Highlighting Private Presses from Wisconsin

To accompany the multi-venue exhibit “Text Support: A Library Exhibit About Paper,” a small exhibit in the lobby of Memorial Library recently offered  a small sampler of output from some of Wisconsin’s innovative private presses, ranging from the early years of the 20th century to the early years of the 21st.

• Black Mesa Press, Madison, Wisconsin
• Centennial Press, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Juniper Press, La Crosse, Wisconsin
• Juniper Press, Madison, Wisconsin
• Midnight Paper Sales, Stockholm, Wisconsin
• Northeast/Juniper Books, La Crosse, Wisconsin
• Perishable Press, Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin
• Philosopher Press, Wausau, Wisconsin
• Quixote Press, Madison, Wisconsin
• Red Ozier Press, founded in Madison, Wisconsin
• Salient Seedling Press, Madison, Wisconsin
• Silver Buckle Press, Madison, Wisconsin
• Sutton Hoo Press, La Crosse, Wisconsin

All the works that were included in this display hail from the holdings of Special Collections. Susan Barribeau and Robin Rider, who curated the Wisconsin private press display, invite you to examine other examples of fine printing in the Special Collections reading room.

In this, the first in a series of posts about our private press holdings, we highlight the Black Mesa Press, founded in Madison in 1981 by poet Charles Alexander. The exhibit included three works from the Press:

Oppen, Mary. Mother and daughter and the sea: Poems. 1981. Our copy is no. 128 of 150.

Drachler, Rose, and Jacob Drachler. For witches. 1982. Our copy is no. 88.

Barrows, Anita, et al. The limits. 1982. The Libraries hold two copies: one in Special Collections, the other in the Kohler Art Library.

The Libraries' holdings of Black Mesa Press run from 1981 to 1984. In that year Charles Alexander moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he established the Chax Press.

Gallery Talk on Thursday, May 30, at 2 P.M.

Please join us on Thursday, May 30, at 2 p.m. in Special Collections (976 Memorial Library) for a gallery talk about the current exhibit, "Text Support: A Library Exhibit About Paper." Tracy Honn of Silver Buckle Press and Lyn Korenic of Kohler Art Library, guest co-curators for this exhibit, will highlight favorite items on display and point to the variety of collections on campus containing relevant books, printed ephemera, and archival materials.

Shawn Sheehy to Speak on Tuesday, May 14, on "Concept to (Political) Action: Pop-Up Artists’ Books"

Please join us on Tuesday, May 14, 12:00–1:30 pm, for an artist talk by Shawn Sheehy: "Concept to (Political) Action: Pop-Up Artists’ Books. The talk, in 126 Memorial Library, 728 State Street, is one in a series of events surrounding the multi-venue "Text Support: A Library Exhibit About Paper."

This intricate example of Sheehy's paper engineering, currently on exhibit in Special Collections as part of "Text Support," hails from the large artists' book collection in Kohler Art Library. 

An earlier exhibit in Special Collections, "Lothar Meggendorfer and Movable Books" (2006),  showcased color lithographic proof sheets of movable children's books from the Lothar Meggendorfer Collection. Meggendorfer (1847-1925) created more than 100 children's books over the course of his career, many in multiple editions and translations. To set Meggendorfer's own paper engineering in context, this earlier exhibit also contained books with movable parts from the Renaissance through the 21st century, including treatises on cosmography, geometry, landscape design, and the automobile, as shown here:\

This multi-part illustration of the Daimler automobile comes from Les transformateurs d’énergie: Générateurs, accumulateurs, moteurs, avec les plus récentes applications à la navigation aérienne, assembled by a committee of engineers and published in Paris in 1910.

"Jesuits and Visual Culture": Center for Early Modern Studies Conference in Special Collections

On May 7, 2013, Special Collections will host a full-day session of a conference entitled " 'Spiritual Optiks': Jesuits and Visual Culture." This conference, organized by Prof. Sabine Mödersheim, director of the Center for Early Modern Studies (CEMS), builds on scholarly interests across campus as well as the exhibit "Jesuits and the Construction of Knowledge"  in Special Collections in 2011 and an ongoing project to digitize Jesuit iconography through the UW Digital Collections.

