4:25 p.m., March 10, 2011----“Letterpress and Libraries: How History Informs Contemporary Artists' Books” will be the subject of a Raven Press Lecture on Wednesday, March 23.

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Scheduled at 6 p.m. in Room 109 of the Willard Hall Education Building, the free public lecture will feature Kathleen Walkup, professor and director of the Book Art Program at Mills College.

A reception and visit to the Raven Press will be held after the talk in the Studio Arts Building.

With the broader introduction of contemporary artists' books to both students and the general public, letterpress and libraries continue to have a vital relevance. Letterpress has a surprising accessibility as a production technique for book artists, while libraries not only purchase but also exhibit and teach from their artists' books collections. While there are many new forms to seduce book artists, the technology of the codex has not lost its prominence. This illustrated talk will consider the central roles of letterpress, libraries and the historical form of the codex in the contemporary artists' books movement.

At Mills College, Walkup teaches typography and letterpress printing, artists' bookmaking and seminar/studio courses that combine print culture and book history with studio projects. She is also book art director for the MFA in book art and creative writing, the first such program in the country.

Walkup's most recent curatorial project is "Hand, Voice and Vision: Artists' Books from Women's Studio Workshop" at the Grolier Club in New York City and other venues.

The Raven Press Lecture is sponsored by UD's departments of Art and English and the Center for Material Culture Studies; the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library; and the Chesapeake chapter of the American Printing History Association (APHA).

For more information, contact Mark Samuels Lasner, senior research fellow at the University of Delaware Library, telephone (302) 831-3250 or [marksl@udel.edu].

An addditional March 23 event for members of APHA and University of Delaware community will be a presentation by Walkup on Women's Studio Workshop publications and Samuels Lasner discussing British private press books of the turn of the century. This event is scheduled from 3:30-4:30 p.m. at the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection in Room 115A of the Morris Library.

These events precede the 2011 Gretchen Hupfel Symposium, "The Art of the Book in the 21st Century," being held March 25-26, at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington, in conjunction with the exhibition, "The Book: A Contemporary View." For more information,visit [www.thedcca.org].

Raven Press

Raven Press, established at UD in 2003, is a letterpress studio facility in the Department of Art devoted to letterpress, typography and bookbinding. Currently serving as the press' directors are William Deering and Ashley Pigford, both assistant professors of art at UD.

The first Raven Press lecture in 2006 was presented by Matthew Carter, noted British type designer.