Transatlantic Connections session, APHA

This month I journeyed to Old, New England to attend "Good, Fast, Cheap: Printed words and Images in America before 1900." It was a joint conference of the American Printing History Association (APHA) and the Centre for Historical American Visual Culture (CHAViC) at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. I had the unfortunate luck of being chosen to be the last speaker in a two-day conference, I was scheduled for the Transatlantic Connections session. However, most people did manage to make it to very end. The title of my talk was: (Re)Assembling Reference Books & Recycling Images: The Wood Engravings of the W. & R. Chambers Firm. A recap of my talk is on the APHA website. The image above is a slide from my talk, where I give an example of how images from Chambers ended up in American publications.

The other speakers in my session (and throughout the conference) were really interesting as well, and there were a few people that seem to be studying my exact same period 1860s-1890s, so there was plenty to discuss with new colleagues that I'll no doubt be keeping in touch with.

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At the end of the conference, I drove to Amherst to visit family, and had to miss visiting the Museum of Printing that was scheduled on Sunday. However, my niece, being very thoughtful, suggested we go to the Yiddish Book Centre, and to my book loving, heart's delight they had a small museum displaying woodblocks, type, and printing presses. There was also a Linotype machine that would have created Yiddish characters. The Centre is very moving. It's not only preserving books, but a whole language, and the 12-min film explaining how the YBC was founded did make me well-up. I'm overly emotional.