Pedagogy for Letterpress: Carl P. Rollins and The Bibliographical Press
Contact the presenter to request permission for educational use.
In the late 1920s, Carl Purington Rollins (1880-1960) founded the Bibliographical Press in affiliation with Sterling Library at Yale University. For over a decade, Rollins taught members of the Yale community to how to set type, print on the handpress, and make paper. In 1965, in an article about the bibliographic press movement in the Journal of the Printing Historical Society, the British bibliographer Philip Gaskell defined a bibliographic press as “a workshop or laboratory which is carried on chiefly for the purpose of demonstrating and investigating the printing techniques of the past by means of setting type by hand, and of printing from it on a simple press” (p.1). In his census, Gaskell lists the Bibliographical Press as the first such press in the English-speaking world. By exploring the ways that the design and printing practices and aesthetic and social ideals Rollins developed in the early part of his career, when he worked as a letterpress printer in utopian and cooperative communities in western Massachusetts influenced his work at Yale and his advice to others regarding the establishment of bibliographic presses, this research provides a historical framework for contemporary letterpress pedagogy.
Katherine is Director of Book Studies Program and Lecturer in Art at Wellesley College. She also teaches the history of 19th and 20th century typography and printing at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia and book arts techniques and pedagogy in the Masters of Art Education Program at the Boston University College of Fine Arts. Katherine holds an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama and a PhD in Library and Information Science from Simmons College. She has published limited edition books and broadsides under the imprint of Shinola Press since 1994.
