New York Historical Society and Intima Press - Parisa Montazaran

New York History Society
If you are “coming to use the library”, there is no admission fee. Walking from the subway on Central Park West, the museums are monumental. They checked the bags for free, which I thought was interesting. The library has books, magazines, photographs and architectural images. The website is www.nyhistory.org. The materials cover from the late 16th century to present time. Some of the maps and books are from the late 1500’s in Spanish and other languages, not in English. They have over two million manuscripts and four hundred thousand books. You have to browse the catalog and bring the call number to the desk.

In 1802, a catalog was made of what was in downtown Shakespeare gallery. In Boston, a pamphlet from a Shakespeare club. In 1844 to 47, the first printing of all Shakespeare’s collected works in illustrated form was released. From 1849 is the diary of Mr. Newfield during the Astor Place Riots, in his own handwriting and very legible. Replies from England as a counter to the letters sent to England regarding the fight between Edwin Forrest and William Charles Macready. There is a collection of twenty thousand broadsides announcing events. There is a book on the events from the history of New York regarding Shakespeare and the Shakespeare statue in Central Park (one text dedicated to the statue).

The Historical Society is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 AM to 5 PM and available for party rentals. There is a sign that reads, “Pens not allowed in this room.” Nina suggested we check out the New York Public Library on 42nd street and the Morgan. There is a police officer’s diary from the Upper East Side.

Everyone working in the room is monitoring people. Nina points out that there is a fine line between wanting to educate and preserve; if people do not know about it what is the point? They allow people to come here, not pay and use their collections. There was a dealer of antique maps going around the libraries and stealing them. Last year at Yale he was spotted with an exactor knife and was captured. He owned up to ninety of the maps. He has been to NYHS and they do not think he took anything. Somebody is buying this stuff even though he used an exactor knife to take it out. Nina insists that it is not “their” personal stuff but it’s “our” stuff open to the public and these people steal it for private property. Funding is partially received from the city, state and private donors. They have parties to raise funds.

Nina studied Art History as an undergraduate and did some data-basing and edited slides for photographers. She went on to get her Masters in Library Science and did paid research on Edgar Allen Poe. She worked for 7 years at the School for Visual Arts as a librarian. She also served as the Head of Library Public Service and was the Interim Director for 2 years. She is now the Associate Director.


Intima Press
I walked to the studio and actually got lost because I misread the directions. Union square is very trendy and “chic” as opposed to the refined, classical air of the upper west side. The building, 32 Union Square East is very contemporary. The studio is down a dingy hallway (the elevator was the older one on the left vs. the renovated one on the right). Mindy’s studio has papers and postcards handing up on the wall.

She studied painting and photography at NYU, went into mixed media installation, and came to books after graduate school. She opened the studio two and a half years ago and opened classes a year ago. The images on the wall are linocut, made by students. Her colleagues teach book art and book binding there too. She makes limited edition books.

We went over a history of print. Cave drawings were the beginning of communications. Next were cuneiform and clay tablets, followed by hieroglyphics and papyrus by the Egyptians. The Roman alphabet came next. Gutenberg created the printing press. In 1452, he printed the Gutenberg Bible. It can be found at the Morgan and New York Public Library on parchment and paper. He developed the metal movable type. The Chinese invented wooden movable type and papermaking. Gutenberg was a jeweler and figure out how to poor melted alloy into a mold made by a punch cutter and individual letters were carved out. Monks used to write on parchment bellum (made out of animal skin). Gutenberg was a businessperson, not an artist. His workers began working at sun up and finished at sun down. The first university was opened in 1200 in Italy and scholarly texts were copied at stationary stores. One person would set type, one would proof it and two would ink it. He also invented oil-based paint. The text on the cards is letterpress, beautiful, with depth. You can see that they are embedded in the paper. “The type is 3D, it’s a sculpture. It’s debossed, not embossed” (Mindy). The one sheet of printed press is called a broadside. Ben Franklin was a printer. Broadsides were printed to get the word out quickly. A lot of prints hops used to be at the seaport so the broadsides would announce when ships were coming and going. Shakespeare’s writings were not published in his lifetime; he was not interested in that. The colophon at the end of the book tells you who made the book, the author, artist, where it was printed, the date, edition, the type of paper and font.

We proceeded to choose a sonnet to work on, Sonnet 116, and each of us was assigned a line. Nina gave us a few handouts on learning how to handset type. I was overwhelmed by the vast amount of contributing elements to make something like one of her linocuts; the process of setting type alone required attention to the details of how to hold the composing stick and then choosing a font and adjusting the spacing, etc. After we all completed our lines, we gave them to Mindy to put on the printing machine, watched her ink the machine, and get it warmed up. It was almost funny to see that even with the intense amount of attention and care that we paid to our individual lines, there were still mistakes on the test drafts; I could only imagine the amount of skill required to put together entire books!

We took turns printing individual sheets and Mindy offered us cookies and snacks. She was very “chill” and at the same time very intense about the work. I admired her ability to create a business and living out of something she loved to do so much. I was especially impressed that she is able to carry on the business in such a higher end location in New York City; printing books out of a cottage in Vermont is one thing but to generate so much profit hat one could afford the overhead of maintaining a business and yield a profit was astounding. This observation only contributed to our conversations on the exclusivity of Shakespeare for the upper crust of society. The people ordering these limited edition books obviously have plenty of disposable income and knowledge of this type of art is reserved for the consciousness of such customers. The machines are expensive and the skill of handset typing is taught in novelty classes in order to maintain a distinction as a “lost art” or something. Overall, the trip was enriching and rewarding. I am so excited to see our sonnets completed and proud to have been a part of the process that created such a beautiful piece of art.