Sorting through my library recently, I came across a book I had forgotten about, The Printer’s Relict. Subtitled An Example to Her Sex, the book was written by Eleanor P. Spencer and published in Baltimore by the Amphora Press in 1937. The press was founded by Elizabeth Mann in 1933; further information is elusive.
The Printer’s Relict is a modest chapbook. It’s ten printed pages are classically formatted, with attention to typographic detail. It’s also surprisingly full of information about Anne Catherine Green and Mary Katherine Goddard, two of the three dozen or so women printers from the American colonial era. The book’s title (an archaic definition of relict is widow) suggests that Spencer was exploring the approach that most women in the printing trades took to becoming active, as does a note at the end of the short text: “No one except Mr. McKinstry (in The Press of Chautauqua) has tried to analyze the position and importance of the printer’s wife.” Still, it is interesting that of the two women she focuses on, one, Goddard, was never married.
Spencer doesn’t include her sources. How do we know the information is accurate? And why bother to find out? Because real history does matter. If Eleanor Spencer hadn’t done her work, or Elizabeth Anthony Dexter, or Lois Rather, or Janet Bogardus, or Leona M. Hudak, or scores of other women, we would be in even more ignorance about the real history of women’s literally countless roles in the history of printing.
This is also true of artists’ books. While it’s early in the life of the field to claim a canon, it is vital that, when we put Ed Ruscha at the top of any list, we can’t forget about Alison Knowles. Dieter Roth? Certainly, but don’t leave out Dorothy Iannone. Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books? A critical voice in the history. But so is Joan Lyons’ Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, published a decade before Drucker’s book. Lyons’ anthology is a self-proclaimed “first in-depth look at the territory.” Perhaps most surprisingly, the essays are still relevant today and are to some extent a movement toward canon formation, although Lyons never makes that claim. Again without making an explicit claim, Lyons’ anthology acknowledges the presence of women in the field through her choice of essayists (Shelley Rice, Lucy Lippard, Betsy Davids, Barbara Moore, etc.) and her visual examples at the front of the book (Madeline Gins, Janet Zweig, Joyce Weiland, Susan E. King) whose work appears among the usual male suspects. These voices and images help to offset Clive Phillpot’s inclusion of only one woman in his long essay, “Some Contemporary Artists and Their Books.” And even that woman, Helen Douglas, is listed only through her partnership with Telfer Stokes.
One of my earliest works is misattributed in two different print publications. Maybe this shouldn’t matter to me, but I would like to see those mistakes righted. As my late friend, poet Chana Bloch, once wrote, “The past keeps changing.” That is why we need to continue to seek out the history, correct the record, go over old ground and re-examine what has been written.
This work is just beginning when it comes to the inclusion of people of color and queer people into book and printing history. We have a long way to go with these histories, but the record is out there; we just need to seek it. And while document digitization, Google searches, peer-to-peer sites like Wikipedia and now AI make the job of research much easier, the necessity for in-person visits to archives, combing through bibliographies for hints of possible sources, de-coding nineteenth-century handwriting and the like is still with us. Mercifully, we are mostly spared the bilious perusal of microfilm.
In 2022 I curated an exhibition at San Francisco Center for the Book, Possibilities: When Artists’ Books Were Young. The show included the books of thirty-two artists whose primary work is or was books or whose work included them. A friend who came to the Center to help design the exhibition phoned me the day after she saw the work for the first time to point out that all of the artists in the show were women. Yes, I acknowledged, I know.
“But it doesn’t say that in the title.”
How sad and how infuriating that we are still having this discussion.
Kathleen Walkup is currently an independent curator and writer living in the Hudson Valley. She is Lovelace Family Professor Emerita of Book Art, Mills College.
