A change in the weather

Winter weather in Madison -- of which we've had plenty recently -- usually brings a dramatic drop in humidity. And apropos of humidity, we noted a relevant book in our holdings by the Swiss natural philosopher and geologist, Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799). De Saussure is credited with building the first comparable hair-tension hygrometer in 1783; and here, in our copy of his Essais sur l'hygrométrie (Neuchatel: S. Fauche, 1783), a fanciful engraving introduced his innovation.

The putti (the Italian word describing chubby male children, usually nude and often with wings, depicted in works of art in the early modern era) shown here were evidently helping to make such a hygrometer: one wielded scissors to cut some strands of the hair of the other for use in the instrument. In the standard version of the hair-tension hygrometer, a long strand of hair, under tension with a thread and weight, expands and contracts in length with changes in humidity. After describing what called his "new comparable hygrometer," de Saussure addressed theories of hygrometry and barometry and their application to meteorology.

For more on de Saussure and other 18th-century natural philosophers who made of the weather a kind of experimental physics. see, for example, Theodore Feldman, "Late Enlightenment meteorology," in The quantifying spirit in the 18th century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 143-177. And J. L. Heilbron explores the role of putti in the depiction of experiments in "Domesticating science in the eighteenth century," in Science and the visual image in the Enlightenment, ed. William R. Shea, European studies in science history and the arts, 4 (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2000), 1-24.

Congratulations, McSweeney's!

We join in congratulating McSweeney's on 15 years of publishing, and point to the NPR interview with its founder, Dave Eggers.
In the interview Eggers mentioned one issue in a substantial box "with a head painted on it." Shown here is that issue on the shelf with other issues in the complete run, part of the Little Magazines collection in Special Collections.

Last Week for Exhibit "On the Sunny Side"

This will be the last week for our exhibit "On the Sunny Side," showcasing books, periodicals, manuscripts, photographs, and other materials from Special Collections and University Archives.
As the hours of sunshine diminish, we all may find ourselves more aware of the impact of daylight (sunlight!) hours on daily life. We invite you this week to take a few minutes to walk to Memorial Library and visit the exhibit on the 9th floor.

Shown here is a detail from a geocentric depiction of eclipses as contained in an Italian manuscript of 1570 (written some decades after the publication of Copernicus' treatise on the revolutions of the heavenly bodies). This manuscript, along with other editions of, and commentaries on, the late medieval text "On the sphere" by Joannes de Sacro Bosco (or Sacrobosco), has found use already this semester by students in History of Science 323 (the Scientific Revolution), as taught by Prof. Florence Hsia with Robin Rider. For more from our holdings of such works, see the small online exhibit "Sacrobosco and His Commentators."

Orreries, from our Current Exhibit, "On the Sunny Side"

In our current exhibit entitled "On the Sunny Side," we're pleased to be able to display a "Copernican model orrery" kindly lent to us by Jim Lattis, co-founder and director of UW Space Place. This model orrery was produced by the Trippensee Planetarium Company of Saginaw, Michigan, and appears to be made of something like Bakelite. At its center is a bright yellow sun, with planets on movable arms surrounding it. For much of the 20th century, the Trippensee Planetarium Company manufactured astronomy models. 

Accompanying the orrery in the exhibit are several 18th-century publications in English about orreries and other astronomical instruments used for observation and demonstration. We call your attention here to one of them, a relatively rare edition of an elementary textbook, An easy introduction to mechanics, geometry, plane trigonometry, measuring heights and distances, optics, astronomy [etc.] by James Ferguson (1710-1776), published in 1768 in London. It contains an advertisement for devices and aids to learning astronomy – notably, what were called “Cards of astronomy, and a living orrery, made with sixteen school-boys.”

As the text explains, the cards would carry "the names and periods" of planets and moons in the solar system," and each of the boys would hold a card corresponding to a planet or moon. "Now begin your play, fix your boys in their circles, each with his card in his hand, and then put your orrery in motion." With sufficient repetition, this game, the author claimed, would fix "clear and sure ideas of the solar system." A "seventeenth boy of a large size must be used for the sun in the  center" (pp. xx-xxi). We're just sorry that the volume contained no illustration of such a living orrery!

