The Bieler Press

Contact information

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Gerald Lange
The Bieler Press
4216-1/4 Glencoe Avenue
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
310-821-8269

Typographic and book production services

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The Bieler Press specializes in a number of related services, including fine typographic book design and composition, careful and intelligent letterpress printing and production, and exacting digital restoration of printed images and letterforms.

Digital letterpress services and materials

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Photopolymer platemaking: The Bieler Press has provided photopolymer plate processing to the letterpress community since 1995. We offer premium-grade plates for today’s popular bases (Bunting, Patmag, Boxcar) with extremely fast turn-around at competitive pricing. Plates are processed and shipped same day/next day. Plates are also available for convenient 24-hour pickup. For further details go to Photopolymer plate specifications and rates.

Bunting magnetic bases: The Bieler Press is a manufacturing representative and distributor of the industry standard Bunting Magnetic Cerface™ Flat Base for Bunting Magnetics Co. The crème de la crème. Inquire for pricing and ordering.

Monograph on photopolymer platemaking and letterpress printing with digital type: The Bieler Press is the publisher of Printing digital type on the hand-operated flatbed cylinder press, the definitive manual for letterpress printing with the photopolymer plate process.

Letterpress Instruction [Summer/Fall 2009]

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Contemporary Studio Letterpress
Art Center College of Design, Archetype Press,
South Campus
950 South Raymond Avenue, Pasadena
14 weeks. Tuesday night, 7–10.
May 12 – August 11.

Digital Letterpress
Otis College of Art and Design, Otis Lab Press,
Goldsmith Campus
9045 Lincoln Blvd, Los Angeles (Westchester)
10 weeks. Saturday afternoon, 1:30–4:30.
May 30 – August 8.

Introduction to Letterpress
Otis College of Art and Design, Otis Lab Press,
Goldsmith Campus
9045 Lincoln Blvd, Los Angeles (Westchester)
10 weeks. Thursday night, 7–10.
June 4 – August 6.

Maintaining Your Vandercook Press
Art Center College of Design, Archetype Press,
South Campus
950 South Raymond Avenue, Pasadena
One-day workshop. Sunday, October 25, 9–5.

An online group site Subiaco serves as a referential component to these instructional venues. Currently enrolled students should sign up for membership as the site contains syllabi, handouts, recommended textbook listings, posted announcements, and other resources, including equipment and materials for sale.

All previous students, apprentices, and teaching assistants of Gerald Lange are welcome to join as well. Stay in touch, and up to date!

The Bieler Press Catalogue

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The Bieler Press Catalogue 2009 is available in PDF form. This provides information on all currently available Bieler Press books, chapbooks, and broadsides (including currently in-print titles produced for other publishers). Descriptions of selected titles can be found on the separately linked pages at Fine Press Limited Editions.

Recent & forthcoming titles

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In production:

Learning From Moxon, A Through Z, &c.

The Aaron Horkey Letterpress Print Series (for Dead Arts Publishing)

Claudius Fraktur (metal type specimen/broadside)

the new god (broadside fashioned from an article by Gerald Lange). Available from Ophelia Press

Recently released:

Non Libri Sed Liberi

Printing digital type on the hand-operated flatbed cylinder press, 4th edition, 2009

Notices & miscellany

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Gerald Lange's essay “The Key to the Survival of the Book” was published in book art object, The Codex Foundation, Berkeley, 2008.

A paper, “Aldus is, after all, the Prevailing Model—the Beginning and the End: Fine Press Book Printing in the Twenty-First Century,” was presented by Lange at the 32nd Annual Conference of the American Printing History Association Conference, October 2007. A synopsis of the talk, by Jennifer Schaffner, can be found in the Winter, 2008 issue of the APHA Newsletter (Number 165).

In September, 2007, “Letterpress: A New Era? An Interview With Gerald Lange,” was published in Galley Gab: A Monthly Online Publication Devoted to Letterpress Printing; in May, Lange's article “Letterpress Mon Amour” appeared.

An article by Lange, “Cristal Reconstructed: A Digital Letterform Remade for Letterpress Printing” was published in Parenthesis: The Journal of the Fine Press Book Association, August, 2007.

