1940s In the early years in Northampton, Leonard Baskin's Gehenna Press used the facilities and equipment of Metcalf rinting Company, owned by Richard Warren, who was soon made production manager for the Gehenna Press.

1940s Harold P. McGrath, a commercial printer by day, was Gehenna Press's printer at night. Soon, McGrath was Baskin's full-time master pressman. [McGrath would have an enormous influence on Barry Moser Lance Hidy, Art Larson, Steve Hannock, and Carol Blinn).

1948-1954 Smith Art Department Professor Clarence Kennedy took over the teaching of Eunice Wead's course at Smith College (The History, Technique, and Art of Book Production), focusing on students' actually doing letterpress printing.

1948 Victor Hammer left Aurora, New York in September, 1948 to take a teaching post at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. He continued printing under the imprint, Stamperia del Santuccio.

1949 Peregrine Press by Henry Evans, San Francisco.

1950s The McCarthy era. The influence of F.O. Matthiessen in the 1950s, the age of McCarthyism, was evident -- appreciation for Thoreau's political thought diminished while appreciation for his literary art increased. Following Matthiessen, Stanley Hyman, chief critic during the fifties and one of the most respected scholars on Thoreau, cited style as more important than politics in Thoreau. Henry Eulaus, a political scientist, didn't care for Thoreau. eulaus felt Thoreau had promoted his own version of the nation-state -- close-minded and concerned with the individual conscience as the bedrock of all action. Eulaus saw the dangers of "enlightened liberalism," and McCarthyism and, more importantly, the need for compromise.

1950 Kurt Vonnegut's first short story, The Barnhouse Effect, was published in Collier’s magazine on February 11, 1950. Vonnegut resigned his position at GE to move to Cape Cod in order to write full time. His first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952. But writing stories didn't provide an adequate income, and so Vonnegut continued to work various odd jobs while writing during the 1950s. In 1958, he and his wife, already parents to three children, adopted the three children of Vonnegut’s sister and brother-in-law, who had died within days of each other. Writing for the Albany New York Times Union, staff writer Doug Blackburn ("New York State of Mind," December 17, 2000) reported, "After Vonnegut realized he could make a living writing stories, his own nuclear family moved to Cape Cod. They had three children -- including Nanny, now an artist in her 40s in Northampton -- and adopted his sister's three children after she and her husband died within days of each other." "One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us." (Kurt Vonnegut, writing in the article "Cold Turkey," which Kurt Vonnegut published online on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 in the e-zine "In These Times") "And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon... have to say about the human record so far? He said, 'History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.' The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times.The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, 'There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide'.”

1950 F.O. Matthiessen (1902-1950) jumped to his death from a twelfth-story window of a Boston hotel on April 1, 1950, shortly before he was to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

1951 U.S. authorities persecuted W.E.B. Du Bois, in his 80s, during the McCarthy era. "His arraignment took place in February, 1951," Truman Nelson wrote of it, "his trial in November. So the lynch mob ran at him for six months, screaming at the top of its lungs that he was an agent of Russia… He was retired on a small pension and had very little money. He had to raise cash for his own defense in an agonizing series of talks and pleas to groups all over the country…His defense cost him $35,150, and it was all for nothing; the case was dismissed after some days of trial, without even going to the jury. The government had no case, said the judge."

1951 Publication of Paul A Bennet's book, Books and Printing. Paul A. Bennett (1897-1966) was the Director of Typography for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company for thirty years (he retired in 1962). He was a founding member and unofficial secretary of The Typophiles. In addition to other books, Bennett wrote Books and Printing, 1951.

1951 Harry Duncan left Cummington, Massachusetts in 1951. He and Paul Wightman Williams moved the press twenty miles north, to Rowe, Massachusetts.

1951 Leonard Baskin accepted a teaching post at the Worcester Art Museum School. There, in Worcester, Baskin and his wife Esther produced the first books under the Gehenna Press imprint.

1952 Truman Nelson published The Sin of the Prophet in 1952. Nelson was self-educated. He'd dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen. He'd spent his free time in the Lynn and Boston public libraries. He'd worked in the Lynn General Electric factory six days a week until he was forty. He'd at one point been chief shop steward in the union. He'd connected with the politically progressive academic literary critic, F. O. Matthiesen (1902-1950), who (in the McCarthy era, prior to Matthiesen's killing himself) helped Nelson get published. Nelson had been at a meeting where Matthiessen (author of The American Renaissance) lectured. Matthiesen had said the man who meets the ultimate challenge of life is the one who can be with the oppressed against the oppressor. Nelson decided he'd write to Matthiessen, then at Harvard. Nelson introduced himself as a factory worker, telling Matthiesen he would pay Matthiesen to work with him at Harvard. Matthiessen agreed to meet with Nelson, Sundays, to discuss Nelson's work. Nelson got a $2,500 advance from Little, Brown, enabling him to finish the book. Matthiesen promised to review it in the New York Times. Unfortunately, called to testify before a McCarthy committee, Matthiessen couldn't handle it. He jumped out a window to his death. In the absence of Matthiessen, Nelson was hit hard by Matthiessen's pier, Perry Miller of Harvard, a hostile critic (a personal enemy of Matthiessen) who gave a damning review of The Sin of the Prophet in the NewYork Times. (In a 1976 interview, Nelson said of The Sin of the Prophet, "This was the sin of the prophet: that the men of learning and sensibility are capable of understanding the physical and political facts of their own existence, yet cannot commit the irrevocable acts needed to transform them. They proclaim what is wrong, but they hesitate to move against the wrong, and really don’t want anybody else to.")

1953 Truman Nelson published his novel The Passion by the Brook, in 1953. The book illustrated (from a perspective quite different to that of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-utopian Blithdale Romance) the philosophical and political limits of the Brook Farm/Fourierist utopian communist response to the mid-19th century moral crisis in U.S. society.

In 1955, Victor Hammer married Carolyn Reading in Lexington, Kentucky. Together they continued to publish, using Hammer's Stamperia del Santuccio imprint. Among many other books, Hammer published several volumes by Thomas Merton. Victor and Carolyn Hammer also participated in the productions of the Anvil Press, a publishing venture supported by loyal patrons. Hammer died in in Lexington, Kentucky in 1967.

1955 Dry Coated paper developed at the Battlefield Memorial Institute, Columbia.

1956 Rank-Xerox company fouded.

1956 Perry Miller published Errand Into the Wilderness, a collection of essays about colonial and early-19th-century American thought. In his preface, Miller recalled a youthful epiphany that occured while watching an apparently inexhaustible supply of American oil drums being unloaded in Africa. At that moment, struck by the "uniqueness of the American experience," he felt a "pressing necessity for expounding my America to the 20th century." That revelation led Miller to undertake a "massive narrative of the movement of European culture into the vacant wilderness of America," an endeavor to which he devoted his entire career. Miller's generation in the 1940s and 1950s, in their work and their lives, had ambition and cosmopolitanism. (Look now -- the G.W. Bush years. American historians and American-studies scholars: their narrowness -- their "parochialism").

1956 When Harry Duncan's pressman Paul Wightman Williams died in an auto accident in 1956, Duncan moved the press to his home state of Iowa, where he was hired to direct the Typographic Laboratory at the University of Iowa's School of Journalism (in Iowa in 1960 he married his wife Nancy).

1956 William Addison Dwiggins died on Christmas day, 1956.

1957 Jack Kerouac's On the Road was published in 1957.

1958 The Stinehour Press founded in 1958.

1958-1959 "English departments across the country obliged students in freshman composition courses to study knotty problems in American history. At Stanford in 1958-59, for example, instructors were free to choose among the witchcraft materials, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the socialist experiment at Brook Farm, and John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry. How did it happen that these books appeared, and were widely assigned, in the 1950s?" -- David Levin "How Uniform were the Old American Studies?" -- http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/levin.txt.

1959 Publication of John Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was about the residents of an old people's home. Updike was trying to write a novel, he once confessed, "which would serve, in its breadth, as a base for further novels." Born in Reading in Pennsylvania, pdige grew up on an isolated farm in nearby in Shillington. After high school in Shillington, where his father worked as a science teacher, Updike attended Harvard (Updike said he choseHarvard because it was the location of the world's oldest humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon). Updike majored in English in 1954, and contributed to and later edited the Harvard Lampoon. He started as a cartoonist, but then shifted to poetry and prose. With his wife Mary Pennington, the daughter of a minister of the First Unitarian Church, Updike spent the academic year 1954-1955 at Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England. In 1959 he published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair.

1959-1960 "...when I was in military school and coming full into my testosterone, I started going to church for the express purpose of meeting girls. To qualify for church-sponsored hayrides and summer retreats I went to Sunday morning services and to Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings on Sunday nights. And in so doing I discovered that a young man can't keep exposing himself to that sort of thing, week in and week out, without promises of salvation and redemption making inroads into his psyche -- no matter how hormone-laden that psyche might be, nor how uncertain as to what, exactly, salvation and redemption are. I was particularly susceptible to salvation and redemption during summer revival meetings where girls wore demure, lightweight cotton dresses. I am here to tell you that cotton dresses with tight bodices got me saved two or three times before I turned seventeen. But then, during the Christmas break of my first year in college, I had an experience that took these considerations to another level. It happened when my brother and I were hunting. We were hiding out among the branches of a big, uprooted hackberry tree in the middle of a grassy field out near the airport. It was a warm, sunny day and letter jackets and tee shirts were fine for warmth and protection. My brother had a crow call and was trying his best to hoodwink some birds into coming close enough so that we could shoot them. Of course it didn't work. The crows stayed their distance -- as they always did. There was another hunter out there too -- though we were unaware of his presence. He didn't know we were there either, hidden in the innards of that uprooted tree in the middle of the field making loud, crow-like noises. When he pointed his rifle at our makeshift blind and squeezed the trigger, I was holding my rifle in my right hand, standing with my weight on my right foot. For no particular reason I shifted my weight to my left foot -- most likely while the bullet was en route -- moving my torso perhaps three inches to the left. I felt the tug at my pocket before I heard the report from the rifle. The bullet tore through my jacket, through the pocket, and through my tee shirt, leaving two small holes in it about an inch apart. It did not touch my skin. Not so much as a nick or a graze. Just made two holes in my tee shirt. Had I been smarter, and had I seen fewer films like The Robe and A Man Called Peter, I might have imagined that if God's hand were at work in all this, perhaps He might have had something other in mind for me than becoming a preacher. But, alas, that's what I thought. I felt certain -- there among the twisted branches of that toppled-down hackberry and between those two tiny holes in my tee shirt -- that I had received a "call" to preach the Gospel. I felt that this brush with death was an all-too-obvious sign that I had been spared to preach God's Holy Word. Never mind that I had not read any of it at that point..." -- Barry Moser, from an article first delivered as a lecture sponsored by Auburn Theological Seminary, "An Evening with Barry Moser: A Bible for a New Millennium," The Grolier Club, New York, February 27, 2001. http://www.crosscurrents.org/mosersummer2002.htm.

1959 Elsewhere, this version: Out shooting crows with his brother, nineteen-year-old Barry Moser climbed into a horizontal tree that was lying on the ground, and took aim. Shifting his weight slightly, he suddenly felt a strange pressure on his jacket. Bullets from a random hunter had entered his body between his arm and his chest. In his shirt were not one but two holes. Impressed by the fact that he didn't die, Moser felt spared. He would come to feel he'd been spared for a purpose. Moser, who had attended military school at Baylor University, now attended Auburn University.

1959 "While I was at Auburn I came across an article by a man I had never heard of: Leonard Baskin. The article was prefaced with one of the most striking images I had ever seen -- a black and white figure of a man, head distorted and upturned as if in agony, rendered in lines like the veins of an onion skin. The caption said that it was a wood engraving entitled The Death of the Laureate. From that day I followed Baskin's career. During the fifties and sixties, he was arguably the most profound and intellectual artist working in America.... He was in his thirties and forties back then and was one of those rare artists who had reached a full maturity early in his life. And I was smitten by his work. [My mentor at Auburn] George Cress was also an admirer of Baskin's work and when he found out that I was, he encouraged me to study him.... I went to a lumber yard and bought the biggest piece of wood I could find -- a six inch section of a redwood four by four. I took it home and cut well into the end grain with an X-acto knife, which, as I would learn later on, was not exactly what the medium was about. I did persist, however, and eventually mastered (or nearly mastered) the medium." -- Barry Moser, from "There Was a Time" in his autobiographical collection of lectures/essays, "In the Face of Presumption.."

