The title of this volume of essays, The SP Century, speaks of two things held dear by our membership: the society itself and a century—the proud fact that our small organization has thrived for one hundred years. The SP Century is a unique entry in our annals. The first commissioned anthology of articles by members, this volume delivers what one would expect in a celebratory centennial publication: an engaging history of founding events, personalities, and publications, and an exploration of how SP members have pursued our mission of studying and advancing the art of printing. The SP Century does all this and also bravely goes forth to question our very rationale for calling ourselves printers even as we redefine our notion of what printing is. Such questions were not among our founders’ concerns one hundred years ago.

  The SP Century follows in a distinguished tradition of anniversary texts and reflects the example set by Printing as an Art by Ray Nash (1955) and SP at Seventy-Five by Charles A. Rheault, Jr. (1981). It tells more about how the very nature of the Society, a small group of practitioners from a rapidly changing industry, found strength and enlightenment in what Scott-Martin Kosofsky, the editor of this volume, calls “the SP conversation.” Our debt, not only to these earlier books, but to the individuals they portray, is clearly evident in the following essays.

Introduction

  The Society of Printers for the Study and Advancement of the Art of Printing was founded in 1905, and, unlike many small societies of this kind, has had a long life and shown amazing vitality. The reason for this is that its program is one which can never be stale or outmoded. Had it aimed to do any particular thing, it might have failed or expired in the accomplishment of its aim. But as we can never exhaust all there is to know about printing or pause if we desire to advance it, the Society’s objective is as true and fresh today as when it was formed. At its meetings, the members have listened to almost every eminent worker employed in the field of American printing and its allied occupations, as well as to distinguished printers of other countries. It has arranged visits to libraries and to private collections of printing. It has published books and pamphlets on printing which are worth having and which would otherwise not have seen the light. It has held exhibitions, and its members have attended exhibitions arranged by other organizations. It has supplied funds for the support of printing courses. But perhaps its most valuable work has been to aVord a meeting ground for persons interested in printing, and, through this, associations, both business and personal, have been formed that otherwise would never have been made. The study of printing and the improvement of work through study has thus been accomplished in no one way, but in many ways, as experience dictated or opportunity oVered. That is the reason why the Society is alive now—very much alive!

  Thus wrote Daniel Berkeley Updike, one of the Society of Printers founders, in 1931, looking back on the occasion of the Society’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Save for the liberty we have taken to delete a telltale date and change a no-longer-applicable gendered noun, these eloquent paragraphs are as true a description of our Society today as they were when they were written. The fondness so evident in Updike’s words is still with us—very much alive!

  During the years of the SP century, technology has changed greatly. Also changed are the roles of those who work in printing and, indeed, the very definition of printing itself. But the Society of Printers has remained the same. Its motto, “For the Study and Advancement of the Art of Printing,” implies a kind of vigilance. Indeed, we have been vigilant in examining and digesting all of the changes that have passed before us. We have been particularly well-positioned to do this because our common bond has less to do with the sort of work we are involved with individually than it does with a shared modus vivendi that is expressed as the passionate commitment to high standards. In bookish Boston, the American Athens, these standards have been informed by study, by comparison and choice, and by respect for a heritage that has never receded into the past, but instead has remained part of a living discourse that informs our choices every day as designers, teachers, and collectors—and as printers.

  It was the revival of interest in the standards of the best-made books and types that shaped the opinions and lives of the Society’s founders, “the men who came to dinner” on February 14, 1905, about whom you will read throughout this book. The founders were Americans influenced by the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Indeed, the influence of William Morris and John Ruskin on the founders of SP was undeniable, as were the teachings and writings of Harvard’s great aesthete Charles Eliot Norton, a friend of Ruskin’s, who shaped the taste of several generations of Harvard students and Bostonians of various stripes. Whereas in England the movement’s point of view was decidedly anti-industrial, the SP founders, as Americans, also bore the influence of more commercially and practically minded figures in the world of printing, most immediately that of Theodore Low DeVinne, who set a standard of superb craftsmanship through the use of up-to-date technology and did so in a large industrial establishment in New York City. DeVinne was also a self-trained historian, the leading American writer on early printing and the modern practice of typography. He shared many interests with Morris and Norton, though not in the stylistic historicity that Morris and his followers applied to their work.

  At the first SP meeting, Charles Eliot Norton and Theodore Low DeVinne were elected honorary members, a distinction that both men accepted gratefully. The Morris-Norton and the De Vinne strains have remained the principal bloodlines of SP members from the beginning, with alternating rises to dominance. When Ray Nash wrote his fine history of SP, Printing as an Art, on the occasion of the Society’s fiftieth anniversary, the De Vinne line was in the ascendancy; today, it would be generally agreed that the Morris-Norton strain prevails.

  Be that as it may, the DeVinneian and Morris-Nortonian points of view share much common ground. SP members of all persuasions agree that the study of the history of printing and graphic arts and the practice of early techniques are essential to successful evaluation of our current predicament, regardless of whether the final product is printed on paper or viewable only on a video monitor. And for this reason, there coexist happily among the membership professional masters of the pen and the hand press, industrial-scale printers, publishers, designers of most every kind, and leaders in the field of digital design and imaging, as well as influential scholars and collectors.

