by Miriam Jankiewicz

The library’s stones are a numbered jumble.
When replacing them, be sure not to mumble.
Put ten before six,
Could be tricky to fix.
We’d hate to see Firestone tumble.

When Firestone gets a facelift,
You need something of a forklift.
For it’s not skin and bones,
But big and small stones,
So the higher you go, switch to a ski-lift.

The library’s façade will soon look neater.
Just be sure to check every meter.
The stones on the ground,
Must all be found.
We’d hate to see Firestone teeter.

When Firestone gets a makeover,
Be sure to have a math’matician take over.
When you take the stones out,
You mustn’t lose count,
Or for more, we’ll have to turn Carnegie lake over.

Last Friday, Dr. Jane Glaubinger, curator of prints at the Cleveland Museum of Art, escorted members of the Print Club of Cleveland on a visit to Princeton University. A portion of the group are seen above.

Founded in 1919 by collectors of fine art prints, the Print Club has been a resource for print collectors in the Western Reserve for 96 years. Thanks to their enduring commitment, nearly one-third of the Cleveland Museum’s superb collection of over 18,000 prints are gifts from the club or its members. In addition, the organization sponsors lectures, trips, and a Fine Print Fair benefiting the entire Cleveland community.

We pulled a wide variety of material in honor of their visit, including:

1. Pre-Columbian stamp seals and roller seals, no date [not after late 15th centuries]. Clay. Graphic Arts Collection. GC185. Gift of Gillett G. Griffin.

2. Original woodblock for the frontispiece of Realdo Colombo (ca. 1510-1559), De re anatomica libri XV (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi for Nicolai Bevilacqua, 1559). Pearwood block with cartouche cut-out at top for the title type inset. Graphic Arts

3. John Foster (1648-1681), Portrait of Richard Mather, ca. 1670. Woodcut. Given in memory of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. by his wife, his son, Frank Jewett Mather III, and his daughter, Mrs. Louis A. Turner. Graphic Arts Collection, GA 2006.00728

4. Robert Nanteuil (1623-1678). Philippe, Fils de France, Duc d’Orléans, 1671. Engraving on satin cloth. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2005.01154. Gift of John Douglas Gordon, Class of 1905.

5. Wang, Gai (active 1677-1705), Jie zi yuan hua zhuan [casual English title: The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual. Part one 1679, part two and three ~1701. Woodblock prints in five colors. Graphic Arts Collection.

6. Alessandro dalla Via (active 1688-1729), General View of Mount Athos, printed ca. 1707. Etching and engraving. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2015- in process. Gift of the Program in Hellenic Studies with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund and matching funds provided by a gift of The Orpheus Trust to the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, in honor of the 35th anniversary of Hellenic Studies at Princeton.

7. Allegorical Map of the Track of Youth, to the Land of Knowledge (London: John Wallis, June 25, 1796). Engraved fan by Vincent Woodthorpe (ca.1764-1822) with hand coloring. Purchased with funds from the Historic Map Collection and Graphic Arts Collection.

8. Attributed to Theodore Lane (1800-1828), The Attorney-General’s Charges Against the Late Queen, Brought Forward in the House of Peers, on Saturday, August 19th, 1820 (London: George Humphrey [1821]). Gift of Richard Waln Meirs, Class of 1888. Graphic Arts Collection (GA) Oversize Cruik 1820.29E

9. Maria Wilds, Zante the Negro, 1848. Needlework on canvas. Graphic Arts Textiles Collection GC 072. Zante, the little Negro: (addressed to the English child) (Birmingham [England]: Printed for T. Groom, 1830).

10. Printing plate for John James Audubon (1785-1851), The Birds of America, 1826-1838. Steel-faced copperplate with aquatint.

11. Frank Leslie (1821-1880) after Charles Parsons (1821-1910), Bird’s-Eye View of New York City, 1854. Wood engraving. In Brother Jonathan, July 4, 1854, Jubilee edition. Rare Books

12. Designed by Sir John Gilbert (1817-1897); Drawn by Frederick John Skill (1824-1881) and William Walker the Younger (1791-1867); Engraved by William Walker and Georg Zobel (1810-1881); Printed by J. Brooker. The Distinguished Men of Science of Great Britain Living in the Years 1807-8. Published by William Walker, London. 4 June 1862. Stipple engraving. Graphic Arts Collection

13. Katagami or Japanese cut-paper stencils.

14. Album Lefèvre-Utile [also called Album des célébrités contemporaines]. Nantes: Lefèvre-Utile, [1900?]. Graphic Arts collection oversize 2009-0005Q

15. Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) and Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917), Le Jardin des supplices [The Torture Garden] (Paris: Ambroise Vollard, 1902). One of 155 copies on velin from a total edition of 200. Graphic Arts Collection. In addition, original cut paper figures.