An article on The Bieler Press, written by Richard Goodman, can be found in the May/June, 2006, issue of Fine Books & Collections Magazine

An essay, “Thinking in solid air,” by Steve Rigley, that references Lange’s concern for contemporary letterpress and the photopolymer plate process was published in eye: the international review of graphic design in Autumn of 2005.

Biographical sketch

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Gerald Lange is the proprietor and founder (1975) of The Bieler Press, a small printing and publishing firm specializing in studio letterpress, typographic design, and the publication of finely-printed limited edition books and related matter.

In 2005, Lange was chosen to present the Eighth Annual Stephen A. Kanter Lecture on California Fine Printing at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. In 1991, he was selected as the first recipient of the prestigious Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design. His publications have also won awards from the Type Directors Club, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the Chicago Book Clinic.

In 1985, the University of Minnesota established The Bieler Press Archival Materials Collection to provide and maintain historical documentation of the Press. In support of his early endeavors, Lange was awarded five assistance grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as grants from the Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation.

Lange has written extensively on typography and the book arts, contributing articles for publications such as book art object (CODEX), Parenthesis (FPBA), Galley Gab, Ampersand (PCBA), Printing History (APHA), Guild of Book Workers Newsletter, Counter, Serif, Bookways, and The Typographer. In 2007, he was selected to present a paper on contemporary typography for the 32nd Annual Conference of the American Printing History Association. Lange's self-published monograph, Printing digital type on the hand-operated flatbed cylinder press, is in its fourth edition.

Lange provides instruction at Art Center College of Design (since 2000) and Otis College of Art and Design (since 1997). From 1986 to 1993, he was Master Printer at the USC Fine Arts Press. While at the University of Southern California, he was also editor of the scholarly journal Coranto. Lange has also taught workshops/coursework for Lala Press and Tiselle, California Institute of the Arts, Minnesota Center for Book Arts (Master classes), Scripps College (Frederic W. Goudy Workshops), Kent State University (Blossom Visual Communication Design Workshop), University of Minnesota, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

From 1990 to 1996, Lange was editor of AbraCadaBrA, the Journal of the Alliance for Contemporary Book Arts, an organization he co-founded in 1987. He was Chairman of the Fine Press Book Association (NA) from 1999 to 2001. In 2001, he founded PPLetterpress, an online forum on investigative, exploratory, and alternative printing and typographic techniques.

Recent exhibitions of Bieler Press work include California Printers in the Fine Press Tradition, 1975–2006, Stanford University, 2007; Master Printers, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery/Barnsdall Park, 2006; Books & Books, Otis College of Art + Design, 2005; Matter & Spirit: The Genesis and Evolution of the Book, Wells College Book Arts Center, 2004; Ninety from the Nineties: A Decade of Printing, New York Public Library, 2003.

Institutional collections of Bieler Press work include The British Library, University of California, Columbia University, Harvard University, New York Public Library, Princeton University, Stanford University, Victoria and Albert Museum, Yale University.

The Aldine Press

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The Aldine Press: Catalogue of the Ahmanson-Murphy Collection of books by or relating to the Press in the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles; incorporating works recorded elsewhere.

This massive tome is the culmination of a four-year project; containing some 1,370 quasi-facsimile bibliographic descriptions of the printed work (1495–1589) of Aldus Manutius, his heirs, and related material. It includes a lengthy introductory essay (by editor Nicolas Barker), illustrative matter (378 typefaces, printer’s devices, and reconstructed watermarks), and referential information (tables, concordance, and indexes).

The typographic design and composition for The Aldine Press were provided by Gerald Lange of The Bieler Press. The book was digitally composed in Manutius – a singularly unique typeface containing an unprecedented set of roman and Greek letterforms common to printing and orthographic practices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – specially designed for the project by Matthew Carter.

The typographic considerations involved in the production of this book were detailed in an article by Gerald Lange in Printing History: the Journal of the American Printing History Association, 2001.

Published by the University of California Press in 2001. Printed on Mohawk Superfine, an acid-free paper, in an edition consisting of 425 copies. The book measures 9 by 12 inches (with cloth covered slipcase). 673 pages. ISBN 0-520-22993-2. LC 00-064851.

Out-of-print from publisher but a limited number of copies are still available from The Bieler Press for $495 each. Shipped without charge (US).