The CEMS conference program begins at 7 p.m. on Monday, May 6, 2013, with a public keynote lecture with the intriguing title, "Jesuit Emblems and Catholic Comics," by Laurence Grove, director of the Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Text/Image Cultures at the University of Glasgow. The lecture will be held in room L150 in the Elvehjem building, Chazen Museum.

Conference sessions on Tuesday, May 7 (held in Special Collections, 984 Memorial Library) will feature wide-ranging studies of Jesuit emblematica, analysis of specific images of lunar geography in the 17th century, exploration of a Jesuit "empire of knowledge," and a workshop investigating scholarly possibilities afforded by the UW-Madison digital Jesuit iconography project.

The latter project (undertaken through Special Collections and the UW Digital Collections in collaboration with Prof. Florence Hsia and graduate students Meridith Beck Sayre and Lynnette Regouby from the Department of History of Science at UW-Madison) aims at presenting high-quality digital images of illustrations from our strong holdings of scholarly works by Jesuit authors in conjunction with detailed, searchable descriptions. Such illustrations range from deeply symbolic frontispieces of Jesuit publications on mathematical sciences

to depictions of exotic animals encountered by Jesuit missionaries

and from fanciful (if mathematically accurate) sundials

to disembodied diagrams of mechanical experiments.

 

See the full program for details about the CEMS conference sessions.

Regiomontanus in the Nuremberg Chronicle

In a recent colloquium held in Special Collections, Prof. Michael Shank of the Department of History of Science, pointed out the portrait of the humanist astronomer Regiomontanus included in Hartmann Schedel's Liber chronicarum (1493), the massive volume often called the Nuremberg Chronicle. 

Although many portraits included in this heavily illustrated work were more generic in nature, and were sometimes recycled for different historical figures, Shank notes that the woodcut portrait of Regiomontanus was probably a faithful likeness, since Schedel and his artist both knew Regiomontanus. For more about this huge volume, see such works as The making of the Nuremberg Chronicle by the noted California printer and book designer Adrian Wilson, available in the reference section in the Special Collections reading room. See also Ezra Brown's English translation (1990) of Ernst Zinner's biography of Regiomontanus.

Much of Shank's lively lecture centered on a manuscript by Regiomontanus, the "Defensio Theonis contra Trapezuntium," or "Defense of Theon against George of Trebizond." A preliminary digital edition of this manuscript, the original of which is held in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg branch, is an ambitious joint project undertaken by Shank and Richard Kremer at Dartmouth.

Text Support

Congratulations to Tracy Honn, director of the Silver Buckle Press, and Lyn Korenic, director of Kohler Art Library, on their three-venue exhibit, "Text Support: A Library Exhibit About Paper." The largest of the three parts of the exhibit, currently on display in Special Collections (976 Memorial Library), focuses on history of handmade and commercial paper. The exhibit includes examples ranging from mundane to highly decorative. In the latter category is an instance of decorative endpapers from a German publication of the Weimar period, Paul Renner's Typografie als Kunst (Munich: G. Müller, 1922):

 The same exhibit case, entitled "Decorative Techniques" also contains

• Paul Nash et al., In praise of patterned papers (1997)
• Yanya Schmoller, Remondini and Rizzi: A chapter in Italian decorated paper history (1990)
• Tokutaro Yagi, Suminagashi-zome (1991)
• Claire Bolton, Maziarczyk paste papers (1991)
• Ann Muir, Harvesting colour: The year in a marbler's workshop (1999)
• Josef Halfer, The progress of the marbling art, from technical scientific principles (1893)

The other two portions of the "Text Support" exhibit feature handmade paper with Wisconsin roots (at Kohler Art Library) and examples of paper engineering (Silver Buckle Press display cases on the 2nd floor of Memorial Library).

The recent Schewe Lecture by Timothy Barrett (director of the Iowa Center for the Book), who spoke in eloquent terms of  "The Future of [Handmade] Paper," drew an enthusiastic crowd to Special Collections in conjunction with the exhibit. We call your attention as well to an upcoming lecture by Chicago artist Shawn Sheehy, "Concept to (Political) Action: Pop-Up Artists’ Books," at 12:00 noon on Tuesday, May 14, 2013, in room 126 Memorial Library. Both lectures benefit from the sponsorship of the Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries.

The exhibit runs through the end of June 2013.