1959 Barry Moser transferred from Auburn University to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, putting himself through the last two years of college as a licensed Methodist preacher. At nineteen, Moser was a pulpit-pounding preacher at the Hixson Methodist Church, just outside the Chattanooga city limits..

"I set out to be a minister, imagining myself one day being the chaplain to the U.S. Senate. Another Peter Marshall. I sought the advice of two local Methodist ministers; I looked into the curriculum of a religious education; I transferred schools and I studied a little Greek. Then I applied for a license to preach in the Holston Conference of the Methodist Church. It was granted on March 24, 1960. To earn it I had to read selections from The New Testament and a few books about John Wesley, the history of Methodism, and the power and practice of prayer. I took an examination on the reading and witnessed to my calling before the preachers in the Chattanooga District. I was nineteen years old. I still hadn't read all of the Bible, though over the next two years I would have read it two or three times. The clarity and certainty of that experience led me to embrace Christianity with a degree of philosophical assurance unparalleled in my life. My belief in the Bible was resolute and pertinacious. My conviction that Jesus was my own personal Lord and Savior was unswerving and steadfast. I carried that resolution and conviction with me at home, at school, and even into the chapter room of the Kappa Alpha house at Auburn University where I led Sunday night prayer meetings for skeptical fraternity brothers nursing hangovers. Eventually I would preach it from the pulpits of rural churches in East Tennessee and North Georgia. But as fundamentalist as I was, I was not fundamentalist enough for my cousin Wayland, a pious, newly reformed drunk. He told me unequivocally that I was wrong. Told me with absolute certainty that God had NOT spoken to me, because if He had, I would know, as he did, that only members of his Church of God or Christ or Whatever-it-was were the only ones on the true road to salvation and paradise. Weren't gonna be no Methodists or Episcopalians or Cathlicks in heaven. No, sir. He also told me that "nigras" bore the mark of Cain and were destined to servitude by the will and act of God almighty. Told me that a woman's 'place' was to serve her husband and to keep her tongue. Told me that the Bible (King James Version, of course) was indeed inerrant and infallible and that I must accept it as such and refrain from any attempt to interpret it. Told me that the Bible says that anyone who changes one word of it will have his name stricken from the Book of Names, and that I'd best be careful if I knew what was good for me. When I reminded him that he was actually quoting the book of Revelation which says that this celestial editing of the Book of Names will happen to anyone who changes any word of 'this book of this prophecy,' and that the author was obviously referring -- by his own words -- to the very book he was writing, Wayland said -- without a hint of irony -- 'Well, that ain't the way I see it, son.' My journey away from the church was nearly as abrupt and unexpected as my journey to it. My first clerical position was as an assistant minister and youth director at a rural church outside Chattanooga. I preached on Wednesday and Sunday nights. I assisted in Baptisms and the serving of the Lord's Supper. I organized hayrides, square dances, and retreats for the kids in the MYF. And I called on the sick and infirm. In the summer of my second year a girl in my youth group got pregnant. The preacher, by innuendo, suggested that it was I who was responsible, if not through venery, then certainly by negligence of responsibility. Up until the time I got fired, the only place that girl and her boyfriend were welcome was in my Sunday school class. That was my first good whiff of the bile of hypocrisy and intolerance, and the stench of it made me so sick that I began to turn away. But the stench got worse. Remember that these were the early days of the Civil Rights movement. The original Freedom March that began in Chattanooga on May 1, 1963, instigated a lot of conversation and controversy within my family (who numbered among them two known Klansmen), and among my new congregation in North Georgia (which likely numbered among them a few Night Hawks, Kludds, and Klexters). I found myself siding with the marchers and the protesters and becoming more and more an outsider to my congregation and my family for my 'radical' views on segregation. My reading of the gospels -- despite my racist and xenophobic orientation -- told me that Jesus spent most of his time with outcasts. With common people. With whores and tax collectors and noisome fishermen. That he championed the little over the big, the poor over the wealthy, the worldly over the pious -- and in doing so taught us, by example, the grand mystery of God hidden away in the dailyness of human life. I concluded -- despite what was being preached from the conservative, rural white pulpits like mine and what was presumed unimpeachable at my family's kitchen table -- that Jesus, and most of his disciples, would have been right out there on Highway 11 with Robert Gore, Sam Shirah, Richard Haley, Winston Lockett and the rest of them, though they would probably not have been as well-behaved as they, nor as well groomed. And I might add that they would have been less welcome in my church than that young woman carrying her baby was. So I fell away from the church. I stopped calling myself a Christian. And for the most part I divorced myself from those who did. Or at least from those who did and practiced it with sanctified calumny and pious animosity in the enclaves where I lived and worked. But I did not fall away from the Bible. The language, the rhythm, the poetry, and the unparalleled grandeur of the King James Bible stayed with me and continued to inform and flavor my thinking, my language, my writing, and my images." -- Barry Moser, from an article first delivered as a lecture sponsored by Auburn Theological Seminary, "An Evening with Barry Moser: A Bible for a New Millennium," The Grolier Club, New York, February 27, 2001. http://www.crosscurrents.org/mosersummer2002.htm.

"I want to remind you that, fifty years ago, racial segregation here in the South was entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South Africa. The national government, even with liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson in office, was looking the other way while black people were beaten and killed and denied the opportunity to vote. So black people in the South decided they had to do something by themselves. They boycotted and sat in and picketed and demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and some were killed, but their cries for freedom were soon heard all over the nation and around the world, and the President and Congress finally did what they had previously failed to do -- enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Many people had said: The South will never change. But it did change. It changed because ordinary people organized and took risks and challenged the system and would not give up. That's when democracy came alive. I want to remind you also that when the war in Vietnam was going on, and young Americans were dying and coming home paralyzed, and our government was bombing the villages of Vietnam -- bombing schools and hospitals and killing ordinary people in huge numbers -- it looked hopeless to try to stop the war. But just as in the Southern movement, people began to protest and soon it caught on. It was a national movement. Soldiers were coming back and denouncing the war, and young people were refusing to join the military, and the war had to end." -- Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus at Boston University, from his commencement address delivered at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia on May 15, 2005. [Zinn had taught at Spelman College from 1956 until 1963 when, due to his civil rights activities, Zinn had been fired from Spelman, where he'd been chair of the History Department. Though tenured and a department head, Spelman’s first black president, Albert Manley, had fired Zinn for “insubordination.” From 1963 until his retirement in 1988, Howard Zinn taught at Boston University.

1959-1960 "Considering the hardships his family faced, how did Moser secure an education at the Baylor School? “I was a recipient of a Benwood Foundation scholarship. This was a total secret until a few years ago, when the foundation made these things public. When I was at Baylor, I didn’t know,” Moser says.His social life as a student at the University of Chattanooga kept Moser tied to the Methodist Student Center, and in academics, Moser felt he was “for the most part, a dunce. I was never a good student, but I am very tenacious and pigheaded and have a penchant for driving work. That has made all the difference, not talent or intelligence.” George Cress, Moser’s mentor at the university, is someone Moser enjoys seeing when he visits Chattanooga. Moser has described Cress as a “wonderful colorist and cantankerous, little bald-headed guy—the spitting image of Winslow Homer.” To which Cress responds, “I finally decided to accept these as terms of endearment.” Cress says he considers it an honor to be called a strong influence in Moser’s life. Cress respectfully disagrees with Moser’s assessment of his years at the university. “Barry was a very good student, particularly in drawing. We detected a very definite promise and talent,” Cress says. Evolution, not epiphany, is the way Moser describes his career development. “Painting led me to printmaking. Printmaking led me to printing. And typography led me to the marriage of printing and printmaking, which is the illustrated book.” -- from "Work of Art," by Cindy Carroll, in the University Tennessee Alumnus magazine, Volume 81; Number 1: Winter 2001.

1960 John Marquand died in his sleep of a heart attack on July 16, 1960 in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

1960 Newburyport, Massachusetts: Author Truman Nelson published his John Brown novel, In The Surveyor, in which Brown was portrayed as the decisive man of action that U.S. abolitionism needed in order to attain its anti-slavery objectives. Nelson’s John Brown tells his Kansas followers: “I am eternally tired of hearing that word ‘caution.’ It is nothing but the word of cowardice.” Nelson considered John Brown “the finest example of pure revolutionary morality produced in this country, perhaps in any country.” In a 1973 essay, “On Creating Revolutionary Art and Going Out of Print,” Truman Nelson wrote, "The Surveyor went forever out of print… What had happened was that the political-revolutionary historical novel was phased out of the American literary scene…The historical novel is a prime form of people’s art…It can be very, very revolutionary and uncontrolled by the consciousness-controllers now deprinciple-izing and derevolution- izing students in the academic process—teaching counter-revolution. / It seems clear that these same people now control the publishing, the publicizing and the criticizing process with the same iron hand with which they control their students. It is no longer possible to circumvent them by writing revolutionary history in the form of a novel nor is it possible to attain the distribution or viability of revolutionary essays or tracts until they appear somewhere on a “reading list.” The only sensible suggestion on this matter comes from Lenin: “The first thing to do is deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishers and buying newspapers, and to do this the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed.” (In a radical left publication, the National Guardian, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a rave review of Nelson’s novel The Surveyor). Nelson’s last long work of fiction, the unfinished God in Love: The Sexual Revolution of John Humphrey Noyes, discussed sexual liberation and women’s liberation in the context of the utopian Oneida Colony community.

"Those were the years of the great movement in the South against racial segregation, and I became involved in that in Atlanta, in Albany, Georgia, in Selma, Alabama, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and Itta Bena and Jackson. I learned something about democracy: that it does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice. I learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent person realizes at a certain point -- that race is a manufactured thing, an artificial thing... I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I could watch a marvelous transformation in my students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then suddenly they were leaving the campus and going into town, and sitting in, and being arrested, and then coming out of jail full of fire and rebellion. My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you. There are wonderful people, black and white, who are models. I don't mean African- Americans like Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas, who have become servants of the rich and powerful. I mean W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Marian Wright Edelman, and James Baldwin and Josephine Baker and good white folk, too, who defied the Establishment to work for peace and justice." -- Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus at Boston University, from his commencement address delivered at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia on May 15, 2005. [Zinn had taught at Spelman College from 1956 until 1963 when, due to his civil rights activities, Zinn had been fired from Spelman, where he'd been chair of the History Department. Though tenured and a department head, Spelman’s first black president, Albert Manley, had fired Zinn for “insubordination.” From 1963 until his retirement in 1988, Howard Zinn taught at Boston University.

1960 Thomas Merton began to correspond with Ananda Coomaraswamy. Coomaraswamy had deeply influenced Merton's view of sacred art and the variety of mystical traditions.

1960 Third International Congress of Plastic Arts in Vienna made an outline proposal drawn op in five paragraphs offering a precise definition of an original print.

1961 Alan Kay expelled from Bethany College in West Virginia for protesting the Jewish quota. He went to Denver to give guitar lessons. He joined the U.S. Air Force volunteer service, and performed well on a computed programming aptitude test. The Air Force put him to work on an IBM 1401.

1962-1966 Alan Kay left the Air Force and started classes at the University of Colorado, where he studied Mathematics and Molecular Biology. He got bachelors degrees in mathematics and molecular biology from the University of Colorado, where he spent much of his time designing and building theater sets. He graduated in 1966 and enrolled at the University of Utah, majoring in Electrical Engineering. He was involved in the Utah ARPA Project (ARPA -- Advanced Research Projects Agency), the forerunner of the Internet.

1963 Howard Zinn, born of Russian immigrants in New York City in 1922, after WWII took his B.A. at New York University, followed by graduate school at Columbia, where he earned an M.A. and Ph.D. In August, 1956 Zinn accepted an offer to teach at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Zinn was an “adult advisor” for the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). Though tenured, and a department head, Spelman’s first black president, Albert Manley, fired him for “insubordination” in 1963. (From 1963 until his retirement in 1988, Howard Zinn taught at Boston University.