Others at the time were less enthusiastic about its pedagogical value. An anonymous reviewer in The monthly review. Or, literary journal by "Several Hands" (July 1768) could not "altogether approve" of the living orrery, thinking it "a crude and trivial performance." Not only that, but if the boys were to "act the diurnal as well as the annual motions (in which case it would resemble a dervises [dervish's] dance), the whole solar system would be liable to a vertigo, and all the planets would drop from their respective orbits" (p. 64).

A sidenote: Although James Ferguson is well-represented in ECCO, that is, the extensive compilation Eighteenth-century collections online, this Easy introduction (London, 1768) does not currently appear there. 

Image from Kircher's "Ars magna lucis et umbrae" Featured in New Book

A large foldout engraving from our copy of Athanasius Kircher's Ars magna lucis et umbrae, in X. libros digesta, published in Amsterdam in 1671, is featured on the dustjacket of a new book, To overcome oneself: The Jesuit ethic and spirit of global expansion 1520-1767, by Prof. J. Michelle Molina of Northwestern University.

Shown here are the two overlapping images from Kircher's book (our overhead scanner especially designed for rare books, even large ones, could not readily accommodate the unwieldy original, hence the need for two images)

along with the adaptation for the dustjacket of Prof. Molina's book.

The image in full presents the extent of the Jesuit enterprise as a tree, with Rome at its center (indeed, its trunk) and far-flung branches. See, for example, references to the Jesuit presence in Canada, Brazil, and China in this detail from the upper half of the engraving:

Prof. Molina spoke in Memorial Library in fall 2011 in the Science and Print Culture workshop organized by Prof. Florence Hsia of the UW-Madison history of science department. That workshop, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities as part of its A. W. Mellon Workshop program, took advantage of a large exhibit in Special Collections entitled "Jesuits and the Construction of Knowledge, 1540-1773."

A digital humanities project in the Libraries, a joint undertaking of the Department of Special Collections and the UW Digital Collections Center, is producing a searchable database of early modern Jesuit iconography pertaining to scholarship and travel, drawing on the extensive holdings in Special Collections of illustrated works by Jesuit authors. A prototype of the database is available.

"Archives & Agential Life" Workshop

Participants in a recent workshop entitled "Archives & Agential Life" made enthusiastic use of the holdings of Special Collections. Co-directed by Prof. Theresa Kelley of UW-Madison's Department of English and Prof. Deirdre Lynch of the University of Toronto, the workshop included ample time to discuss precirculated papers, an archival walk arranged by Carrie Roy of the Libraries and the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, and afternoons spent in Special Collections exploring a wide array of "archival objects" within our holdings.

Those archival objects ranged from the 18th century through the early 20th century, and included objects as diverse as

• an extra-illustrated French book of prayers and devotions, 
• correspondence concerning Iceland written to Sir Joseph Banks (a collection digitized as part of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections), 

• a manuscript treatise on famous animals and their courage and fidelity (by one Antoine Antoine), 
• multiple manuscripts from the Cairns Collection of Works by American Women Writers, 
• an odd Album de sténographie microscopique by a young French clerk, demonstrating his prowess at producing more and more script in Duployé shorthand within a rectangle the size of a postage stamp.  

Participants then presented an archival object of their choosing "as a material and theoretical focus of inquiry" at the final workshop session, held at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. Since the intent is to convert presentations at the workshop into a publication, we won't steal the participants' thunder by previewing their choices. But it is clear they enjoyed the opportunity to examine

and explain archival objects.

Thanks to library colleague Susan Barribeau for the last of these photos.

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.

"Parts and Wholes" Exhibit Ends on Friday, March 29

The Special Collections exhibit "Parts and Wholes" ends next Friday, March 29. We hope you will take the opportunity during spring break to see it. 

As we have noted in earlier posts, the exhibit features works of science and natural history, revealing examples of print culture, and specimens from campus museums. For example, it pairs (in separate but adjacent cases!) a so-called wet preparation of medusae from the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum  with striking color illustrations from publications of the prolific and controversial life scientist Ernest Haeckel (1834-1919):  

The term medusae (plural of medusa) refers to the head of Medusa in Greek mythology. Carl von Linnaeus is credited with coining the term; Haeckel's color illustrations helped to popularize medusae.

