This workshop takes place on Sunday May 1 from 2-4pm in-person and on-site at Center for Book Arts (28 W 27th St, 3rd Fl).
Please note: registration for this workshop closes on Wednesday, April 27 at 11:59pm.
About the Workshop:
In this in-person workshop open to all experience levels, Instructors Jana Dambrogio & Daniel Starza Smith will teach participants the historic art of “letterlocking.”
Before the invention of the gummed envelope c.1830, correspondence by letter was almost entirely dependent on “letterlocking”, the process by which a flat writing substrate is turned into its own sending device. Letterlocking is one of the most important communication technologies of the last millennium, and is part of a 10,000-year document security tradition, but is only recently attracting critical attention. View a short documentary about letterlocking–>
Dambrogio & Smith will guide participants through the main features and techniques of locked letters that make them distinctive, secure, attractive, and a joy to work with. The Instructors will also offer resources for learning more about letterlocking after the workshop is completed.
About Jana Dambrogio & Daniel Starza Smith
Jana Dambrogio (she/her) is the Thomas F. Peterson (1957) Conservator for Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries. She previously held positions at the US National Archives, the United Nations, and the Vatican Secret Archives. Her research in letterlocking has been supported by the Seaver Institute, the Delmas Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome. Her 2017 essay ‘Trickett’s Tickets’ reveals the identity of the first bookbinder for the US Continental Congress, William Trickett.
Daniel Starza Smith (he/him) is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature (1500–1700) at King’s College London. His books include John Donne and the Conway Papers (Oxford University Press, 2014) and, edited with Joshua Eckhardt, Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2014), and he is General Editor of the OUP editing of the Correspondence of John Donne.
Dambrogio and Smith are co-directors of the Unlocking History research group, and general editors of letterlocking.org and the Dictionary of Letterlocking. Along with nine other scholars, Dambrogio and Smith recently published a study that revealed the contents and letterlocking evidence of an unopened letter from 1697 for the first time.
Images courtesy the Instructors.