1963 "On November 22, 1963, my wife and I were in our living room when the phone rang. It was a friend, speaking excitedly: 'Turn on your TV! President Kennedy has been shot!' We turned it on in time to hear that last rites were being administered. My immediate feelings of shock and sadness, always a reaction to a sudden, unexpected death of someone you have come to know, were followed by thoughts about violence and fanaticism. We had just moved to the Boston area after seven years in the South, teaching and living in a black community in Atlanta, becoming involved in the movement against racial segregation. Countless acts of violence had taken place against black people in the South, with which every national administration since the Civil War, including that of John F. Kennedy, had failed to interfere. Kennedy was young, good-looking, with a fine sense of humor. Some of his speeches suggested a great vision of, yes, a new frontier, a world at peace. But his policies, increasing drastically the number of US soldiers in Vietnam and maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal (far more than required to deter any possible Soviet attack) did not break from the emphasis on military force that seemed central to government policy since the World War II. I wondered, still shaken by the assassination, if such acts of fanatic violence would ever stop so long as the nation itself did not turn away from the idea that brute force could solve fundamental problems. I wondered whether the tragic death of John F. Kennedy would cause a rethinking of what we should be as a nation." -- Howard Zinn, Boston University History Professor, in the Boston Globe, November 22, 2003.

1963 The University of Massachusetts Press, the book-publishing arm of the University of Massachusetts, was founded in 1963. Its mission: "to publish first-rate books, edit them carefully, design them well, and market them vigorously. In so doing, it supports and enhances the university's role as a major research institution."

1964 Philip Hofer began his Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts series with French 16th century books compiled with the help of his wife, Ruth, and Harvard University library president William Jackson. A second series appeared in 1974. Hofer became secretary of the Fogg Art Museum.

1964 Publication of Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden.

1964 One of the most original perspectives to come out in the sixties was a psychological interpretation of Thoreau. This came out of Carl Bode's introduction to The Portable Thoreau, which he edited. Bode re-edited this edition in 1964 and drew on a Freudian approach to Thoreau, based on Raymond Gozzi's work. Bode claims that Thoreau was "plagued by an 'incipient homosexuality'"(p. 111, Bode as quoted by Meyer, 173) Bode saw John Brown as a mythological father-figure for Thoreau. The hatred of father is translated into a hatred of state, of the paternalistic powerful government, according to Bode. Martin Luther King used Thoreau to show the path of noviolent resistance, but once again he was using Thoreau, not studying him. "Resistance to Civil Government" was used by everyone from the Beats to the Pacifists. Staughton Lynd, a New Left historian, claimed that Thoreau was both violent and nonviolent, which would seem to follow from the dichotomy of messages in "Resistance to Civil Government" and "A Plea for John Brown." Attacks on Thoreau focused on his isolationism and his estrangement from collective action.

1965 Richard Wilbur enticed Ralph Ellison and his wife, Fanny, to move to western Massachusetts. The Ellisons bought a summeer home in Plainfield, bordering Cummington in the North. Ellison gardened and even purchased his own equipment to cut hay. The same year, 1965, a fire that had started as an electrical fire burned the house down, taking with it the only copy of a portion of Ellison's unfinished second novel. For almost twenty years after the fire, the Ellisons continued to spend summers in the property's outbuilding. (After Ralph Ellison's death in 1995, his wife Fanny continued living in their apartment in Spanish Harlem).

1966 Paul A. Bennett died of a heart attack in December, 1966.

1967 After a vote on June 7, 1967, some of Paul Bennett’s friends and piers formally incorporated in July 1967 as a non-profit educational organization, The Typophiles, Inc., in the State of New York.

1960s Leonard Baskin was reaching a mature phase as a book designer. The Gehenna Press favored classic typefaces, especially those designed and cut by Nicholas Jenson in Venice in the late fifteenth century and revived in the early twentieth-century. He crafted his own handwriting, adapting the Italian Renaissance chancery hand. Baskin also appreciated the modern typefaces Spectrum, designed by Jan Van Krimpen, and Civilité, designed by Herman Zapf (both revived Renaissance letterforms). “People like me, who care about printing,” Baskin once said, “constitute the tiniest lunatic fringe in the nation.” Baskin’s passion for creating fine press editions led him to print a number of hard-to-find and previously unpublished texts. "Gehenna Tracts" and "Gehenna Essays in Art" were two Baskin projects highlighting little-known and new texts.

1967 Barry Moser moved to the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts, having accepted a teaching post in in the Art Department at Williston Academy in Easthampton, Massachusetts. (In an interview with Jeanne Braham [in the 2004 book, Made By Hand], Moser said of this: "I had to escape the South, to expatriate myself from my people and from the society I was a part of.... I was a boy preacher, licensed at nineteen and preaching for three years or so in a fairly fundamentalist series of churches... I had a deeply held belief that the Bible was the infallible word of Godand that the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ was the salvation of humankind. But gradually I discovered that the people who were most likely to call themselves Christians were the least likely to actually be so. For example, I had a young woman in my Bible school class who got pregnant and was shunned. When I tried to offer my support to her, I lost my job, got fired -- even though, as I recall, Jesus hung out with sorry sorts.... But it wasn't just that form of hyposcrisy. It went deeper. You know, as I get older I realize more and more that race is the defining issue of my life. I was brought up in a family of virulent racists.... when I attended a highly respected military school, Baylor, racism was rampant. In New England I found my spiritual home. Intellectual freedom is the basis of that home, for with intellectual freedom I was left alone to think my own thoughts, to define my own values, a freedom I did not enjoy in the South..."

1967-1969 Alan Kay was involved in creating the FLEX Machine, an early modern computer desktop machine -- a so-called "personal computer." It had a display, a pointing and drawing tablet, a multiple window graphical user interface and the first object oriented operating system.

1968 Alan Kay met Seymour Papert at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the fall of 1968. Kay watched Papert and his colleagues teaching children how to program in LOGO. After writing a thesis about The Reactive Engine and graphical object-orientation and getting his Ph.D from the University of Utah, he spent two years teaching at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He began thinking about a book-sized computer that the user, especially children, could use in place of paper. He dubbed his project "KiddieKomp." Kay began work on the Smalltalk language..

1968 Thomas Merton, attending an international conference on Christian and Buddhist monasticism in Bangkok, Thailand, was accidentally electrocuted on December 10, 1968.

1968 Lance Hidy (born 1946), was born and raised in Portland, Oregon where he had learned italic handwriting at age twelve, attended Yale University, studying painting and printmaking in the mid-1960s with Leonard Baskin. He graduated from Yale in 1968, then ventured into typography and book design.

Late 1960s Bookbinder Arno Werner, born in Germany in 1899, had arrived in NewYork City in 1925. He'd moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts in the 1940s. In Northampton in the 1960s, Werner took on apprentices in his shop: Gray Parrot, David Bourbeau, Carol Blinn, and others.

1969 Barry Moser began printing at the old railroad terminal owned by the Williston Academy in Easthampton, Massachusetts. See Ram Dass's story of huis father's turning it over to Williston]. Moser had met Hrold MGrath at Baskin's Gehenna Press studio and fell in love with the inks, papers, and ambience of the printer's chambers. Soon after, Moser established his own press, Pennyroyal Press. [In his autobiographical collection of essays, In the Face of Presumption, in the essay Leper & a Witch's Garden," Moser wrote of Pennyroyal: "The choice of the name was, first of all, influenced by Mandragora Press, the name David Godine was then using for his limited edition work. Mandragora is the genus name of the mandrake, a plant, as legend holds, that grows at the foot of scaffolds nurtured the hanged man's blood, and screams when plucked from the earth. My then-current fascination with witchcraft, demonology, and plant lore seemed to be a fertile place to look for a name. Pennyroyal, I learned from Dorothy Jacob's book A Witch's Guide to Gardening, is 'a plant common to every witch's garland.' As a word, Pennyroyal seemed an interesting oxymoron, if nothing else, because it played on my wanting to do grand and regal books though I had no money. I wish now that I had been less self-conscious and precious about the naming of the press and had simply called it The Moser press. Today the historic allusion to Thomas Bird Mosher's The Mosher press is more interesting to me than the herbal, witchcraft allusion. Alas, hindsight. I began reading everything I could find on the history of private presses, the history of the book, book design, paper making, binding, lettering, calligraphy, asnd typography: paul Bennett, Douglas McMurtrie, Graily Hewitt, Eric Gill, Dard Hunter, Douglas Cockerell, Roderick Cave, Alfred Fairbank, Colin Clair, Emil Ruder, D.B. Updike, Rudolph Koch, Alexander Nesbitt, John Howard Benson, Oscar Ogg, Paul Standard, Stanley Morison, Edward Johnston, Herman Degering, Frederick Goudy, Egon Weiss, Adrian Wilson, Hugh Williamson."

1970-1971 "[Barry] Moser spent the 1970-'71 academic year as a graduate student at UMass. He had something to prove to himself at that point, says the artist. His earlier academic career had been rocky: 'After six years of military school, I was kind of like "Free At Last!" ' He had cracked few books and 'consumed copious amounts of whiskey,' and wound up being rejected by several graduate programs. But upon coming to the Valley to teach at the Williston-Northampton School, he was recommended by world-renowned artist Leonard Baskin for admission to UMass. 'I carried a full load and got a 4.0 average,' Moser says proudly of that year studying with Jack Coughlin, Hui-Ming Wang, and Fred Becker." -- Patricia Wright, from her article "Moser's Masterwork Brings Bible Stories Down to Earth, in the UMassOnline magazine htp://www.umass.edu/umassmag/archives/2000/spring2000/arts.html.

1970 Kurt Vonnegut separated from his wife and moved to New York City, to live in a Manhattan town house near the United Nations building. He also had a house in the Hamptons on Long Island for more than 20 years. Vonnegut and Cox were officially divorced in 1979, and in November of that year he married photographer Jill Krementz. Three years later they adopted a girl, Lilly."

1970 The University Press of New England was founded in 1970. It was supported by a consortium of schools: Brandeis University, Dartmouth College, the University of New Hampshire, Northeastern University, Tufts University and University of Vermont. The publishing consortium was based at Dartmouth College, the host institution. UPNE earned a reputation for excellence in scholarly, instructional, reference, literary and artistic, and general-interest books. Many were published cooperatively with one of the member institutions, and carried a joint imprint. Others were published solely under the University Press of New England imprint.

1970 The publishing firm David R. Godine was founded in 1970. After earning degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard University, David Godine had gone to work for Leonard Baskin and Harold McGrath, Baskin's master printer. The following year, 1970, Godine opened a printing shop in a deserted barn in Brookline, Massachusetts. His first books, printed on his own presses, were nearly all letterpress, limited editions printed on high-quality rag or handmade paper. Many of these early volumes are now collector's items. Among those working with Godine in the early years were typographer and poster artist Lance Hidy and printer Michael Bixler.

1971 Michael Bixler had graduated from the School of Printing at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1969. He served in the U.S. Navy for two years. In 1971, he began working with David R. Godine at Godine's private press in Brookline, Massachusetts.

1971 Publication of booklet (prospectus), The Heron Press Celebrates {Bruce Chandler]. Six pages. The Heron Press Williamsburgh, Massachusetts, 1971.

1971 The Hampshire Bookshop, founded by Marion E. Dodd and Mary Byers Smith in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1916, closed in 1971.

1971 Michael Hart initiated Project Gutenberg by typing the Declaration of Independence at the University of Illinois. Project Gutenberg was founded to electronically record and store the world’s great literature (as ASCII text).

1972 After graduating from the University of Utah with distinction (getting both Masters and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering), Alan Kay took a job at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in 1972, forming the Learning Research Group. There, expanding on his research into the intuitive processes of learning and creativity, he began using Smalltalk in an educational context, and led efforts to develop graphical user interfaces for personal computers, introducing iconic, graphical representations of computing functions -- folders, menus, and overlapping windows on the desktop. He convinced the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to fund a lab to put together a hardware prototype of the Dynabook the Alto, which had bitmapped display, mouse and network connectivity -- the prototype for the modern workstation. Kay set out to design software to make it all usable.

1972 Harry Duncan accepted an offer to found a press for University of Nebraska, which he called Abattoir Press. Nevertheless, through all his years at the typographic laboratory at University of Iowa's School of Journalism (1956-1972) and at the University of Nebraska, Duncan continued publishing books and pamphlets under the imprint of the Cummington Press.

1973 Michael Bixler left David R. Godine and, with his wife Winifred, opened his press, Bixler Press & Letter Foundry, in Boston.