Special Collections is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. The exhibit area is located on the 9th floor of Memorial Library.

The next exhibit in Special Collections, entitled "Text Support: A Library Exhibit about Paper," opens on April 15.

Little Magazines and the Grolier Club

The Libraries' own Susan Barribeau was one of the speakers at the Grolier Club symposium about little magazines on March 13, in conjunction with the Grolier's exhibition entitled “American Little Magazines of the 1890s: A Revolution in Print.” Susan's witty presentation highlighted the history (long), extent (big), and strengths (many) of the Little Magazine Collection in Special Collections at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her examples ranged from early little magazines acquired by Marvin Sukov

to recent publications like Esopus and Forklift, Ohio: A journal of poetry, cooking, & light industrial safety. 

Susan also generously noted the collection development work of her predecessors, including Yvonne Schofer and Felix Pollak; called attention to related collections and programs at UW-Madison, including the

• Dobbertin Collection of Campus Humor Magazines in Special Collections 
• Library of Amateur Journalism, also in Special Collections 
• Silver Buckle Press
• artists' book collection at Kohler Art Library
• Center for the History of Print & Digital Culture 
• Tandem Press;  

and pointed to the distinguished (and diverse) history of print culture in Wisconsin, as demonstrated by such institutions as the

• Philosopher Press at the sign of the green pine tree in Wausau, Wisconsin, 
• Walter Hamady's Perishable Press Limited in Mt. Horeb
• Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee
• Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers.

Compliments to Susan!

For more information, see the new blog Little Magazine Collection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (collection manager Susan Barribeau, web editor Oliver Wendorf).

Gallery Talk on March 8 for "Parts and Wholes" Exhibit

On March 8, 2013, at 4:30 p.m., Judith Kaplan, Ph.D., guest co-curator for the exhibit “Parts and Wholes,” will offer a gallery talk in Special Collections (976 Memorial Library). Kaplan will describe the process of selecting books, periodicals, and museum specimens to illustrate part/whole relationships in the sciences and print culture, drawing upon a wide variety of collections around campus. We hope you will be able to join us for this event.

One of the exhibit cases sure to attract attention pairs a multi-layer lift-the-flap illustration of the anatomical structure of the escargot, enlarged to 28 cm., with a decidedly oversize papier-mâché model of a May beetle, open to show its internal organs. The former, Jules Philippe Lewis Anglas' L'escargot (anatomie et dissection): Planches coloriées à feuillets découpés et superposés (1916) is a new acquisition in Special Collections made possible by the Reeder Family Fund. 

Here is the snail in two-dimensional form:

and with various flaps lifted: 

The model of the May beetle (Melolontha vulgaris), produced in Paris by L. T. J. Auzoux (1797-1880), hails from the Zoological Museum on campus, and features the artist's signature under one of the wings. Both halves of its head rest on a maroon book weight some 24 cm. long. We are grateful to Laura A. Halverson Monahan, Curator of Collections for the Museum, for her willingness to lend this and other museum objects for the exhibit. (For more about Auzoux' anatomical models, see web exhibits by the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, and the Whipple Museum in Oxford, UK.)

Throughout “Parts and Wholes,” works from Special Collections, Silver Buckle Press, and the Ebling Library Historical Collections, sit alongside materials from the Zoological Museum and the Insect Research Collection, highlighting questions of individuality and individuation, “colonial” organisms and composite forms, print serials and metamorphosing creatures. For more on materials from Silver Buckle Press on display, see an earlier post in this blog.

The exhibit, which runs through March 2013 in Special Collections, was co-curated by Judith Kaplan; Lynn Nyhart, Professor of History of Science; and Robin Rider, Curator of Special Collections, with exhibit installation by Kaplan and Cindy Lundey, M.L.S. Daniel Joe of the library graphics office designed the striking exhibit poster.

