Binding for Designing the Mentoring Stamp by Alegria Barclay: steel-gray goatskin with orange, green, and purple onlays. The design is inspired by Lance Hidy’s Penumbra font and depicts several letters in varying sizes and font styles. There is gold and blind tooling as well as gold lettering. Photograph by Stephen Petegorsky.
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Illustrated Lectures

On Sunday, September 28 at 4 pm, in the Neilson Library Browsing Room, Lance Hidy will deliver a brief illustrated lecture, “Digital Craft,” followed by Michael Russem’s brief lecture, “A Primer on Postage Stamps by Type Designers.” A reception will follow in the Book Arts Gallery, and awards will be announced for three of the bindings: Artist’s Award by Lance Hidy, Publisher’s Award by Michael Russem, and Curator’s Award by Martin Antonetti, the curator of rare books at Smith College.

More on the Exhibition

A three-fold exhibition complements these bindings. First there are Lance Hidy’s poster and postage stamp designs, with preliminary sketches and color trials for many of them. There is also a modest sampling of postage stamps designed by graphic artists who have also designed typefaces. Finally, there are several items of philatelic interest from the collections of the Mortimer Rare Book Room. The exhibition labels were written by Barbara Blumenthal and designed by Michael Russem with Penumbra, designed by Lance Hidy, and Dante, designed in the 1950s by Giovanni Mardersteig, a printer, book designer and font designer renowned for the work he produced at Officina Bodoni and Stamperia Valdònega, his two printing offices in Italy.

Description of the Set Book

In Designing the Mentoring Stamp Lance Hidy, an accomplished designer of books, posters, types, and stamps, takes us through the process of designing a postage stamp while explaining how the small Mentoring stamp relates to his larger body of work. Thirty-eight full-color reproductions illustrate the photographs, designs, and drawings which were part of the design process, as well as related posters and illustrations from the last thirty years of Hidy's work. Composed in Dante and Penumbra types, the latter designed by Hidy, the books were printed at Stinehour Press on Mohawk Superfine paper and bound as a Smyth-sewn paperback at Acme Bookbinding. Thirty-five deluxe copies, which include actual specimens of the postage stamps illustrated in the text, were bound by Sarah Creighton with her own pastepapers. Michael Russem provided copies in sheets for this set-book exhibition.

Philately is a field often overlooked by bibliophiles and historians of printing and typography. Yet, a small group of the most important contributors to twentieth century book and letter arts have made significant contributions to the design of the seemingly modest postage stamp. Eric Gill, Reynolds Stone, Jan van Krimpen, S.L. Hartz, S.H. DeRoos, Georg Trump, Walter Brudi, and Hermann Zapf—designers who are celebrated for their masterful accomplishments in the field of type design—have all considered the specific concerns of philatelic design. They, and the hundreds of stamps designed by them, are an unexplored resource of superb lettering and calligraphy, and also provide exceptional insights into how these designers worked and solved problems. Designing the Mentoring Stamp is the first in a series of books published by Kat Ran Press to explore these heretofore forgotten bodies of work. More information on postage stamps by type designers can be found at the Kat Ran Press website.