1973 Fritz Kredel died in 1973.

1973 The UMass Amherst exhibition, Bookmaking as a Fine Art, featured Arno Werner.

1974 Barry Moser's Pennyroyal Press was struggling to make do. Along came bookseller jeffrey Dwyer, who had an innovative financing scheme, a subscription-based plan, to assure Moser could proceed with his printing of fine books.

1974 Leonard Baskin and his second wife, Lisa, moved to England.

1970s At post-Baskin Smith College, sculptor-graphic-artist-typographer-calligrapher Elliot Offner taught the course Introduction to Printing (also Calligraphy and letterforms). Offner was the official Printer to the College. offner took over the Smith College Student Printing Office (through to 1995). Offner's own press was the Rosemary Press.

1974 Leonard Baskin sold all the Gehenna Press printing equipment to Harold McGrath -- for a dollar.

1974 Ruth Mortimer arrived at Smith College, having been at Harvard's Houghton Library, where she'd prepared the catalogues of the Philip Hofer collections of Franch and Italian sixteenth century books.

1975 The Hampshire Typothetae was founded by Northampton businessman John Locke, rare book librarians John Lancaster and Ruth Mortimer, bookseller Jeffrey Dwyer, book artist Barry Moser, and master pressman Harold McGrath.

1975 Graphic Arts Institute of New England, Inc. (Graphic Arts Institute of Massachusetts, Inc., which had evolved from Boston Typothetae) moved from its long-time home at 10 High St., Boston to Auburndale in Newton, Massachusetts.

1975 Lime Rock Press established in Salisbury, Connecticut by W.N. Seymour, Jr. The press specializes in two types of books: literary environment books and livres d'artiste. Lime Rock Press developed literary environment books to include black-and-white photographs of the settings that shaped and inspired various authors. The livres d'artiste developed by Lime Rock Press take the form of mounted original black-and-white photographs or unbound sheets of paper with original fine art prints. The press prints with letterpress by hand as well as using up-to-date modern technology.

1976 Ink-jet printing announced by IBM.

1976 In an interview, Truman Nelson said, “I consider myself to be a Marxist, guided by the concept of historical materialism.” He noted, "I am now 65 and applying for social security. My monthly stipend will be $140. This could be devastating to think that my ultimate income is so little. My only recourse outside of my writing is welfare, which would bring it up to $200 a month. But I feel honored by this. I am proud of the fact that I have contributed eight revolutionary books without feeding any profit back into the system." (Nelson had published The Torture of Mothers, which “actually got six young blacks convicted of murder out of a life sentence and out of prison after a series of trials in which the book was their most substantive defense mechanism,” Nelson said [James Baldwin, reviewing The Torture of Mothers in The Nation, described it as “an extraordinary moral achievement, in the great American tradition of Tom Paine and Frederick Douglass.”] and The Right of Revolution, reflections on the political meaning of the 1967 African-American rebellion in Newark. The black writer Julian Mayfield commented (in The Nation), “Nelson is one of the few white historians I would want my children to read.”

1976 Upon the publication of Saul Bellow's book Humboldt's Gift in 1976, Gloria L. Cronin wrote a review the book titled, "Art vs. Anarchy: Citrine's Transcendental Experiment in Humboldt's Gift" (Indian Journal of American Studies 15.1, 1985: 33–43).

1976 Hampshire Typothetae in Northampton, Massachusetts was founded in 1976 by Barry Moser and Harold McGrath. The goals of the press were "the production of fine printing, and to pass on that knowledge to others... Publications of the Hampshire Typothetae emphasize poetry, the arts of the book, and portfolios of visual interest" (-- Fourth International Directory of Private Presses: Letterpress, Sacramento: Press of Arden Park, 1986).

1976-1994 From 1976 until her death in 1994, Ruth Mortimer offered a popular Smith College course, The Compositon of Books.

1977 Doña Luisa Coomaraswamy, the widow of Ananda Coomaraswamy, who organized her husband's papers after his death, attempted to collect some of his unfinished projects for publication as a book of collected writings. She died before finishing the project. In 1977, a two-volume set of his papers, edited by Roger Lipsey, was published.

1978 Lance Hidy started his own silk screen poster design business.

1979 After receiving an MFA in printmaking from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Alan James Robinson (born 1950) founded the Cheloniidae Press with Joel Ginsburg in 1979.

1979 Alan Kay kept busy, evolving his idea of a hand-held stand alone interactive-graphic computer, which he dubbed the "Dynabook." Kay described his Dynabook as "a portable interactive personal computer, as accessible as a book." Computers, Kay recognized, might one day replace books. The Dynabook was conceived as a "dynamic medium for creative thought," synthesizing media: pictures, animation, sound, and text. The Dynabook would be linked to a network and offer users a synthesis of text, visuals, animation and audio. The Dynabook could be called the first prototype for the notebook computers, laptops, and handhelds (PDAs -- personal data assistants), with their light weight, flat screens, brilliant color, graphic capabilities, multiple media, and wireless connections. Kay was convinced "dynamic media" represented an important departure from “static media” – books, paintings, television, photography, and film. He saw that interactivity would characterize future communications media. Kay had participated in creating the Xerox Alto which, with its bitmapped display, mouse and network connectivity was the prototype for the modern workstation. The Alto would inspire Steve Jobs and colleagues at Apple Computer to create the Macintosh.

1979 When Jobs visited PARC in 1979, he recognized that Alan Kay's ideas were the way of the future. Kay's work at PARC were the seeds from which the Apple Macintosh would grow -- the first microcomputer computer to ship (in 1984) with no end-user programmability.

1980 George Gloss’s son Ken helped his father rebuild the Brattle Book Shop (originally founded in 1825) after a fire destroyed the shop. When George passed away in 1985, Ken took over. People browsed avidly outside the store, where rows and rows of loaded-up book-carts re-created the atmosphere of a European street market. Inside the store were more than 250,000 books.

1980 Lance Hidy switched from books to posters and illustration, incorporating his love of printmaking with his training in letterforms. Hidy designed the typeface Penumbra for Adobe Systems at the suggestion of Sumner Stone who, in 1987, invited Hidy to join Adobe's Type Advisory Board. Penumbra was issued in 1994 as a capitals-only, Multiple Master typeface with unlimited variants of weight and serif. When Adobe abandoned the Multiple Master technology, Penumbra was reissued in four styles: sans serif, flare serif, half serif, and serif, and in four weights for each. The typeface was based on the lettering in Hidy's posters, with influence both from Greek geometric capitals, and the classical proportions of Roman inscriptions. In addition to running Lance Hidy Associates' Studio for Art and Design, he lectured in Design History at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and taught graphic design and illustration at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Massachusetts while living in Merrimac, Massachusetts.

1980 Boston University Professor Howard Zinn published his magnum opus, A Peoples History of the United States, in 1980.

1980 Philip Hofer retired from Harvard.

1981 Harvard University's Houghton Library honored master bookbinder Arno Werner with a one-man exhibition, with an illustrated catalogue and a testimonial dinner.

1981 The Hampshire Typothetae was re-located to Hatfield, Massaschusetts (Barry Moser's Pennyroyal Press was likewise re-located). "Moser describes himself as 'divorced, happily' from Kay Richmond, a 1963 UC alum. The two have three daughters and five granddaughters, with one on the way. Moser says he is very much in love with his girlfriend, who lives in Mississippi. He shares his Frank Lloyd Wright-style home with two English mastiffs named Ike and Truman. The nearest neighbors are wildlife; the nearest humans are at least a quarter-mile away through dense woods. 'The old-timers, who are suspicious of outsiders like me, are terse and distant. Not quick to warm up. And I love that because they leave you alone. No superficial niceties. Nobody ever asks me where my church home is,' Moser says." (from "Work of Art," by Cindy Carroll, in the University Tennessee Alumnus magazine, Volume 81; Number 1: Winter 2001).

1981 Roadkills: A Collection of Prose and Poetry [Easthampton, Mass.: Cheloniidae Press, 1981], Alan James Robinson's third publication, included one title-page etching and eleven wood engravings by Robinson, and a collection of poetry and prose on the subject of roadkills by Gillian Conoley, Madeline DeFrees, Richard Eberhart, John McPhee, Gary Snyder, and William Stafford. Roadkills was produced in an edition of 250 fifty portfolios and fifty deluxe copies containing an additional suite of prints.

1981-1984 Alan Kay was Chief Scientist at Atari from 1981 to 1984. He set up Atari Research Labs throughout the country.

1982 A Newsweek article named Harry Duncan of the Cummington Press "father of the post-World-War II private-press movement."

1982 Michael and Winifred Bixler left Boston in 1982, relocating to Skaneateles, in upper New York state.

1982 Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Illustrated by Barry Moser. Printed by Harold McGrath at Pennyroyal Press, West Hatfield, Massachusetts 1982.Describing this work Moser wrote, "I have tried to keep the illustrations weird (yet reasonable), and grotesque (yet humorous), but I have not tried to make them pretty or graceful."

1983 Barry Moser's Pennyroyal Press edition of Alice in Wonderland won the National Book Award for Design and Illustration in 1983.

1983 James Baldwin in Amherst] James Baldwin (1924-1987) had grown up in Harlem, and had become a novelist, poet, and powerful civil rights activist. After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, Baldwin had acknowledged bitterly that violence may be the only route to racial justice. In 1983, Badlwin was appointed Five College Professor in the Afro-American Studies department, UMass, Amherst. There he met Leonard Baskin. The two became friends. Baskin, captivated by Baldwin’s imagery, suggested the two collaborate but, before they could realize their project, Baldwin contracted and succumbed to stomach cancer (he spent his last years in St. Paul de Vence on the Riviera, France, where he died November 30, 1987). Baskin decided, nevertheless, to continue the project as a memorial, creating a series of portraits of Baldwin to accompany previously unpublished poems. Gypsy was printed in an edition of 325 copies [bound by Daniel Gehnrich. See 2005: Daniel Gehnrich, Gybsy Bookbinder.

1983 Alan Kay left Xerox in 1983.

1984 Philip Hofer died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1984 The year the Macintosh, the first mass-marketed GUI-centric computer, came out, Alan Kay became a Fellow at Apple. from early 1984 through late 1996, the Apple Fellow and independent researcher would work on end-user languages, input-output devices, and the Viviarium, an educational research project at his Open School in West Hollywood, California. The project lasted nearly eight years. Kay lived in Los Angeles but also traveled across the country to teach occasionally at MIT.

1984 Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, illustrated by Barry Moser (Pennyroyal Press), trade edition published by Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1984.

1985 David Bourbeau, Thistle Bindery: Daniel Gehnrich completed a three-year apprenticeship in bookbinding and conservation in Berlin before returning to the States in 1985 to work for David Bourbeau at The Thistle Bindery, Gray Parrot, and The Pierpont-Morgan Library in New York City. He later established his own business in New Haven, and moved on to Worcester. Babette Gehnrich was trained in Berlin, Germany and Ascona, Switzerland. On coming to the United States she served an initial internship at the Folger Shakespeare library in Washington, and worked for both David Bourbeau and Gray Parrot. In 1986 she took a position at Yale as Assistant Conservator. Babette is the Chief Conservator at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester. Babette and Daniel Gehnrich later moved to Paxton, Massachusetts.

1986 Graphic Arts Institute of New England, Inc. purchased and moved into its own building in Natick.

1986 Hampshire Typothetae, founded in 1976 by Barry Moser and Harold McGrath, ceased operations.

1986 -1990 The Vivarium project, overseen by its principal designer, Alan Kay. Team member Larry Yaeger wrote, "we hope that our research will lead us to useful ways of designing and deploying 'agents' --- little (or not so little) software tools that will effect our wishes in the computer, from answering the phone and setting up our calendar like a personal secretary to culling articles of interest from all the world's news sources and preparing our own personal 'newspaper' to browsing the world's databases in search of information relating to a personal enquiry, be it technical, literary, or completely fanciful.” Input to the Vivarium program came from the members of the advisory council -- including: former Disney animator Frank Thomas, creator of Bambi and other popular characters; Gossamer Albatross inventor Paul McCready; author of Society of Mind and dean of artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky; author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins; neural network expert and innovator, Geoff Hinton; author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy four-part trilogy and the Dirk Gently novels, Douglas Adams; and Koko, the gorilla who has learned to speak with American Sign Language."

Late 1980s Wang Laboratories demonstrated pen-based “Freestyle” software, enabling users to mark up “electronic paper” documents.