The exhibit was installed in conjunction with the workshop, “What is an Individual? Where Philosophy, History, and Biology Coincide,” which has enjoyed generous support from the Anonymous Fund, the Department of the History of Science, the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, and the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.

Work of Silver Buckle Press on Display — and Kudos to Tracy Honn

The current exhibit in Special Collections, “Parts and Wholes,” explores part/whole relationships, weaving together examples from the sciences and from print culture. In the latter category, one exhibit case highlights moveable type, and in particular, the work of Tracy Honn and holdings of the Silver Buckle Press.

As Ephraim Chambers wrote in his Cyclopaedia (published in London in 1728 and digitized as part of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collection), printing is “the Art of taking Impressions with Ink, from Characters and Figures moveable, or immoveable, upon Paper, Velom [vellum], or the like Matter.” Taking off from the basic notion of moveable type comprising words, lines, paragraphs, and pages are borders composed of individual decorative sorts (composite ornaments), and chromatic type, in which one sort occupies the negative space of the other, often used in two-color printing. The exhibit case features a broadside deploying chromatic type

Complete Specimen of 10 line Van Lanen Type Designed by Matthew Carter and Produced by Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum. Design and printing by Tracy Honn for Silver Buckle Press in 2011,

along with with samples of Carter’s “W” and sets of composite type, all courtesy of the Silver Buckle Press.

Tracy Honn's work with the Van Lanen font has also received praiseful notice in the blog Design Envy — congratulations, Tracy!

Irish manuscript included in exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library

An exhibition entitled "Nobility and newcomers in Renaissance Ireland," which explores the Ireland of Shakespeare's time, opened on January 19, 2013, at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Included in the exhibition, curated by Thomas Herron and Brendan Kane, is a modest manuscript volume (MS 179) from our holdings, part of the Myles Dillon collection (MS 175-179):

In particular, on display at the Folger in a case entitled "James and the Three Kingdoms," is a page opening from this manuscript volume, which contains Ossianic verse transcribed y Domhnall ac Mothanna/Domhnal ac Taig (ca. 1603?):

Our holdings in this area were described in considerable detail by Cornelius G. Buttimer in a Catalogue of Irish manuscripts in the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published by the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, in 1989.

40 years since the last issue of LIFE

December 29, 2012, marked the 40th anniversary of the last issue of the original LIFE magazine. An  exhibit in the 1st-floor lobby of Memorial Library (on display through March 1, 2013) commemorates that anniversary and highlights the fact that Special Collections holds some 40 examples of the curved metal printing plates used to print the last issue in December 1972. The printing plates were the gift of John and Barbara Dobbertin, who also donated examples of the first (November 23, 1936) and last issues of LIFE included in the display. As he describes it, Dobbertin discovered "printing plates from the last issue of LIFE stacked on the ground floor of the 440,000-square foot printing plant" of R. R. Donnelley & Sons in Chicago and purchased the plates in 1973 "for the scrap metal price of 3¢ per pound."

The color cover, "The Year in Pictures 1972," required multiple color plates, one of which is shown here. Like movable type, such electrotype printing plates are reversed or wrong-reading; the pages printed from them are right-reading.

Use of curved printing plates was just part of a complicated technological system that made possible a weekly photographic news magazine printed on coated paper and produced in enormous quantities.

Henry R. Luce, who recognized the possibilities at R. R. Donnelley & Sons, launched LIFE in the midst of the Depression, as recounted by James L. Baughman, professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, in Henry R. Luce and the rise of the American news media (1987). George H. Waltz, Jr., described the printing processes at R. R. Donnelley in The house that quality built (1957).

We invite you to take a look at the exhibit, which John Dobbertin generously curated. It features LIFE articles of signal importance in late 1972, from the launch of Apollo 17 to latest on the war in Vietnam, alongside the printing plates used to produce them.

More of the printing plates await you in Special Collections.

A video recording entitled Craftsmanship & automation, originally produced in 1960, contains footage about presses and plates used by R. R. Donnelley & Sons in various large publishing projects. Acquisition of this DVD, among scores of documentary films on printing crafts, was supported by a grant to the the Libraries' Silver Buckle Press from the Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries.