Designing Women

The Princeton Library is currently showing an online exhibit named "Unseen Hands: Women Printers, Binders, and Book Designers." It's nifty and eclectic, and you should go look at it.

There are works by female illustrators, book designers, printers, type designers, typesetters, and publishers. The exhibit timeline runs from the 15th century, when the Nuns of San Jacopo di Ripoli produced the first complete printed edition of the works of Plato in 1484, to the current day, with a 2002 specimen page of Diotima type signed by Gudrun Zapf von Hesse, who designed the typeface. (Oddly enough, the Diotima typeface is named after a female character in Plato's Symposium. It's Plato all the way down.) Parts of the Book of St. Albans may be the first printed work written in English by a woman.

Maria Sibylla Merian spent two years studying the indigenous wildlife of Surinam, caught malaria, returned to Amsterdam, and published a "lavishly illustrated folio" about bugs. Fanny Palmer drew more than 200 scenes for Currier & Ives. Clemence Housman, sister of A.E. Housman, was a writer and engraver herself. Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, sister of W.B. Yeats, founded Dun Emer Press in order to train young women in the skills of bookbinding, weaving, embroidery, and printing.

The exhibit includes a copy of Grandmother Sweat Bath, edited by Janet Rodney, printed by Weaselsleeves Press. I mention this because I don't think that in my lifetime I will ever grow tired of saying "Weaselsleeves."

There's also an edition of Beatrice Warde's manifesto "This Is A Printing Office," which she designed and printed to publicize the new Perpetua typeface. Here's how it goes:

THIS
IS A PRINTING OFFICE

Crossroads of civilization
Refuge of all the arts against the ravages of time
Armoury of fearless truth against whispering rumor
Incessant trumpet of trade
From this place words may fly abroad, not to perish on waves of sound, not to vary with the writer’s hand but fixed in time, having been verified by proof
Friend, you stand on sacred ground,
This is a Printing Office

Weaselsleeves.