1987 The New York Times named Barry Moser's Jump, Again! The Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit one of the Ten Best Illustrated Children's Books. That same year, Redbook named it a Best Book for Children.

1987 Although the legal name of the Graphic Arts Institute of New England, Inc. remained, the association began doing business as "Printing Industries of New England."

1987 David Bourbeau of Thistle Bindery in Eashampton, Massachusetts organized "Form & Content: The Art of the Book in the Pioneer Valley," a two-week event that brought artisans and the public together for lectures, readings, a design forum, workshops, demonstrations, a book fair, and other festivities, all showcasing area bookworkers. Nearly forty printers, bookbinders, paper makers, and paper decorators participated in the exhibition. "Form and Content assembles for the first time the work of the largest community of professional book artists in the country," Bourbeau wrote in the program, "many of whom are acknowledged as the most accomplished in the field today." [Bourbeau felt himself to be, more than a bookbinder, a "Bibliotect" (Leonard Baskin referred to himself, as typographer and book artist, as an “architect of the page”).

1987 At the Easthampton, Massachusetts Public Library (Bookbinder David Bourbeau would become President of the Friends of the Library), the trustees ("Corporators" of the Library Corporation) vowed to reject town funding, fire the staff, and run the library themselves. "Charitable trustees tend to clothe themselves in the cloak of privacy," wrote James Baughman in his Trustees, Trusteeship, and the Public Good (published in June, 1987), "although their private nature relates more to the institution's management than to its use, which is public. One can find out more about a public corporation... than about a noprofit organization. The board of trustees of a charitable organization is often a self-perpetuating group of individuals -- principally business and professional people -- who meet in private and do not publish accounts of their business....The public's right to know is seriously blighted because even the press is denied access to charitable trustees' activities. This reduces trustee accountability to the public.".

1988 Bruce Chandler published his book, Lovejoy [Lovejoy, Excerpts from a Memoir. A Commentary and Etchings by Bruce Chandler with an Epilogue by Anthony Lewis. Boston: Heron Press, 1988]. 33pp. First edition. Text printed by Dan Keleher. Illustrated with eight etchings, most drypoints, some with aquatint and lift ground. The entire edition consisted of 115 copies, 100 on moldmade paper and 15 on handmade paper (each signed by the author/artist, Bruce Chandler, and Anthony Lewis, who contributed an afterword; each containing an additional etching, signed by Chandler, bound by the Harcourt Bindery in quarter blue morocco and blue linen over boards in a tan linen clamshell box).

1989 "A public library is just that," Marilyn Gell Mason explained in "Politics and the Public Library: A Management Guide" in the March 15, 1989 issue of Library Journal: "the public's library. It belongs to the citizens of a given community. It does not belong to the library director. Trustees are selected as representatives of the community to govern the library. The library director is hired by those trustees to manage the institution and to carry out policies established by the board. The board makes policy. The director carries out policy. As straightforward as this principle may seem, many of the problems that arise between directors and boards are a result of a confusion of roles."

1989 Alan James Robinson founded ABCedary Productions with author Mark Philip Carol.

1989 Richard Wilbur (of Cummington, Massachusetts) won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, New and Collected Poems (published 1988). He'd previously received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his book Things of This World (1956). Other books include The Mind-Reader: New Poems (1976); Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (1969); Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (1961); Ceremony and Other Poems (1950); and The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947). Among his honors are the Wallace Stevens Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bollingen Prize, the T. S. Eliot Award, a Ford Foundation Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, two PEN translation awards, the Prix de Rome Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He was elected a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. He was a Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets. He was Poet Laureate of the United States. Wilbur said it was Cummington's landscape that kept him there (Wilbur had grown up on a farm in New Jersey). Wilbur had imagined he'd end up living by the sea, but Cummington won. The wind in the trees and woods, the streams, "the up and down-ness of the terrain and cool nights" were, for him, "the complete equivalent to the ocean." ("Life seems rich enough without the latest technology," Richard Wilbur has said.)

1989-1990 Easthampton Public Library, Easthampton, Massachusetts: "The Art of the Book in Easthampton" (monthly exhibits, lectures, presentations, demonstrations) -- September, 1989: David Bourbeau, Thistle Bindery, 39 Union Street, Easthampton; October, 1989: Carol Blinn, Warwick Press, One Cottage Street, Easthampton; November, 1989: Faith Harrison Decorative Papers, One Cottage Street, Easthampton; December, 1989: Gary Metras, Adastra Press, 101 Strong Street, Easthampton; January, 1990: Barry Moser, Pennyroyal Press, West Hatfield; February, 1990: Claudia Cohen, Bookbinder, One Cottage Street, Easthampton; March, 1990: Daniel Kelm (The Wide Awake Garage) / Peter Geraty, Bookbinding and Restoration / Sara Pringle, Bookbinder, One Cottage Street, Easthampton; April, 1990: Alan James Robinson, Cheloniidae Press, One Cottage Street, Easthampton.

1990 David R. Godine launched his imprint, Hoc Volo, a limited edition book club featuring the book arts, typography, calligraphy, and poetry.

1990 Michael Hart introduced the first CDROM of eTexts at the Chicago Midwinter ALA meeting on January 6, 1990 -- "the Library of the Future" 1st edition, which Michael Hart introduced to the American Library Association (a gameboy device which had a screen smaller than Palm Pilot but had a book light. There were only about a dozen eTexts you could download from the Internet at that time.

1990 Fritz Eichenberg, considered one of the most renowned book illustrators in the world, died in 1990. Perhaps best known for his illustrations of Russian literature and gothic tales during the 1930s and 1940s, he'd also published many illustrations in the Catholic Worker during the 1950s. He'd supported young artists experimenting with new printmaking techniques and had published the reknowned history of the graphic arts, The Art of the Print.

1991 The first issue of "Firsts: Collecting Modern First Editions" was published January, 1991. According to the first issue, its publishers felt there was no magazine aimed directly at collectors of modern first editions. In January 1995, the focus of "Firsts" was expanded and its title became "Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine."

1991 Poet Stephen Philbrick, who'd purchased a hilltop farmhouse surrounded by sloping pastures and sheep in Windsor, Massachusetts in 1979, began to live there (with his second wife, Constance Talbot) in the summer of 1992. Philbrick, a former pro baseball player turned local pitching coach, is the minister of the West Cummington Church (in one of his early sermons, Philbrick read a poem, "Goldenrod." Another sermon began with the words, "Easter did not happen." Sundays, Philbrick went directly from his morning church service in West Cummington to an afternoon shift manning the register at Cummington's Old Creamery Grocery.

1992 Alan James Robinson's merged his Cheloniidae Press with ABCedary Productions in 1992 to form The Press of the Sea Turtle. Robinson designs and illustrates all of the books in collaboration with numerous artisans and craftsman, mostly from Western Massachusetts, a center of book-arts activity. All of Robinson's works are printed by celebrated master printer Harold P. McGrath.

1992 Publication of Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear by Ken Kesey, illustrated by Barry Moser.

1992 George P. Landow (professor of English and art history at Brown University published the book “HYPERTEXT: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology.” From 1985 on, Landow had worked on the team at the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University, which had developed Intermedia, a hypertext system. The first paragraph of Landow's book: "Hypertext, an information technology consisting of individual blocks of text, or lexias, and the electronic links that join them, has much in common with recent literary and critical theory. For example, like much recent work by poststructuralists, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, hypertext reconceives conventional, long-held assumptions about authors and readers and the texts they write and read. Electronic linking, which provides one of the defining features of hypertext, also embodies Julia Kristeva's notions of intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin's emphasis upon multiivocality, Michel Foucault's conceptions of networks of power, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's ideas of rhizomatic, 'nomad thought.' The very idea of hypertextuality seems to have taken form at approximately the same time that poststructuralism developed, but their points of convergence have a closer relation than that of mere contingency, for both grow out of dissatisfaction with the related phenomena of the printed book and hierarchical thought. For this reason even thinkers like Helene Cixous, who seem resolutely opposed to technology, can call for ideas, such as l'ecriture feminine,that appear to find their instantiation in this new information technology." (Landow discussed the mechanics and practicalities of reading text on a screen instead of from a page in a hand-held book: "Reading Leather-bound volumes in the bathtub; or, The Hypertext Reading Site") .

1993 Brattleboro, Vermont. R. Micheal Segroves founded Modern Age Books with Geoffrey Chappell, a programmer he'd met while working as a consultant in Somerville. [“A true pioneer in the field of electronic publishing, Segroves first began work with the fledgling technology at Modern Age Books, an electronic documentation and computer products manual supplier he founded in 1993.” (-- OeB August 2002 press release)]. Four months after the launch of Modern Age Books, Toshiba hired the company to produce electronic copies of its manuals, followed by the Digital Equipment Corporation in Maynard, Massachusetts.

1993 Lance Hidy living in Newburyport, Massachusetts In in 1984, the Lance Hidy Archive at the University of New Hampshire Library was obtained (twenty items, Gouaches, Cut Paper, and Drawings from 1981) through a dealer in book arts. The collection was processed: March 1987. "This collection consists of the preliminary studies by Lance Hidy for his League of New Hampshire Craftsmen poster. It includes gouaches, cut paper, and drawings, plus 4 printed versions of the poster. " When the web site detailing the collection (http://www.izaak.unh.edu/specoll/mancoll/hidy.htm) was updateed in November 1993, it was noted that Lance Hidy lived in Newburyport, Massachusetts ("Lance Hidy, freelance designer of posters and books and co- founder of the Godine Press, was born in Oregon in 1946. He studied art at Yale and has become known for his silk screen posters. Hidy lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts."

1993 Saul Bellow, with his fifth wife Janis Freedman (they were married in 1989; in 1999, when Bellow was 84, a daughter, Naomi, was born), moved to New England. Bellow had accepted a teaching position at Boston University. Bellow lived on a remote 120-acre estate in rural Vermont, a two hour drive from Boston University and his second home in Brookline, Massachusetts.

1994 Death of Ruth Mortimer, rare books librarian, Harvard-Houghton bibliographer, and professor at Smith College (she taught the popular course The Compositon of Books).

1994 For the first time in history, chain bookstores (megabookstores, superstores) outsold independent stores, signaling the death of smaller booksellers.

1994 Modern Age Books issued, on CD-ROM, the eBook, “How to Really Create a Successful Business Plan,” by David E. Gumpert (“Copyright 1994 Goldhirsh Group, Inc. and Modern Age Books, Inc.; Vermont Electronic Publishing Engine c. 1994 by Modern Age Books, Inc.)

1995 Modern Age Books issued, on CD-ROM, the eBook “How to Really Start a Business,” also by David E. Gumpert (“Copyright 1994, 1995 Goldhirsh Group, Inc.and Modern Age Books, Inc.; Vermont Electronic Publishing Engine c. 1995 by Modern Age Books, Inc.) Segroves put together a business plan for his own $3.5 million company, making himself President and Chief Executive Officer of Modern Age Books based in Norwood, Massachusetts. Segroves used his contacts throughout the computer industry to make sales. That same year, the self-funded venture got a million dollars from Commonwealth Capital Ventures in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and a second million from Sigma Partners of Mountain View, California. MacMillan Computer Publishing, a division of MacMillan-McGraw Hill, was the first publisher to contract with Modern Age Books. "We're the content experts and Mike's software technology really was a great match for us," said Michael Violano, MacMillan’s Vice President of International Sales Rights. "Over the years, we've worked pretty effectively together to refine the technology and define the content so it travels well within the electronic format." International Data Group Inc. and other publishers soon were aboard. Four months after the launch of Modern Age Books, Toshiba hired the company to produce electronic copies of its manuals, followed by the Digital Equipment Corporation in Maynard, Massachusetts, AST Research in Irvine, California, IBM in Armonk, New York, and Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California. "Right now, of the top ten manufacturers in the [small office/home office computer] space, we have six who are utilizing our technology," Segroves said. "I'd like to have all ten."

1995 At the Bookbinding & the Book Arts Symposium & Exhibition at Wells College, Aurora, New York, May 11-13, 1995, Terry Belanger spoke on The Future of the Book (If Any). Though many presumed "a book" to be a unique physical object, Belanger insisted this would not be the definition that would prevail in the future. Economic difficulties were causing changes. All libraries already relied on reformatted copies. A great many old books would not be able to be kept in their original format; books that had significance as physical objects would be the only ones to survive. The library of the future would certainly be mostly electronic, but there would always be an interest in (and a market for) fine printed books, illustrated books, and one-of-a-kind art books. Aside from those, many books, even those considered rare, would not survive. Some institutions would have a "museum of the book" in one corner. "Change is neither merciful nor just," Belanger assured his groaning audience. "Nobody is asking your opinion. What will happen will happen. The only question is: When is the future?"

