in ways that not only make Updike’s text inadequate, but ever more difficult to supersede. Professor Mosley's talk explored some possible answers to updating Updike's work.
A sometimes spirited question and answer session followed along with a pleasant reception allowing old friends to get together and new friends to be welcomed.
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