  If it is the common inheritance of printing history that holds us together generally, then it must be said, too, that our reverence for the Society’s founders binds us specifically. Historians have remarked that the founding of the United States was a fortunate accident of history, that it was only in that time and only at that place that so many extraordinary individuals could have come together for such a risky cause. So it was with the Society of Printers, which was created and shaped by some of the best masters of printing and design of all time, who came together at a critical moment of simultaneous sea changes in the aesthetic and the technological. The founders of SP were not only artists and artisans of high caliber but also thinkers and writers whose words have become the wisdom literature of our field. It was among our early members that the term “graphic design” was invented, that the still-unsurpassed standard history of printing types was written, and that the notion of a book designer as an artist separate from the compositor and printer of the book was born.

  How could it be, then, that D. B. Updike or Bruce Rogers— or the great American original William A. Dwiggins—whose work and acquaintance was sought by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Edith Wharton, Lawrence of Arabia, and King George V, and whose books have been continually exhibited and sought by collectors at ever higher prices, merit barely a mention in today’s popular histories of graphic design? The reason is that books, the medium in which nearly all of SP’s best-known practitioners have worked, no longer hold pride of place in the commercial design world, which, since World War II, has been dominated by advertising. The curriculum of the design schools, from which most of the popular historians of graphic design come, emphasizes the single sheet—the placard, the billboard, the magazine advertisement —or, at most, the brochure or annual report. In these schools, text typography, reading over the long haul, and the ideal of design at the service of the humanities and the sciences are held in lower regard. For SP members, design has always been a literate and even literary activity, in which our long-acculturated habits of reading and the traditional boundaries of the printed page are sacrosanct—yet never without the possibility of personal interpretation and a remarkable variety of expression.

  Undeterred and fully aware that pendulums swing both ways, a singularly dedicated group of men and women gather for conversation, dinner, and a lecture eight or nine times a year, on the first Wednesday of the month. They have done this for one hundred years. The lectures vary from the ordinary to the elevated, but the conversation is never less than inspiring. That conversation —our conversation—is the essence of the Society of Printers. And so for the occasion of our centennial, we had the notion to create a book of essays that would capture the substance and spirit that are at the heart of the SP conversation, in all of its varieties, to reflect upon the key elements and issues of our professional identities and to expound upon the ideas that defined us all as printers one hundred years ago and those that define us as printers today.

  When I jotted down the outline for this book one Sunday in April 2002, planning was already under way for the Society of Printers centennial. The particulars of the celebration were yet to be decided; the feeling of the Council, SP’s governing board, was that there should be an exhibition and a book of some kind. Two past presidents, Melissa Clemence and Victor Curran, served as an exploratory committee. Since it had become a tradition to recount in a book the Society’s activities in the preceding period, the council supported the creation of a volume that would follow in the path of those by Ray Nash and Charles A. Rheault, Jr. Melissa Clemence, who had long been the unoffcial yeoman of the guard, keeping track of many of the Society’s records, volunteered for the task.

  The outline I put forward to then-president John Cataldo and to my fellow members of the council was for a book of a rather diVerent kind. It was heartily endorsed, so I took the next step of inviting members to participate as authors. Any number of them might have written any one of these essays, though I must confess that as I conceived the topics, I had certain members in mind, and much to my delight, nearly all of them agreed to participate. James E. Mooney, former associate director of the American Antiquarian Society and former director of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, was a natural choice to provide a concise history of the Society and its founders that would serve as a backdrop for the essays that would follow.

  Since type design, typography, and lettering are the warp of the SP cloth—some of the century’s most important and celebrated practitioners of these crafts have been Society members— it seemed imperative for us to examine the subjects and record what we know. The challenge was to do so in a fresh way, to place the work in a worldly context and look beyond the classical leanings that characterize the styles of most members. Unalloyed classicism is simply not part of the dna of Jean Evans, who brings to her calligraphy and type design—and to her writing—an individual voice that is like no other. And so the article “Our Types” is a record of Jean’s journey of discovery and personal recollection, what she saw, what she collected, and the many people she spoke with along the way. One of her excursions was to Cornhill, a place in Boston that exists today only in memory, but was a thriving community in the years leading up to the Society’s founding, an incubator where many of the founders made art, worked, met, and played. Rather than giving it short shrift as a sidebar in Jean’s type article, it seemed best to have it be an article of its own.

  My own essay, “Who We Were Then, Who We Are Now,” afforded me the opportunity to investigate in writing a thesis whose germ came to me one evening while sitting at the SP dinner table: That we are, in all the important ways, the same group we were a century ago, upholding the same ideals and discussing many of the same topics—with the same passion as ever.