1995 Goodspeed's Boston bookshop closed.

1995-1999 Mike Violano (who’d wind up, in the fall of 2003, taking over Mike Segrove’s job at PalmDigital Media) was with Macmillan Publishing USA for nine years, holding various management positions in the computer and reference divisions of the company. From 1995 to September 1999, Violano was Vice President of International Sales and Subsidiary Rights. During this time, he substantially increased revenue from distribution partnerships, foreign translations, electronic licensing and special sales, and also played a key role in foreign acquisitions and forming overseas startups. As Vice President of International and Content Licensing, based in IDGB's New York office, Violano was responsible for two growing business areas for IDGB, building partnerships to expand the company's global sales network and localization programs and extending the international reach of its consumer and technology brands. Violano oversaw IDGB subsidiary CDG Books Canada and was the company's representative in its joint ventures in Australia (IDGB Australia) and Singapore (TransQuest Pte. Ltd.).

1995 Modern Age Books, reaching sales of $1.4 million, put its products on the open market. Internet book sales were on the rise, for example at Amazon.com, but distributing electronic books via the Internet was all but unheard of. At www.mabooks.com, via Netscape LivePay SSL secure transaction technology, electronic books could be purchased, paid for, and received online. Once a credit card was approved, the electronic book was downloaded directly onto the buyer's computer's hard drive. Segroves said he not only looked forward to selling “millions and millions of books off our site,” but also to working with “companies like Barnes & Noble to bring electronic delivery of books into their business model." Trusting in new and exciting breaktroughs for Microsoft's Windows CE technology, he predicted eBooks would break out of the reference book realm. In five or fewer years, he said, readers would be flipping through novels on handheld computers the size of small books. And Modern Age Books was going to be ready. Segroves wanted quickly to “become the standard for providing documents and books in electronic forms” on the Microsoft CE platform. The company offered a free electronic publishing toolkit at mabooks.com, so non-commercial users could download tools for putting a document or short story into Modern Age's electronic book format. The eBooks could then be read on the Microsoft CE platform. After long discussion, the old “Vermont Publishing Engine” now became the “E-DOC Engine” (c1994-1998). A fight over ownership of the term “E-Books” was in the courts. Modern Age Books adopted the term “V-Books” (Virtual books).

1995-1996 Michele Cloonan taught The Composition of Books (once Ruth Mortimer's course) at Smith College.

1996 First issue of Biblio Magazine published.

1996 Waltham, Massachusetts. John Carrera had named his Quercus Press back in 1993, when he was interning at the Silver Buckle Press at the University of Wisconsin. The name had sprung from his love of botany and trees. Quercus was Latin for Oak. The QU was also a graceful ligature that flourished in in older typefaces. This Quercus Press was not the first: Robinson Jeffers had named his press Quercus Press; and there was a literary publication in California in the 1960s named Quercus. John Carrera's mission: "To create lasting images in artist's books and other printed matter which can be experienced in an intimate way thereby allowing people to appreciate and enjoy the world of overlooked beauty." The first publication, Acquainted With the Night, had been produced in Madison in 1993. Quercus Press went into a dormant winter until Carrera moved to Boston to attend the North Bennet Street School. In 1996, Quercus Press moved into the Moody Street Building in Waltham, Massachusetts. On installation of a 1938 model 8 Linotype (and the small job-shop of Henry Doucette of Waltham which included numerous cases of type, a 12X15 Chandler and Price & a Guillotine), Quercus Press was up and running again(shortly after, Carrera brought up a Vandercook Universal III from Norfolk, Virginia).

1996 “I have found that there are many analogies to books and the history of the printing press that help when trying to understand the computer," Alan Kay noted in “Revealing the Elephant: The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education” (July/ August 1996 issue of Educom Review; Volume 31, number 4). "Like books, the computer’s ability to represent arbitrary symbols means that its scope is the full range of human endeavors that can be expressed in languages. This range extends from the most trivial – such as astrology, comic books, romance novels, pornography -- to the most profound -- such as political, artistic and scientific discussion. The computer also brings something very new to the party, and that is the ability to read and write its own symbols, and to do so with blazing speed. The result is that the computer can also represent dynbamic situations, again with the same range: from Saturday morning cartoons, to games and sports, to movies and theater, to simulations of complex social and scientific theories. The analogy to a library of books and communications systems is found in the dynamic networking of millions of computers together in the Internet. One can use this new kind of library from anywhere earth, it is continuously updated, and users van correspond and even work together on projects without having to be in the same physical location. To us, working on these ideas 30 years ago, it felt as though the next great ‘500-year invention’ after the printing press was born. And for a few -- very like the few that used the book to learn, understand and debate powerful ideas and usher in new ways of thinking about the world -- computers and networks are starting to be that important. The computer really is the next great thing after the book. But as was true with the book, most are being left behind.”

1996 Modern Age Books moved from Brattleboro, Vermont to Norwood, Massachusetts, September 2, 1996.

1996 At the end of 1996, Kay left Apple to go to work as a Walt Disney Fellow working on digital media projects for Disney Imagineering. He would stay five years, departing in September, 2001.

1996 Modern Age Books now had more than 15 million electronic books “in print” -- “including up to 4 million preinstalled Windows 95 manuals on new PC hard drives.” (Pam Derringer, “Modern Age of Books Dawns in Norwood,” Mass High Tech Communications magazine, June 10, 1996. Vol 14, Issue 17).

1997 Alan Kay announced “The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet” on March 5, 1997, over radio IDT (Gerogia tech, Atlanta). Apple Fellow and Vice president of Research and Development, Alan Kay, announced, "Today, after 50 years of development, the computer is still masquerading as "better paper", but the next decade will be the transition into what computing and networks are really about: entirely new ways to communicate, do business, organize politically, think, and live. The changes are likely to be as broad and deep as those brought by the printing press to 15th century Europe. As usual, it will be much easier to invent the technology than it will be to help people make good use of it.”

1997 Noel Ignatiev received the 1997 American Book Award for his co-editing the Race Traitor anthology, published as a paperback in 1996. Ignatiev had previously published a book about the Boston Irish, How the Irish Became White. He worked for over twenty years in steel mills, farm equipment plants, and machine-tool and electrical parts factories before getting his PhD from Harvard University. He co-founded and was editor of the journal Race Traitor, published in Cambridge, Massachusetts and distributed from Dorchester. Ignatiev was one of the founders of the New Abolitionist Society, an organization committed to eradicating the “historically constructed social formation” of the white race. When he was not raising a ruckus, Ignatiev taught in the Department of Critical Studies at Massachusetts College of Art. He was simultaneously a fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute. A frequent public speaker, he taught at Bowdoin College as well as at Harvard. Rolling Stone magazine named him one of the “Ten Most Dangerous Minds” in academia.

1997 “Reading is a lot like sex,” Walter Kirn opened his April 21, 1997 Time magazine piece, Rediscovering the Joy of Text. “So much reading is done in private, behind closed doors… A book a day? A month? A year? Do self-help books count, or only novels? What if they’re on tape?… Surely something profound is going on,” he concluded. “Surely a new age of literacy has dawned. Or might it be that reading resembles sex in yet another way? Perhaps the people who are always talking about it -- hatching book clubs, debating on the Internet, quoting from the latest New York Times review -- are making up for the fact that they’re not doing it.”

1997 At Smith College, Martin Antonetti began teaching the course The Composition of Books (taught through years by Ruth Mortimer, and 1995-1996 by Michele Cloonan).

1998 Harry Duncan (Cummington School for the Arts/Cummington Press) died in 1998.

1998 In Sudbury, Massachusetts in April 1998, with Mark Reichelt, Jeff Strobel cofounded Peanut Press, an electronic publisher for handheld computers (Palm Pilots / PDAs [personal digital assistants]) that initially targeted the large and rapidly growing installed base of PalmPilot organizers, offering the more than two million PalmPilot computer owners the ability to purchase and download eBooks through a web-based storefront in a secure electronic format -- dedicated to providing secure electronic publishing, distribution, and sales of high-quality fiction and nonfiction. The two founders promised to offer books for any up-and-coming handheld device that gained a significant market share. Peanut Press went live on October 26, 1998. "We've had an incredible response from PalmPilot computer users since we announced the formation of our company just a few months ago," Jeff announced. "We're thrilled to go live and announce that we'll be adding a variety of contemporary books on a weekly basis from here on out," he added. "Specifically, over the next several months customers can expect to find such popular titles as A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge and Cheekie by Clarence Nero," Mark Reichelt said. "One title we're particularly excited about is Joe Hutsko's highly-touted new book, The Deal, which customers will be able to purchase and download at the Peanut Press site in December. By choosing the Palm Computing platform for its launch, Peanut Press is already ahead of the curve in the electronic publishing industry," said Joe Hutsko, author of The Deal and regular contributor to the New York Times. "And by later branching out into other platforms, the company will continue to be a leader in the future," Hutsko continued. "Peanut Press is forging the way with vision in this exciting new arena," Philippe Kahn, CEO of Starfish Software, Inc., observed. Popular contemporary fiction and nonfiction books that came straight from the publisher’s frontlists were now available for reading on the Palm Computing platform (in October 1998, Palm was still owned by 3Com). Peanut Press formed alliances with Tor Books/St. Martin's Press; Avery Publishing Group; Council Oak Books; Aslan Publishing; Intrigue Press; Velocity Business Publishing, Open Road travel publishing; and romance novel publisher Dorchester Publishing. "We're thrilled to be the first to deliver top-notch books to the millions of people looking for additional ways to use their Palm Computing platform products and enjoy quality leisure-time reading anytime, anywhere," said Peanut Press co-founder, Jeff Strobel. To prevent customers from emailing their books to friends and family members, Peanut Press used the first eight numbers of a customer’s credit card as the key to opening the book. The feature limited the copying of books, but not the number of times a reader could delete and reload a title. For any book lost or deleted from a PC or Palm device, Peanut Press sent the customer a free replacement copy. "Because our books are securely encrypted for use on individual machines, we continue to attract prestigious publishers and, therefore, we'll be adding new titles regularly." Soon, the free Peanut Reader software enabled all handheld computer owners to read eBooks, whether on Palm OS or Windows CE handheld devices. Peanut Reader displayed styled formatting and text -- italics, bold, underline. The interface offered two font sizes and a reverse-screen feature, altering the screen from black on a white background to white on a black background. To navigate through the book, readers used the up-down scrolling button or tapped on the bottom of the screen to go forward and the top of the screen to go back. The text could be oriented on the screen in four ways -- normal view, at a 90-degree angle, upside down, or at a 270-degree angle. The orientation and font options were in the Preferences menu. There was an on-screen bookmark option, an annotation option for making notes, and a "turn-to-page" feature, letting readers jump ahead and back through the book’s pages. The company prospered. Subject categories included fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance, mysteries, classic and contemporary fiction, history, travel, business, poetry, spirituality, self-help, law, and science. Some of the major hardcover and paperback publishers began signing on -- Tor Books/St. Martin’s Press; Avery Publishing Group; Council Oak Books; Aslan Publishing; Intrigue Press; Velocity Business Publishing; Open Road Publishing, a travel-book publisher; and Dorchester Publishing Company, a romance-novel publisher. Peanut Press obtained the subsidiary rights to reprint their books for the Peanut Press proprietary reader software. Peanut Press offered easy purchase -- real-time order fulfillment. The customer placed the PalmPilot device in its cradle, pushed the HotSync Button, and the book was loaded on the PalmPilot organizer, ready for reading. The average time it took to download a Peanut Press book was about 1 minute on a 28.8-Kbps modem. The cost of the books was competitive with paper books, ranging from $2.00 to $14.99. “Since we went live in October, our repeat business has been so strong that our challenge has been keeping up with the demand for a wide variety of new and exciting titles,” said Mark Reichelt, CEO and co-founder of Peanut Press. “We’re pleased to announce today that we’re now selling over 90 books from an impressive list of publishers which continues to grow daily.”

