legacy printers
Sara Sauers offered a magnificent review of the legacy of fine letterpress printing in Iowa City. Carroll Coleman, Harry Duncan, Kim Merker and Kay Amert and their achievements over the last half century.
As interesting is the odyssey of the typographic lab as a departmental orphan. First expelled from English and then expelled from Journalism each time extinguishing the position of the printer. Now the remnant typography lab is adopted by another orphan; the Center for the Book. This time, at least, the stakeholders range across department lines.
The future of the typographic lab is being configured as we speak and there is some talk of a book project following a quiet of over a decade. Even more interesting the lab could go forward with a larger mandate to advocate for the future of print, legacy and prospective, in a context of screen reading.
These transactions are closely followed in the Historical Printing Seminar.
After Sara’s lecture we went out into the Library to view the newly installed Columbian Press. A lovely ugly of the first flowering of Yankee ingenuity that found its success in the Mother Country.
flair
Susan Share landed in Iowa City and presented a two hour performance of visuals, video, demonstration, history, natural history and flair of the book as artistic expression. This is an intricate and dramatic topic.
Perhaps what tantalized and surprised most of all was how deliberately her performance revealed a proof of the nature of reading. Near this revelation, Susan was configuring full stage-sized book scenery of folding and blazing panels. She was reversing and inducing up-rightness and flipping backsides and front sides. “I am looking for stabilities in a folding and unfolding movement of panels.” So she was demonstrating the performance space of the book. As an author she was reading her own visually mobile text.
Her argument hinged together everywhere and insights flickered and stunned the viewer. She stood up, reversed and collapsed the baffles. So we saw what reading does; not what it is, but what it does. We learned of the labor, anxiety, and rehearsal of authorship and then we saw the author, disguising that, recite momentary stabilities for the audience, then fold up the book tent and move on to the next town.
lc
This session will provide analysis and evaluation of the functional mobility of the codex binding. Basic design issues of materials selection, mobility inhibitions, and the nature of analog access will be discussed. A taxonomy of prototypes, spanning mechanical structures and historical contexts, will be defined and studied. Attributes of each type will be considered in context of exhibition, imaging, reading, portability, durability and kinetic appeal.
My last workshop at the Library of Congress, a three month internship, was from July 22 to September 21, 1974. On July 26 Nixon resigned. Runners in the halls of the Library gathered lottery bets for the hour and minute of the resignation. Meanwhile we continued our work in book conservation with instructors Don Etherington, Chris Clarkson and Peter Waters.
That was thirty-five years ago. It feels like yesterday, but now we will be in the Madison, not Jefferson, Building.