16. Gazette du bon ton: arts, modes et frivolities (Paris: Lucien Vogel, 1912–1925). 700 pochoir plates. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize GT500 .G252q

17. Rockwell Kent “dingbats” for the printing of Voltaire (1694-1778), Candide (New York: Random House, 1928). Graphic Arts Collection.

18. Antonio Martorell, Las Antillas Letradas [The Lettered Authors of the Antilles], 2014. 27 multi-media prints. Copy 1 of 100. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize 2014-0031E. Purchased with funds provided by the Program in Latin American Studies.

 
They kindly also listened to the story of our collection, Elmer Adler, and the Pynson Printers. Thanks to our new friends for taking time away from “print week” to make the visit.

Posted in honor of a visit from ART 562: Seminar in American Art – Impossible Images, taught by Rachael Z. DeLue, associate professor of American art.

William Stillman? “Poetic Episodes in Nature,” The Crayon, vol. 3 (May 1856): 138.

“Besides, have we not books on the Poetry of Science? Were those ages more poetic than ours, when Botany wore nothing but a repulsive habit to the poet, and its devotees cared nothing for flowers except to make them tenants of a ghostly herbarium, wrapping them up like a parcel of mummies within the thick leaves of pressing maps, writing their epitaphs in unintelligible, pompous Latin, that would make an old Roman stare?

Assuredly, there is poetry in the age that will call for and sustain such books, as the two we have quoted, whose authors see something more than a marvel of mechanism in a flower, and to whose perceptions the coursing sap is the heart’s blood of the plant, and the unobserved mollusk, royally happy in his abode, the sharer of some of the enjoyments man would vainly judge were his alone.

Audubon painted his delineations of birds when he had just killed them, making a mossy log his seat and his lap his easel; and they accordingly have that vraisemllance to life, that Buffon and his compeers never could reach, daintily at work in the library, with a distorted, bead-eyed, staffed specimen before them. Audubon is a type of the truest investigator of Nature, holding marvellous communions with her, understanding her as few do, and observing her component parts in relation to each other, as well as in themselves.”

One of the contemporary artists working in a similar fashion is Walton Ford. This video shows how Ford’s work is (and Audubon’s work was) printed.

The 40th annual American Printing History Association (APHA) conference concludes this evening with the presentation of the 2015 Frederic W. Goudy Award to Jerry Kelly followed by the Goudy Distinguished Lecture in typography.

Established in 1969 by a gift from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Goudy Award pays tribute to the friendship between Melbert B. Cary, Jr. and Frederic Goudy by honoring distinguished figures in type design and its related fields.

Over the last few days APHA’s 2015 conference: “Printing on the Handpress & Beyond,” has been reexamining the history and practice of operating some of our earliest printing machines—flat-bed handpresses in predominant use from the 15th to 19th centuries.

The keynote address entitled “Gutenberg’s World: How Printing Arose in 15th Century Mainz,” was given by novelist Alix Christie and the plenary address “A Hands-On Approach to Printing History: Lessons Learned in the Construction of a Common Press,” was delivered by Dr. Jeffrey Groves. https://printinghistory.org/2015-conference/

Seen below, Groves discussed his recent sabbatical spent building a replica of Isaiah Thomas’s eighteenth-century common press. It was his hope to understand more fully the technological and practical shift from wood to iron in early nineteenth-century press construction. Groves also shared some of his research in the material transition represented by the Columbian press, an iron press patented in the United States in 1813.

Events and tours were held in and around the Cary Collection in Rochester, New York, one of the country’s premier libraries on graphic communication history and practices.

The original collection of 2,300 volumes was assembled by the New York City businessman Melbert B. Cary, Jr. during the 1920s and 1930s. Cary was director of Continental Type Founders Association (a type-importing agency), a former president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and proprietor of the private Press of the Woolly Whale. In 1969, the Cary Collection was presented to RIT by the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust as a memorial to Mr. Cary, together with funds to support the use and growth of the collection. Today the library houses some 40,000 volumes and a growing number of manuscripts and correspondence collections.

One of the highlights of the weekend was the printing of a keepsake on the newly acquired Kelmscott/Goudy Albion No. 6551 printing press. Owned by such luminaries as William Morris, Frederic Goudy, Spencer Kellogg, Melbert B. Cary, and J. Ben Lieberman, the press has a new home in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection, an acquisition made possible by the generous support of the Brooks Bower family.

http://library.rit.edu/cary/

A memorial gathering for the German type designer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf (1918-2015) will be held at the Grolier Club in New York City on Monday, November 9 beginning at 6:00. This event is co-sponsored by the Grolier Club Committee on Modern Fine Printing http://www.grolierclub.org/ and the Type Director’s Club, https://www.tdc.org. in collaboration with the American Printing History Association, The Typophiles, and others. The event is open to the public without reservations.

Joseph Robertson (1726-1802), An Essay on Punctuation (London: Printed for J. Walter, 1785). Rare Books (Ex) TS1090 .xM8

In honor of Mary Norris’s visit to Labyrinth Books on October 13 at 6:00 p.m., here are a few images from An Essay on Punctuation by Joseph Robertson (1726–1802) printed for J. Walter in 1785.

Princeton’s copy is bound with Practical Remarks on Modern Papers (1829) and Typographical Antiquities (1813).

According to her webpage Mary Norris, the author of Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, “spent more than three decades in The New Yorker’s copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards, has written the most irreverent and helpful book on language since the #1 New York Timesbestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves.”

See also:
Peter Thomas and Donna Thomas, The Pencil (Santa Cruz: the authors, 2010). “This book tells a short history of the pencil and displays vintage advertising pencils. The text was hand written and colored with pencil by Donna, then color copied on Peter’s handmade paper.” Copy 26 of 30. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) 2015-1147N

Watch the Comma Queen’s videos: http://video.newyorker.com/watch/comma-queen-comma-queen-series-premiere

Century Building at 33 East 17th Street

Dr. Mark Noonan, author of Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (Firestone PN4900.S4 N66 2010), organized the National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute, “City of Print: New York and the Periodical Press from the Antebellum Era to the Digital Age,” held last June 2015. http://www.citytech.cuny.edu/City_of_Print/index.aspx

He kindly offered the American Printing History Association a taste of the walking tours created for The City of Print this weekend. Beginning at Union Square we worked our way east to Stuyvesant Park, north to Gramercy Park, and then to Madison Square Park.

Along the way, Professor Noonan discussed the notable buildings and sites that were important to the rise of New York’s periodical press, such as The Century, The New Masses, McClure’s and Harper’s Weekly.

We stopped at the Flat Iron building on 23rd Street where pulp fiction began. Noonan commented on the publisher and author Frank Munsey (1854-1925), who introduced Argosy Magazine with an all-fiction format in 1882, printed on cheap, pulp paper. By 1903, the publication had a circulation of 500,000.

Bernarr Macfadden (1868-1955), editor of Physical Culture magazine, set up “Physical Culture City,” in Spotswood, NJ, until legal problems forced him to close the community and move Macfadden Publications to the Flat Iron building. True Story was his next publication in 1919, followed by Photoplay, True Detective, and New York Evening Graphic.

We ended at the north end of Madison Square Park by the Admiral Farragut Monument created by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and architect Stanford White. Unveiled in 1881, this was Saint-Gaudens’ first public commission. The original home of McClure’s Magazine was in sight at 141-151 East 25th Street, where the magazine was published from 1896 to 1903. Herman Melville lived at 104 East 26th Street, while Henry James lived down the block at 111 East 26th Street.

Admiral Farragut Monument

We also paused at the Temperance Fountain Union Square, erected in 1888 and one of two such remaining fountains in New York City. The premise behind the fountains was that the availability of cool drinking water would make alcohol less tempting. It features the Greek Goddess Hebe, cup bearer to the Gods, and four lion heads that served as the water spouts.

The fountain was associated with the Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association (WTPA), one of many social and political organizations who marched in Union Square. Emma Goldman (1869-1940), editor of Mother Earth, lived at 208 East 13th Street until 1913.

We also visited the homes of artist and illustrator George Bellows (1882-1925) and James Harper, Sr. (1795-1869), Mayor of New York City and co-founder of the firm Harper and Brothers in 1817. Our sincere thanks to Dr. Noonan.

Home of George Bellows, 146 East 19th Street

Home of James Harper, 3 Gramercy Park West

The 40th annual American Printing History Association conference in Rochester, New York, will re-examine the history and practice of operating some of our earliest printing machines — flat-bed handpresses in predominant use from the 15th to 19th centuries. https://printinghistory.org/2015-conference/

Workshops, tours, lectures, papers and panels, and excursions in the Upstate York region will inform us of the creative ways these models are still employed by printers, artists, scholars, and educators. This conference will also investigate how these presses contribute to 21st-century teaching, historical studies, and fine printing.

A number of pre-conference tours and workshops on the Rochester Institute of Technology campus and at various sites in Rochester and Upstate New York are available on Thursday, October 22. On-site conference registration will be from 8:30 a.m.–5 p.m. at the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection.

Program: https://printinghistory.org/2015-conference/#program