1998 Modern Age Books had sold more than 50 million books. Modern Age books now evolved into Books24x7.com. Segroves “refocused Modern Age Books to become Books24x7.com, “the leading provider of online reference-ware for corporate IT departments.” (-- OeB August 2002 press release). Chris Pooley was hand-picked by Segroves to become the new CEO.

1998 After creating and closing Boondock Books, Mike went over to visit Jeff Strobel at PeanutPress.com. Strobel had cofounded Peanut Press with Mark Reichelt in April 1998. Pursuing his interest in electronic publishing for trade books, Mike became an investor in peanutpress.com, Inc. Then he went to work for the company as Vice president of Marketing and Sales. Peanutpress soon emerged as the leading provider of eBooks and associated technologies for handheld computers.

1999 “In addition to the new titles and publishers, our customers are also getting an improved reader on which to enjoy their books,” Jeff Strobel announced in May, 1999. “The upgraded Peanut Reader software offers users such improvements as faster paging, user-definable screen orientation, annotation editing, plus many other features.” Jeff also revealed the new Peanut MakeBook software. MakeBook was a Java program that read a text file formatted using either the Peanut Markup Language or a subset of HTML, which was then written to a Palm OS .pdb file, which could be hotsynced to a Palm device for reading with the Peanut Reader. Initially, Peanut press eBooks had been available only for purchase in the United States and Canada. In May, 1999, Jeff announced the opening of the online Peanut Press international bookstore.

1999 The Board of Directors of Printing Industries of America and the Board of Directors of the Graphics Arts Technical Foundation voted to merge the two organizations into one (The PIA/GATF).

1999 Barry Moser’s Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, begun in 1997 and completed in 1999, was exhibited in October 1999 at the R. Michelson Galleries, Northampton. "Together with an iconic Moses represented by Valley hero Leonard Baskin, and a Moser self-portrait as the Apostle Paul, it is these images that we reproduce here and on the back cover, courtesy of the R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton." -- Patricia Wright, from her article "Moser's Masterwork Brings Bible Stories Down to Earth, in the UMassOnline magazine [htp://www.umass.edu/umassmag/archives/2000/spring2000/arts.html] ] The project had been underwritten by Bruce Kovner, the chairman of an investment management company, the Caxton Corporation, and a collector of Moser's and other fine bookmakers' work. ("What have you always wanted to do that you haven't done yet?" Kovner had asked Moser on first meeting the artist several years before.) Kovner was Moser's patron during the four years it took to do the illustrations, a year of reading and three years of twelve-hour workdays in the studio. Moser, "a son of the Christian South" as a child had not been an avid reader. At nineteen, after a brush with death, he'd become a lay minister -- which vocation had not endured. ["Moser was a thousand miles away, living in Massachusetts, when his family home was sold. 'I’m glad I never saw it empty. Samuel Butler said an empty house is like a dead body from which life has departed. And that is so, I think, especially when we remember our childhood homes. We remember those time-distant and dream-like spaces so vividly in the quiet reflections of our later years,' Moser says. Even though Moser has lived for a long time in New England, he still considers himself a 'cultural Southerner.' " (from "Work of Art," by Cindy Carroll, in the University Tennessee Alumnus magazine, Volume 81; Number 1: Winter 2001).

1999 Moser’s Pennyroyal Caxton Bible was published in November 1999. [Pennyroyal Caxton Bible. West Hatfield, Massachusetts: Pennyroyal Caxton Press, 1999. Limited Edition. One of four hundred numbered copies printed on Zerkall bible paper. Two folio volumes. Typefaces used: Galliard, Mantinia, and Mantinia Greek designed by Matthew Carter and printed in double columns. Illustrated throughout with 235 engravings by Moser, executed especially for this book in a new process called Resingrave. Bound by Claudia Cohen and Sarah Creighton in full vellum over boards with gilt stamped lettering on spine and front cover. Both volumes housed in linen clam shell boxes with mounted paper spine labels printed in black and red. The Pennyroyal Caxton Bible followed Frederick H. A. Scrivener's 1873 critical edition of the Cambridge Paragraph Bible of the Authorized English Version.] Advance publicity in Newsweek, the New York Times and elsewhere emphasized the price tag of of the hand-bound Pennyroyal Caxton edition of four hundred copies, $10,000 (there was also a $30,000 edition on handmade paper with original drawings, of fifty copies). The book received much critical praise, but not everybody was happy. In the April 8, 2004 issue of the New York Times, Simon Winchester wrote a review declaring Moser's Pennyroyal Caxton edition of the Holy Bible indeed beautiful, but bloody expensive, a book "for the rich elite, for the collectors, for the private libraries or... for the crystal cathedrals and churches of the wealthier suburbs."

1999 November through December 22nd, 1999, the Morgan Gallery of the Neilson Library at Smith College exhibited The Book of Books: Pen & Ink to Polymer Plate, featuring manuscripts and printed Bibles from the 13th through 20th centuries, including the 1999 Pennyroyal Caxton Bible designed and illustrated by Barry Moser.

1999 In an interview with Anna Olswanger, Barry Moser said, "I want to bring to trade publishing the sensibilities of the private press world, those rarefied typographic and design sensibilities. I want that to be my legacy. I've done that to a point with my trade books. But I plan to go back to my first love -- fine books, hand-made books."

1999 By the end of 1999, some 10,000 people had bought Peanut Press books online. Peanut Press was then bought by NetLibrary. Then, when it began its own decline, Net Library sold the company.

2000 Death of Leonard Baskin. "I have been informed by Daniel Gehnrich that Leonard Baskin died on Saturday night, June 3, 2000.... So passes a significant influence upon American graphic and plastic arts of the past 50 years." --Marcus A. McCorison [http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/exlibris/2000/06/msg00037.html].

2000 Writing for the Albany New York Times Union, staff writer Doug Blackburn wrote (in "New York State of Mind," December 17, 2000) of Kurt Vonnegut, "the voice and vision behind 'Slaughterhouse Five' and many more novels (Vonnegut had just been made New York's latest "State Author"]. "...just once," he quoted Vonnegut, "I'd like to turn on the TV or radio and find out what's going on in the rest of the world. Hell, I'd like to know what's going on in my life.'' Blackburn continued: "For most of this year... the 78-year-old writer... has been living in a spacious studio apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he is teaching advanced writing at Smith College. He came to this thriving, picturesque New England town to heal as much as to inspire young students. Vonnegut was not in a good way when he arrived in Northampton in the spring. He was weak and out of sorts, the aftereffects of a Jan. 31 fire in his East Side Manhattan brownstone. The structural damage from the fire -- caused by a spilled ashtray -- was limited to the top floor of the building, but most of Vonnegut's clothes were lost and his archives were destroyed. The one-time volunteer with the Alplaus Fire Department suffered smoke inhalation trying to extinguish the blaze and was initially listed in critical condition. He was hospitalized for four days. 'I was a wreck after the fire. It seemed the best thing to do was come up here, where my daughter and nephews could take care of me. Now I'm thinking about suing the makers of Pall Mall,' he added, a devilish gleam in his eyes. 'On the package they promise to kill me and they still haven't done it.' His raspy laugh follows the oft-told line."

2000 Doug Blackburn wrote ("New York State of Mind," December 17, 2000) of Vonnegut, "His studio apartment near Smith College is decorated with children's artwork, as well as paintings and drawings that he did himself. 'It's something to do,' he said, 'like golf or playing bridge or anything else. My family, we're in the art business.' On the counter separating the kitchen and living room is a bumper sticker: 'Your planet's immune system/Is trying to get rid of you.' Since 1992 Vonnegut has been the honorary president of the American Humanist Association, succeeding Isaac Asimov, the late science fiction writer. The politically progressive organization, based near Buffalo in Amherst, has roughly 5,000 members and publishes a bimonthly magazine. It advances a philosophy of reason and compassion that is not traditionally religious, according to Fred Edwards, editor of The Humanist. Said Vonnegut: 'We try to behave as well as possible without any fear of any rewards or punishment in an afterlife. Historically, we've been very good citizens. We exist to let politicians know we're around. We believe in a strong separation of church and state.' He insists he is a Luddite. When he gave an address at Smith in October, Vonnegut inveighed against the Internet and society's increasing reliance on computer interaction. He said, 'I won't use the Internet, which is a particularly habit-forming, hallucinatory, pernicious form of LSD.' Yet he admits to owning and using an Apple Powerbook and admires its word-processing capability... Yet Vonnegut struggles with writing today. Sitting on the plain wooden end table that he has placed in front of himself as he sits on the couch is a tattered blue paper folder. Written in dark blue ink on the cover is one word: Novel. Next to the folder are a larger ceramic ashtray and a cherry red Zippo lighter. The Pall Malls are in his right pocket. 'Everybody should write to find out who they are and where they are,' he said. 'Right now, though, I'm thinking I want to turn the typewriter into a musical instrument because I can really play it. I do finger exercises in the morning and hope something else will come out'.".

2000 "...physicists have succeeded in constructing a framework that offers the best hope yet of integrating gravity with nature's other fundamental forces. This framework is popularly known as string theory because it postulates that the smallest, indivisible components of the universe are not point-like particles but infinitesimal loops that resemble tiny vibrating strings. 'String theory,' pioneering theorist Edward Witten of Einstein's own Institute for Advanced Study has observed, 'is a piece of 21st century physics that fell by chance into the 20th century'." -- J. Madeleine Nash, article "Einstein's Unfinished Symphony. Strings may do what Einstein finally failed to do: tie together the two great irreconcilable ideas of 20th century physics" ["the smooth continuum of space-time, where stars and planets reign, as described by his general theory of relativity, and the unseemly jitteriness of the submicroscopic quantum world, where particles hold sway" / "the conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity"]. Time magazine, Monday, Jan. 3, 2000.

2000 Viking published an edition of Moser's Bible at an affordable price. Moser said he got numerous hostile anonymous letters, one asking, "Why do people like you want to trash the things that are sacred?" He responded, "The opposite is true. I'm trying to find the sacred in the quotidian. It's as simple as that." (One benefit of the project, Moser said, was that it brought him back to prayer. "Not prayer in the sense of 'Our Father' or 'Hail Mary,' but in the sense that my work is my prayer.") "My work is one of the things that I do hold sacred," Moser said. At the bottom of the acknowledgement page, Moser put, in Hebrew, the final line of the Book of Nehemiah: "Remember me, O God, for my work.".

"I had no choice but to go with the truth as my eyes see it. As they have seen it as a witness, both through my own lenses and the borrowed lenses of the photographers and limners of other times and places have seen it -- Soldago and Evans, Goya and Bosch, Breughel and Witkin. And the truth I see is that the Bible is populated with people like you and me. People who are flawed and imperfect. People who have crooked teeth and bad skin. Who have stinky breath and dirty feet. Who don't always know the difference between right and wrong. Who are self-serving and capricious. People caught in the conflict and dichotomy between good and evil, between the sacred and the profane, between beauty and ugliness, and between the bright and the moronic. People who hope -- and many believe -- that they are made in the very image of God." -- Barry Moser, from an article first delivered as a lecture sponsored by Auburn Theological Seminary, "An Evening with Barry Moser: A Bible for a New Millennium," The Grolier Club, New York, February 27, 2001. http://www.crosscurrents.org/mosersummer2002.htm.

"Sacrifice, a central tenet of Judaism and Christianity, is implicitly violent. A young bullock is killed, its throat slit, its blood drained. The animal struggles until its death-throes cease. Its blood, a source of purification, is sprinkled on the altar. The violence continues as the animal is flayed, quartered, and burnt. Barbecues for a demanding God who seems (according to the Tanakh) to relish blood sacrifices and burnt offerings. In the Christian Bible we confront the cruel and sanguinary sacrifice of Jesus Christ, God's own son -- the ultimate act of violence. But once again, do we see that blood, that cruelty, and that violence in the images of the crucifixion? Not often. It has been leached off. Pared away. Hidden behind platitudes or the commonplace appearance of a sweet, languid Jesus attached without stress to his cross. Only a handful of paintings have dared show the agony that accompanies death by crucifixion. Death brought on, slowly, by exposure to the scorching sun. Sun that sears and blisters the flesh. Brought on by exposure to scavenger birds, who -- perching with sharp talons on naked and bloodstained shoulders -- peck out eyes, going for brains. Brought on by exposure to scavenger dogs that bite and rip the flesh of the lower legs and feet, mercifully expediting death. And finally brought on by asphyxiation -- breathe in, but can't breathe out. Perhaps, toward the end, it was so horrific that even a battle-forged soldier could stand it no longer and thrust a spear into Jesus' heart bringing His suffering to an end." -- Barry Moser, from the article "Blood & Stone: Violence in the Bible & the Eye of the Illustrator" by Barry Moser, in Cross Currents online magazine, July 2001. http://www.crosscurrents.org/moser0701.htm.