  Al Gowan, for many years the chairman of the Graphic Design Department at Massachusetts College of Art, has taught the history of design to two generations of college students. He is a writer of novels and short stories and also something of a futurist, with an appreciation of technology’s humanistic potential. He brings his good judgment and experience to bear on the article— and to the question—“What Is Printing?” Perhaps the answer to that question is determined ultimately by those who collect printed matter in an organized way. Collecting has been part of the lives of many SP members, whether as an adjunct to their related professions or as a vocation in its own right. Eleanor Garvey, the Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts, Emerita, of Harvard’s Houghton Library, brings unrivaled authority and the spirit of Diana to her article, “Collectors and Collecting in the Society of Printers.” (It should be noted that every holder of the Hofer chair has been an SP member, as was the chair’s namesake.)

  Lance Hidy, versatile designer of books and type, is widely recognized as one of the leading poster artists working today. Lately he has translated his signature style to the small canvas of postage stamps in a number of fine works commissioned by United States Postal Service. Lance’s article in this book was first conceived as an essay on multigenerational teacher-student relationships within SP, but over time his research led him to important discoveries about the emergent and divergent field of graphic design in twentieth-century America, and about the socio-political background of the Society, its founders, and certain key members that had never been written about before. Thus, his in-depth article “The Mission and the Missionaries.”

  Letterpress printing has been an important part of the education and working background of many, perhaps most, of today’s SP members, and those who devote themselves exclusively to that work are held in special regard. In a group of essays called “The Persistence of the Handmade,” three noted practitioner-members reflect on the nature and meaning of handwork today. Darrell Hyder tells how he came to letterpress work almost by accident and how yesterday’s technology is technology all the same. Missionary zeal comes to the fore again in Katherine McCanless RuYn’s description of her work teaching book arts to students at Wellesley College. To Barry Moser, letterpress printing has been a vehicle both of and for art. He describes how he has integrated computers into his work while retaining his “handmade” sensibilities.

  And lastly, Victor Curran brings his discerning eye, charm, and good humor to a review of one hundred years of SP meeting announcements and keepsakes. These mini-masterpieces were made by printers for printers and, as such, often reflect their creative and technical best. As a group seen in series, the announcements are a unique, microcosmic history of a century of graphic design and printing technology. Victor was assisted in his work by Roberta Zonghi, Keeper of Rare Books at the Boston Public Library, where the Society’s archives are held.

  I could not have undertaken this project without the encouragement and inspiring work of my coauthors and the unflagging support of the SP council. Three SP presidents, John W. Cataldo, Merce R. Wilczek, and Patricia M. Peterson, gave me their time and advice. Council members read and commented on every article and many members gave generous assistance to the authors at every stage. The names, voices, and work of many SP members, present and past, appear throughout the book, but some among the present ones went above and beyond the call of duty to be of help. Former president Charles A. Rheault, Jr., of longest memory, was a primary source for many of the authors, never stinting on time and materials from his vast collection. Al Gowan’s good counsel and faith in the project inspired us all. Carl Zahn’s impeccable taste and tireless enthusiasm are evident in many pages, as is the uncommon erudition of Matthew Carter, Marcus McCorison, and Sinclair Hitchings. A friend of many in the Society is the calligrapher and historian of type and lettering Paul Shaw, whose generous help and expertise were invaluable to this project, enabling us to be sure of dates, designers, and sources that might have taken years to get right or eluded us altogether.

  In matters editorial I have relied heavily on the seasoned professional skills of Patricia Peterson, Merce Wilczek, Sally MacGillivray, and Melissa Clemence. Eugene R. Bailey, whose skills as an editor are of the legendary kind, was the book’s copyeditor, giving it a professional polish for which we are most grateful. Robert J. Moschetto expertly scanned the SP announcements, Avanda L. Peters was the book’s masterful and ever-patient compositor, and Heather Hedden provided us with a truly useful index. Gardner LePoer and John Kristensen furnished a number of rare type specimens for the type timeline.

  We express our thanks to Monadnock Paper Mills and Ecological Fibers for furnishing paper and binding materials. DS Graphics was the book’s deft printer and we are grateful to its staV and to Victor Curran for their extra care while shepherding the book through press.

  Paul Parisi gives the most persuasive testimony that the De Vinneian strain is alive and well in the Society of Printers. His Acme Bookbinding Company is not only the oldest and finest of its kind in America, but it proves how superior work can be accomplished by loyal, knowledgeable, and dedicated employees working under leadership that bravely combines the values of traditional craftsmanship with technological innovation. We are grateful for Paul’s binding of this book and for his many generosities to the Society.

  Lance Hidy has been indispensable to this book, my stalwart right hand. No one could ask for a more giving friend or more inspiring colleague. My deepest gratitude goes, always and forever, to my wife, the designer Betsy Sarles, and to my family for their sacrifices that enabled me to spend the time to work on this book.

  It is with pride and pleasure that I thank the designer of this book, Roderick D. Stinehour, a living legend and an SP member for more than fifty years. During the past half century, no single person has been more closely identified with the term “fine printing” than he. Under Rocky’s direction, the Stinehour Press set the standards of craftsmanship, design, and literacy against which all others would be compared. His lasting accomplishments have always been made in the spirit of camaraderie and generosity, not only in the products of the press, but also in his creation of courses and seminars to educate all who are interested in the heritage of fine printing. For his contribution to this book and for everything he has done, we are thankful beyond words.

Scott-Martin Kosofsky
Lexington, Massachusetts, June 2006