Still covered with ink: Nuns, widows, mavericks & other passionate printers

Kathleen Walkup
September 17, 2011
1:30pm
Scripps College Humanities Auditorium

From the vernacular books set by the nuns of St. Jacobus de Ripoli to the irrepressible antics of Jane Grabhorn, women have been involved with the craft and trade of printing since printing was invented. Some are named: Charlotte Guillard, Ann Franklin, Emily Faithfull, Emily Pitts Stevens, Elizabeth Corbet Yeats. Most, though, are anonymous: wives, widows, working women, cheap labor. Altogether, exploring the work of these women is tracing the entire history of printing, this time through a slightly different lens.

The panel discussion that follows the lecture will include several women whose books will be shown in the exhibit detailed below. We will discuss the changing nature of letterpress books over the last 25 years and what they have learned about letterpress printing, both technically and artistically.

Kathleen Walkup is Professor of Book Art and Director of the Book Art Program at Mills College, where she teaches typography and letterpress printing, artists’ bookmaking and seminar classes in the conceptual and historical nature of the book. She is also Book Art Director for the MFA in Book Art & Creative Writing, the first such program in the country. Her most recent curatorial project is Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop (Grolier Club, New York, 2010, plus several other venues). Her talk The Book is a Public Place can be found on PennSound as part of the Threads Talk Series.

Please note that Frederic W. Goudy Lectures are free and open to the public.