Other events and announcements
Nature printing event at Oxford Botanic Garden. Monday 18 July 11.30am–6pm
This event at Oxford University's Botanic Garden may be of interest.
Nature printing is a process that uses plants and other natural objects to create an image by printing on paper from the surface of that natural object. This event is a special opportunity to see more wonderful nature printing techniques brought to life as the marquee on the main lawn is transformed into a veritable printing studio.
A range of demonstrations of various techniques will take place, and the event features the launch of a new publication, Capturing Nature (Zucker Art Books, New York, 2022).
Investigatory Explorations & Experimentations in Arabic Type : the Justin Howes Memorial Lecture 2022
Lara Captan will deliver the annual Justin Howes Memorial Lecture on 27 April in-person and online via Zoom at St Bride Library, London. The talk starts at 7pm BST.
Full details: https://sbf.org.uk/whats-on/view/the-justin-howes-memorial-lecture-2022/
It will be a wonderful chance to hear more about her work and to also catch up with fellow type designers and friends.
Norwich Printing Museum seeks new Trustees
23 March 2022
The collections of the Norwich Printing Museum are now safely transferred to its new storage facility, with a five year lease (and two years of funding already in place). Meanwhile, the "museum in residence" at Blickling Hall has been re-organized and refitted and is ready to re-open on 1 April for the summer season. It will be offering both a display of printing equipment, type and printed specimens, and practical demonstrations of printing and bookbinding. There is an excellent group of volunteers running the Blickling outpost. However, three of the six current Trustees on the Board will not be seeking re-election when their terms of office come to an end in the autumn, so that there is an urgent need for new Trustees to continue running the Museum.
Please consider volunteering to join the Board of Trustees. The Museum is seeking especially local people (local to Norwich), and those with knowledge and skills in fundraising and any other aspects of museum management, but will welcome help from anyone keen to support the Museum. If you can help, or have any suggestions of others who may be willing to become Trustees, please contact the Museum at enquiriesnpm@btinternet.com. Thank you.
Update: you can view the vacancy on the web site of the Association of Independent Museums (AIM)
Talk: Edward Lloyd and the introduction of high-capacity printing technology
Wed, 19 January 2022 18:30 – 20:00 GMT video/live talk given by Matt McKenzie.
Hosted by the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society at Alan Baxter Ltd, 75 Cowcross St, London EC1M 6EL
Edward Lloyd had a passion for 19th-century popular press, especially in London. He set up a printing plant and paper mill in Bow, introducing high-capacity printing technology into Britain. He was a businessman seeking the widest possible reach for Newspapers and Fiction.
Celebrating London’s Libraries: event at St Bride Library
20 January 2022, 7–9pm (GMT), online via Zoom
Featuring contributions from representatives of seven London libraries and a special introduction by Lissa Evans, author of Their Finest Hour and a Half, V for Victory, Old Baggage and more.
The City of London is a cornucopia of specialist libraries and archives just like us and we are hosting this event to shine the spotlight on them and the riches they hold for the curious explorers among us who want to seek them out and learn more ...St Bride Library
The Dutch Museum of Lithography celebrates twenty years
On 21 September 2021 Het Nederlands Steendrukmusuem, the Dutch Museum of Lithography, will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its foundation.
The museum was founded by Peter-Louis Vrijdag, currently the owner and director of Vrijdag Premium Printing in Eindhoven. This firm was established by his grandfather Louis in 1905. Like Alois Senefelder, Louis Vrijdag started his business by printing music sheets on stone. Soon afterwards he began printing cigar labels, along with labels for luxury products such as perfume, wines, champagne, soap and chocolate. At that time the area around Eindhoven had numerous cigar factories.
About 50 years ago his grandson became so impressed by the beauty of this printed matter and by the skills of the lithographers and printers, who sometimes used more than 10 colours for a label or poster, that he started collecting anything that was printed on stone. 95 % of this material was commercial and 5 % art. The collection now includes not only samples of commerical printing but also books, presses and other equipment necessary for printing quality work. Visitors can consult books from the antiquarian to the contemporary in the museum’s library. Amongst them is the standard work of 1818 by Alois Senefelder, the inventor of lithography. Also of course, Drawing on Stone by Charles Hulmandell.
Many exhibitions about lithography have been held over these two decades. Last year there was a very successful show about Alphonse Mucha who made very charming posters in Art Nouveau style. The current exhibition shows Dutch Art Nouveau posters from 1890 up till 1930. In December the museum will undergo renovation. After that is completed in January 2022, a significant exhibition about the Belgian artist Henry Privat-Livemont will be held.
Many workshops are held for amateurs and famous artists are invited to draw prints on stone: these included a large portrait of Lucian Freud by Nico Vrielink, made a few years ago.
For more information about the museum visit the website: www.steendrukmuseum.nl
Newberry Library Fellowships for 2022/3
The Newberry Library in Chicago is now accepting fellowship applications for the 2022-23 academic year. They say:
The Newberry Library's long-standing fellowship program provides outstanding scholars with the time, space, and community required to pursue innovative and ground-breaking scholarship. In addition to the Library's collections, fellows are supported by a collegial interdisciplinary community of researchers, curators, and librarians. An array of scholarly and public programs also contributes to an engaging intellectual environment.
Both long- and short-term fellowships are offered. See http://newberry.org/fellowships for full details.
Tibetan typewriters: from promotional stunt to handy educational tool
Online event. Wednesday 11 August 2021
6:00 pm to 7:00 pm (UK) | 1300 EDT | 1000 PDT | 10:30 PM IST
Jo De Baerdemaeker will examine the history of three different kinds of Tibetan typewriters, explore the design styles of their typefaces, and discuss the intricacies of typesetting text on these machines.
Organised by the Association of European Printing Museums. Full details here
Symposium on the Nebiolo Type Foundry, Turin, September 2021
Nebiolo Type Foundry, 1878–1978: New critical assessments
International Symposium
Turin, Castello del Valentino, September 16–17, 2021
The Nebiolo company of Turin was Italy’s great type foundry on both a national and an international level for most of the 20th century until its closure in 1978. It is remembered for its contributions in the field of type design. The foundry did not survive the transition from letterpress to phototypesetting and this will be the first time that the heritage of Nebiolo has been critically assessed since the dispersion of the company’s archives.
Organised by the Nebiolo History Project in collaboration with the Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino, the conference is open to the public for free and will be streamed online.
Letterpress in the Time of Covid: St Bride Library lecture, Monday 12 July 2021
The next St Bride Library Lecture is happening online via Zoom on Monday 12 July at 7pm BST on ‘Letterpress in the Time of Covid’ with short ten minute lectures being given by Ane Thon Knutsen, Ben Blount, Naomi Kent, Michelle Yu, New North Press, Peter Gibbons and Scott Cameron.
You can find out more here: https://www.sbf.org.uk/whats-on/view/letterpress-in-the-time-of-covid/
Western foundry founts in the Kannada and Telugu scripts: Lecture 9 June 2021
St Bride Library's annual Justin Howes Memorial Lecture, with Pria Ravichandran
Wednesday 9 June 2021, 7–8.30pm (GMT), Online via Zoom. Tickets: £3–5
European and American printing establishments in the Indian sub-continent during the 19th century were responsible for the foundry type endeavours in the Kannada and Telugu scripts. During the later part of the 16th century, Europeans arrived at the Indian sub-continent to pursue pepper trade, which eventually extended to colonisation. As colonialism gained a foothold and the East India Company revised its religious policies, missionaries found it pertinent to intervene with the religious beliefs and evangelise the locals.
The talk identifies the factors from the foundry type period that influenced the typographic forms of the Kannada and Telugu scripts. It mainly explores the role of type making in the divergence of the Kannada and Telugu scripts, the introduction of modulation and stroke contrast, the standardisation of their respective typographic forms, the demands from the printing environment, and how this history can inform current practice. Inadvertently, it also identifies the first book printed in the Telugu language with movable type.
De/Reconstructing photomechanical reproduction: Conference in September 2021
Don’t Press Print is an annual conference organised by the University of West of England’s Centre for Fine Print Research and the Royal Photographic Society. In 2021 Don’t Press Print will take as its theme the history of photographic and photomechanical print reproduction and processes from both an historical and contemporary perspective.
The conference will take place at RPS House, Bristol on Thursday, 9 September and Friday, 10 September 2021.
Call for papers / Deadline for proposals 20 June (500 word abstract to DPP02@rps.org)
Talk at the St Bride Foundation: The Brunswick Prison Camp Map Printers
‘The Brunswick Prison Camp Map Printers’ is the little-known story of how a clandestine press was made and run by a group of industrious men in a German prisoner of war camp (Oflag-79) in order to mass produce escape maps, towards the end of the second world war.
The talk, at the St Bride Foundation on 3 December at 7.00 pm, will be given by: Mark Evans, artist and son of Brunswick Prison Camp map printer, Philip Radcliffe-Evans; and Ken Burnley, compositor and letterpress printer.
For further information see the event page on the St Bride Foundation website.
Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture
The 2019 Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture, entitled Invisible women: the contribution of Type Drawing Offices to twentieth century type-making, will be given by Alice Savoie at the St Bride Foundation, London, on 13 November 2019 at 7 pm. For further information see the event page on the St Bride Foundation website.
Cultures of the book: science, technology and the spread of knowledge
The Centre for Printing History and Culture in collaboration with the Department of Language, Literature and Modern Culture at the University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy, is organising a conference entitled Cultures of the book: science, technology and the spread of knowledge, to be held on 6–7 November 2019 at AURUM in Pescara, Italy.
The conference will consider how science and technology have been deployed in book production and how the book itself has been a vehicle for the promotion of science and technology. The conference will cover all periods, regions and cultures and interpreting the ‘book’ widely to include clay tablets, codices, printed texts and electronic media. Both the physicality and culture of the book will be explored. The conference is not only looking at the word, but images as well, including woodcuts, engravings, photographs and digital images.
Proposals for twenty-minute papers and one-hour panel presentations (three panel members) on aspects of the following or related topics are welcome:
- Science, technology and the making of the book, before and after the printing revolution, for example, writing instruments, substrates, ink, punches, presses, type, bindings;
- The relationship of technology to the appearance of letter forms and images;
- Science, technology and book conservation;
- The dissemination of science and technology via the book in manuscript, printed and electronic forms;
- The consumption and reception of scientific and technological books;
- The use of technology in storing, moving and transmitting books: for example, the evolution of libraries and shelving, means of transport for distributing books, digital transmission and e-books;
- The authorship and publishing of science and technology texts.
There are no conference fees. The deadline for submission of proposals is 30 April 2019. For details of how to submit a proposal see the Call for Papers page on the CPHC website.
Footnotes magazine
The Swiss digital typefoundry La Police is publishing an occasional magazine Footnotes, containing articles about type design history as well as the current preoccupations of type designers. Two issues have been published to date: the first issue (Issue A) was published in July 2016, and the second issue (Issue B) was published in October 2017. The magazine contains several articles that are likely to be of interest to type design historians, including two articles on the Haas typefoundry by Brigitte Schuster.
Stationers Company opens new Archive facility
The official opening of the Stationers’ Company’s new archive room and reading room took place on 10 November 2017, improving access to its archive, both for members of the Company and the general public. Thanks to the generosity of Liverymen Duncan Spence and Amy McKee, and additional funds from the Company, the new facility is called the Tokefield Centre in commemoration of the then Clerk, George Tokefield, who in 1666 transported the Company’s records in a wheelbarrow out beyond the reach of the Great Fire of London thus saving them.
Liveryman Sarah Mahurter, Manager, University Archives and Special Collections Centre at University of the Arts London, undertook the project management to relocate the historic Archive from an inaccessible upstairs room to the oldest book warehouse building in London, which forms one end of the Company’s garden.
Ruth Frendo, the Stationers’ Company archivist, said “The Stationers’ Archive is already known as a key resource to historians of the book trade. However, it also holds a wealth of records whose potential is yet to be explored. As custodians of the records we have inherited through the care and dedication of our forebears, we have a serious responsibility to maintain these documents for future exploration. Through the development of this purpose-built storage facility, and a reading room which will provide unprecedented access to its Archive, the Stationers’ Company is demonstrating that it is whole-heartedly embracing this responsibility.”
William Alden, Clerk to the Company said “Widening access to Stationers’ Hall for educational purposes is a critical objective of the Stationers’ Company. The opening of the Tokefield Centre marks the completion of the first phase of a broader Hall development programme, which we hope to complete by 2023, the 350th anniversary of the building of the Hall.”
For further information please contact: William Alden on clerk@stationers.org or on 020 7246 0980
The Stationers’ Company,
Stationers’ Hall
Ave Maria Lane
London
EC4M 7DD
The History of Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press have announced the publication, in three volumes, of The History of Oxford University Press, spanning the period from its beginnings in the fifteenth century until 1970. Written by almost fifty contributors, experts in their fields of history, publishing and printing, the three volumes draw exclusively on material in the archives of Oxford University Press and the University of Oxford.
The three volumes are:
- Volume I: Beginnings to 1780 – Edited by Ian Gadd
(ISBN: 978-0-19-955731-8) - Volume II: 1780–1896 – Edited by Simon Eliot
(ISBN: 978-0-19-954315-1) - Volume III: 1896–1970 – Edited by Wm. Roger Louis
(ISBN: 978-0-19-956840-6)
The three volumes may be purchased either singly for £100 each or as a set for £250 (ISBN: 978-0-19-870279-5). Members of the Printing Historical Society may take advantage of a 20 percent discount on the advertised prices. For details please contact the Hon. Secretary.
For further information see the publication website.