2001 Barry Moser: “At first it was just a realization that work is prayer, but now, in the aftermath, I have come to actually pray in the traditional sense. I still have my doubts about it, have my issues with it, but I am trying. I am exploring it. And I have taken the sacraments for the first time in 40 years. My work put me face-to-face with the fact that Christianity is, if nothing else, a sacramental religion. It was bought and paid for with flesh and blood. Wine and bread. I discovered that this means a hell of a lot more to me than preaching,” Moser says. (from "Work of Art," by Cindy Carroll, in the University Tennessee Alumnus magazine, Volume 81; Number 1: Winter 2001).

2001 "Barry Moser is currently on the faculty of Smith College where he team teaches a course called 'The Bible as Art' with Karl Donfried." from the Intro to an an article first delivered as a lecture sponsored by Auburn Theological Seminary, "An Evening with Barry Moser: A Bible for a New Millennium," The Grolier Club, New York, February 27, 2001. http://www.crosscurrents.org/mosersummer2002.htm.

2001 "Barry Moser... at Smith College [has finished teaching] with Karl Donfried, a course on the Bible as art. This fall he will be the Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Louisville, and the Geneva Lecturer at Queens College, Kingston." from the Intro to Barry Moser's article "Blood & Stone: Violence in the Bible & the Eye of the Illustrator" in Cross Currents online magazine, July 2001. http://www.crosscurrents.org/moser0701.htm.

2001 Howard Zinn on the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, New York City: "We should take our example not from our military and political leaders shouting 'retaliate' and 'war' but from the doctors and nurses and medical students and firemen and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not violence, but healing, not vengence, but compassion." -- Howard Zinn, from his essay, Retaliation, written shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

2001 DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts September 15, 2001 - January 6, 2002 "Terrors and Wonders: Monsters in Contemporary Art" - "Monsters -- both freaks of nature and profound creations of the human imagination -- have been present in the art, literature, folklore, and religion of all human cultures since the time of the earliest Paleolithic cave paintings. They have played the roles of gods and demons, universal creators and apocalyptic destroyers, messengers, guides, torturers, and healers. In our more secular age, monsters have served as penetrating metaphors for diverse aspects of human psychology. Monsters also reflect deep philosophical ideas surrounding good and evil, order and chaos, and nature and culture." Note: "Companion exhibition" to "Terrors and Wonders" -- "What's Under the Bed? Monsters in Children's Book Illustration" (DeCordova Museum, James and Audrey Foster Galleries), September 15, 2001 - January 6, 2002. "What's Under the Bed? Monsters in Children's Book Illustration is a companion exhibition to Terrors and Wonders: Monsters in Contemporary Art. After all, monsters have been a part of children's literature from time immemorial. Whether it's mythical monsters such as dragons, serpents, or Cyclopes or silly monsters such as 'The Hairy-Nosed Preposterous,' monsters are a part of our cultural heritage. And the monsters in children's literature are often drawn from different cultural traditions, such as the Kracken, a Scandinavian sea monster or a Golem, a creature from a Jewish legend... artists: Mark Buehner, Eric Carle, Mordicai Gerstein, Kevin Hawkes, Trina Schart Hyman, Barry Moser, Brian Pinkney, Peter Sís, David Wiesner, and David Wisniewski."

2001 In March, 2001, Net Library sold its Maynard, Massachusetts PDA eBook division (formerly PeanutPress.com) to Palm, Inc. and renamed Palm Digital Media Group, a division (subsidiary) of PalmSource, Inc., the Palm OS subsidiary of Palm, Inc. Mike Segroves became the Director of Business Development, responsible also for sales and marketing activities, positioning Palm Digital Media as the leader in providing electronic editions of publishers' frontlist titles for reading on PDAs. (Palm had approximately 70% market share for handheld computers). Palm Digital Media's publishing partners included AOL Time Warner Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw Hill, Penguin-Putnam, Random House, Simon & Schuster, St. Martin's Press, Walker & Company and many of the other leading American publishing houses. Mike served as Treasurer on the Board of Directors of the Open eBook Forum. (By November 2002, Palm Digital Media would offer a catalog of almost 7,000 titles).

2001 Alan Kay’s five-year contract with Disney ended in September 2001. Kay said he’d focused on how to design Internet spaces in the same way that Disney designs theme-park spaces. When Kay left Disney, his team of six programmers immediately took advantage of the voluntary severance packages offered them. Disney scaled back its Internet efforts, which it had been promoting heavily when Kay had joined the firm in 1996. In the meantime, Kay was one of the founders of the Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit organization in Glendale, California. Kay began work on a new programming system, Squeak, again focusing on children and education -- primary inspirations for all of Kay's work, including the Dynabook.

2002 Hewlett-Packard announced on November 26, 2002 that Alan Kay would join the company's research division. Kay, 62, would serve as a senior fellow at HP Labs in Palo Alto, doing research.

2003 Daniel H. Steinberg, in “Daddy, Are We There Yet? A Discussion with Alan Kay” (April 3, 2003), complained to Kay about the miserable state of software targeting children, asking how to encourage the production of better educational software for kids, Kay answered, "don't buy bad stuff…. the market needs to reject what is bad."

2003 In September, 2003, PalmSource sold Palm Digital Media to PalmGear, a company selling Palm software applications. With conservative tastes in reading, PalmGear acted as a censor -- deleting the “Gay” book category, and getting rid of many sex-related titles. The acquisition of Palm Digital Media by the Franklin, Tennessee based PalmGear spurred the departure of Jeff Strobel, the founder and director, Mike Segroves, former director of business development, and technical director David Pasco. The departure of Segroves and Strobel sparked concern that the new owners were arbitarily removing or concealing titles that dealt with sex or were aimed at gay and lesbian readers.

2003 Jeff Strobel purchased the domain name paperbackdigital.com on November 8, 2003. Mike Segroves now took on Paperback Digital -- taking responsibility for the new company’s relationships with its publishing partners, for title acquisitions activities, for day-to-day management of the retail website, including all direct marketing activity, and for press relations, marketing communications, and advertising.

2003 Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education/The Chronicle Review, June 20, 2003, Richard Pells noted, "Nowhere was the scholarly preoccupation with America's internal tribulations more vividly displayed than at the most recent convention of the Organization of American Historians, in April. The papers presented at the meeting were concerned almost entirely with the injustices done to the victims of American life -- African-Americans, Hispanics, women, workers. Only two sessions dealt with the topic of anti-Americanism and the difficulties of teaching American history abroad; those drew small audiences, composed mostly of historians from Europe and Asia. So, at a time when the United States had embarked on a war to remake not only Iraq but potentially the whole Middle East, there were hardly any panels devoted to a discussion of the modern presidency, the evolution of the American economy, mainstream culture (movies, television, the theater, literature, cyberspace), or America's role in the world, all matters of considerable importance to "ordinary" nonacademic Americans. There was, however, a hastily organized and politically correct session on the war, in which the panelists unanimously denounced what they saw as the Bush administration's imperialist agenda.... however much America's social historians might prefer to visualize themselves as detectives, prowling through the nation's archives and attics for clues to how midwives, sharecroppers, and shopkeepers once lived, the world -- as we discovered on September 11 -- will not leave us alone. Hence, the menace of terrorism in the 21st century may eventually compel Americanists to adopt, again, a global perspective. At present, however, most of our scholars are talking only to themselves. And their insularity, sadly, is a sign of how distant we are from a time when American historians -- driven by a curiosity about the world beyond both the academy and the United States -- were able to communicate with the public about the issues, national and international, that continue to affect us all." (Richard Pells is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (Basic Books, 1997). He has taught at universities in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands) -- The Chronicle of Higher Education/The Chronicle Review, June 20, 2003.

2004 “In its day,” Alan Kay commented in “The Dynabook Revisited,”in January, 2004, “Gutenberg's printing press was the equivalent, we might say, of computer workstations…. It wasn't until 50 years after Gutenberg that printers like Aldus Manutius began producing books that were affordable enough to be widely owned…. Still, it wasn't for another hundred some-odd years, until the 17th century, that the real potential of the printing press was realized in any full sense. So it took about 150 years for writers and publishers to really get what the technology could do and to put it into practice. And the result was that, in the 18th century, Western society underwent the transformation that produced the modern world, the world we live in today. My point, of course, is that there may be considerable lag time between the development of a new technology and the realization of the technology's potential. This was true of the printed book, and I think it is true of the Dynabook as well. Before Gutenberg, the handwritten manuscript books in Europe were, by and large, owned by institutions -- the church, the monarchy, and so forth. In the case of computers, when the Univac I appeared, sometime around 1950, computing was done on machines that also had to be owned by an institution. In its day, Gutenberg's printing press was the equivalent, we might say, of computer workstations. In today's money, they might have cost 60 or 70 thousand dollars. Only wealthy people could own them, and only wealthy people and institutions could own the books produced on them. And the number of books printed on the Gutenberg press was still small. Also, a Gutenberg Bible was not something you would travel with; it was not designed to be replaced if it was lost or damaged. It wasn't until 50 years after Gutenberg that printers like Aldus Manutius began producing books that were affordable enough to be widely owned. They were still fairly expensive -- several hundred dollars in today's money. But they were replaceable, and they were something you could carry with you from place to place. Still, it wasn't for another hundred some-odd years, until the 17th century, that the real potential of the printing press was realized in any full sense. So it took about 150 years for writers and publishers to really get what the technology could do and to put it into practice. And the result was that, in the 18th century, Western society underwent the transformation that produced the modern world, the world we live in today. My point, of course, is that there may be considerable lag time between the development of a new technology and the realization of the technology's potential. This was true of the printed book, and I think it is true of the Dynabook as well.”

2004 In an article "Cold Turkey," which Kurt Vonnegut published online (Wednesday, May 12, 2004) in the e-zine "In These Times" (for which Vonnegut serves as a senior editor, see www.inthesetimes.com), he wrote of the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”): "A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.... I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does 'A.D.' signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that. Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?"

2004 In the article "Cold Turkey," published online Wednesday, May 12, 2004 in the e-zine "In These Times" Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace. But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power.... There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.... [In] modern American politics... thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.... If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.... Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on."

2005 Saul Bellow died at the age of eighty-nine on April 5, 2005, in Boston. In the last years of his life, he was astonished at accusations flung -- that he was an elitist, a chauvinist, even a misogynist, and a racist. Attendance at the graveside funeral in Boston was small. No reporters were present. The rabbi, who'd become a friend of Bellow's in Brookline, read from instructions Bellow had himself written for the funeral. In deference to the memory of his mother, who'd died young, Bellow wanted his funeral to be in strict accordance to Jewish tradition. The funeral procession would follow the hearse, pausing seven times. Bellow wanted family members to throw the first and last dirt on the grave, and only members of the Jewish faith to cast dirt on the grave.

2005 Publication of Daniel Gehnrich: Gypsy Bookbinder by Carol J. Blinn at the Warwick Press, Easthampton, Massachusetts [-- http://www.warwickpress.com/inner/gypsy.htm]. Eighty copies. Letterpress printed. Softcover binding in a red/black Thai paper. The typeface is Joanna; the paper is Biblio. The twenty-five page book measures five by seven and one-half inches high. Each book has a tipped-in original paste paper sample made by Daniel Gehnrich, a digitally reproduced photo of Daniel with Arno Werner and a photo of the Baldwin book [James Baldwin Gypsy, & other poems. Gehenna Press, published in 1989 by Leonard Baskin's Gehenna Press in Northampton, Massachusetts].

2005 Publication [Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts] of David P. Bourbeau's book, Out of the Cellar: A Garland for Cantina, "the story of the Cantina Press, the private press founded in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1936-37 by Clarence and Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy at the height of the private press movement in England and America." At the front of the deluxe edition (50 copies) was an Ansel Adams portrait of the Kennedys, rendered as a photogravure. "Both Kennedys were classicists and Renaissance scholars and taught at Smith College. The text is by local bibliotect David P. Bourbeau; the introduction is by Martin Antonetti, curator of rare books at Smith. The book was produced using the talents of various members of the local book arts community."