The Black Letter Tradition After William Morris in Fine Printing and Private Press Work at The Library of Congress
gathering of the Chesapeake Chapter of the American Printing History Association revolved around a roundtable discussion with books and materials from private collections of our members, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other sources.
Chris Manson, a slightly blackletter-obssesed letterpress printer; Peter Bain, graphic designer, type historian and co-curator of the Blackletter:Type and National Identity exhibition at Cooper-Union; Corinne & Russell Earnest (website), dealers and experts in Pensylvania-German Fraktur; and Dan De Simone, Curator of the Rosenwald Collection, each contributed to the thirty or so examples of the evolution of blackletter along with splendid examples of page layout, illustration and printing, including the work of William Morris.
A few of our guests of honor thanks to wikipedia.com.
Seventeen chapter members and several guests joined in along with a number from the Library of Congress, including summer interns, brought the number attending to 29.
Dan De Simone, Curator of the Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress, welcoming the group.
Chapter President Mike Denker addressing the group and laying out the agenda for the gathering.
Chris Manson got things started, showing a variety of private press books printed in a 15th century idiom, showing the variations of blackletter, as well as more recent books, and a series of broadsides he is producing.
Often the discussion would include page layout and woodcut illustrations from the examples that were shown.
Dan De Simone passing around a copy of --- for closer viewing.
Corinne and Russell Earnest looking over an example.
Stuart Bradley (and Russell Earnest below) looking over one of Chris Manson's broadsides.
The LOC summer interns really seemed to be interested in the discussion, a valuable experience as well as something that might not happen in a class. It is hard to imagine that hanging around some passionate book people for a couple of hours wouldn't help make work be more fun.
The image above shows one of the incredible perks the Chesapeake Chapter gets from its membership and connection to the Library of Congress. One of the gathering's topics focused on William Morris. The book in the foreground is a Kelmscott Chaucer which is printed on paper. The group at the other end of the table is looking at a vellum copy. Now, how often can you get someone to present two copies of the Kelmscott Chaucer? It would have been enough for a meeting to just have this experience.
George Barnum (left) and Mike Kaylor, our chapter's founding president, looking over a few blackletter examples.
All eyes and ears are focused on the Fraktur typography and history.
Corinne and Russ Earnest brought four examples of 18th- and 19th-century decorated decorated printed forms made by and for Pennsylvania Germans, typically in southeast Pennsylvania. Collectively called Fraktur, these genealogically rich manuscripts are America's equivalent of the monastic manuscript art of medieval Europe. As a whole, they represent a wonderful body of personal records and primary sources often overlooked by family historians.
Since 1971, Russ and Corinne Earnest have recorded more than 30,000 Fraktur examples, including many which are inaccessible to genealogists.
Above, Peter Bain connects some of his research and type design work to the Chaucer. Peter brought a contemporary connection to our roundtable with his work on digitizing several Fraktur typefaces.
From a review by Paul Shaw of Pink is the new black(letter) in Eye Magazine—"Since 1998, when Peter Bain and I staged the exhibition Blackletter: Type and National Identity at the Cooper Union in New York, blackletter has increasingly shed its image as the province of Nazis, heavy-metal bands, beer brewers and churches. ‘The typographical taboo surrounding blackletter has been broken, even if its use remains ambivalent, sometimes even contradictory,’ says the Berlin-based designer Judith Schalansky."
Below are a few photos of some conversations that were going on after the roundtable.
Jill Cypher talking to Lenore Rouse with Mike Denker and Rebecca Johnson Melvin looking on.
Stuart Bradley, Mike Kaylor, George Barnum and Corinne Earnest.
Rebecca Johnson Melvin and chapter president Mike Denker.
Greg Robison and Roland Hoover.
Greg Robison, Ray Nichols and Chris Manson.
A dozen of us gathered afterward at the Hunan Dynasty, our favorite Library of Congress area restaurant, to keep the discussion going.
Photos by Ray Nichols, Jill Cypher and Mike Denker.
