Stephen Harvard

Calligrapher, stonecutter, illustrator, poet, book and type designer, 
Stephen Harvard’s art and craftsmanship are remembered here through selections of his work.

 

 
 

Initials carved into stone by Stephen Harvard.  Black slate, 6 x 7.375 inches.
Made for Edward Connery Latham who presented it as a gift to his wife, Elizabeth French Lathem.

 

Alphabets of Grace
A Calendar of Letterforms and Type Designs

 
 
 

From the Colophon:

Alphabets of Grace has been set in type and printed by letterpress at the Meriden-Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, Vermont.
The paper is a unique letterpress version of Curtis Tweedweave, produced in a custom mill run for this project. Each month is represented by a different typeface or letterform, and these are identified within the specimens themselves in nine point Monotype Bembo. René Arsenault and John Stinehour were compositors, and Paul Hoffmann the production supervisor. The pressmen were John McCormack and Ken Brisson.

Stephen Harvard is the designer, calligrapher, and author of the descriptive texts. Mr. Harvard, a Director of Meriden-Stinehour Press, is an award-winning book designer and lettering artist. He is author of Ornamental Initials, a catalogue raisonné of the woodcut decorative alphabets of the renaissance printer Christopher Plantin (Godine, 1974) and An Italic Copybook:  The Cataneo Manuscript (Harvard University, 1981). He lives with his wife and two daughters in an old farmhouse in New Hampshire's North Country.

Published by Cahill & Company, 1985


Alphabets of Grace is available for purchase in the Shop

 

Announcement, 8.5 x 11 inches, lettering and design by Stephen Harvard, for an illustrated talk he gave to the Society of Printers on April 6, 1988, four months before his death. His first illustrated talk to the Society of Printers was given on April 2, 1980, titled Living by Letters.

 
 
 

The printer dwells in two worlds –that of art, literature, and scholarship on one hand,
and on the other, the world of craftsmanship, tools, and materials.
It is the printer’s daily work to bring these two worlds together.

Quotation by Stephen Harvard, designed and printed by Roderick Stinehour and Dean Bornstein on the occasion of
the twentieth anniversary of the Printing History Association in 1994.

 
 

Announcement for a talk by Lance Hidy given at The Stinehour Press January 20, 1977.
Calligraphy by Stephen Harvard.
View the whole announcement here.

 
 

Stephen Harvard A Life in Letters

Published by Harvard College Library, on the occasion of an exhibition of the work of Stephen Harvard held at
the Houghton Library, 23 April – 31 May 1990


Catalogue by David P. Becker, foreword by Richard Wendork with an introduction by Eleanor M. Garvey.
Designed by Christopher Kuntze, with title page calligraphy by Christopher Stinehour. Printed and bound by The Stinehour Press. The book contains an exhibition checklist of seventy-nine works by Stephen Harvard, including his designs for books, invitations, posters, broadsides, decorated papers, devices and type designs.
Stephen Harvard・A Life in Letters is available for purchase in the Shop.

 
 

In loving memory of Stephen Harvard, 1948 - 1988

The lettering craftsman is apt to be a perfectionist – he is likely to have a crystal clear alphabet somewhere in his mind; a perfect, proportionate set of images that shine with pythagorean light. All of his work in the real world of ink, paper, copper, steel and stone will be an attempt, with varying degrees of success, to approach the ideal unseen letterforms. He is a craftsman who shares something with the artist as well as the mathematician; it is his trade as well as his joy to weigh form and proportion in his mind. – Stephen Harvard

A collection of his papers is housed at Dartmouth College

Rocky

 

Roderick Stinehour in Printing News, September, 1986

Thirty years later

 

A distinguished tattoo artist at Stinehour Editions

Some Characters from along the Way

A gallery of some of the talented individuals and beautiful strangers that we have been privileged to work with and encounter.

Items from the Bibliographical Checklist of the First Thirty Years

 
 

The Stinehour Press 
A Bibliographical Checklist of the First Thirty Years

Selected and Compiled by David Farrell
Published by Meriden-Stinehour Press, Lunenburg, Vermont, 1988

Available for purchase from the Shop

 
No. 1

Thoreau MacDonald's Drawings for Dartmouth
With notes by Ray Nash

 

Designed and printed by Roderick D. Stinehour at the Graphic Arts Workshop,
Dartmouth College, May 1950

4.75 x 3.5 inches; sixteen pages including five tipped-in illustrations on Japanese tissue. Two hundred copies; untrimmed and handsewn by Elizabeth Stinehour into a light brown paper cover.

This is the first entry inThe Stinehour Press, A Bibliographical Checklist of the First Thirty Years, which describes 1,006 publications printed at The Stinehour Press from 1950 to 1979. 

 

No. 47

The Stuyvesant Staircase, Ayrault House, Newport. Privately printed, 1956.

8 3/4 x 6 1/4 inches; 12 + [2] pages, illustrated with a collotype plate printed by the Meriden Gravure Company. 150 copies printed on untrimmed paper; handsewn into brown paper cover. Designed by Roderick Stinehour. The pattern paper used to wrap the cover was designed by Elizabeth Friedländer (1903 - 1984), who designed a number of patterned papers for the Cuwren Press in the late 1940’s.

 

No. 53

 
 

The Great Stone Face  by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Foreward by Stearns Morse, drawings by John Nash. Printed and published by The Stinehour Press in 1957.
Designed by Roderick Stinehour, forty-six pages, 5.375 x 7.5 inches.

Available for purchase from the Shop

No.  80

 
Stinehour_Press_Merry_Christmas_1958
 

A few Paragraphs on Printing inVermont... By Roland E. Robinson. Lunenburg, Vermont
The Stinehour Press, Christmas, 1958

Excerpt from Vermont:  A Study of Independence  (1897)

6 1/2 x 3 3/4 inches; 8 pages. 200 copies printed for friends of the Press; handsewn into printed blue paper cover.
 An early Christmas keepsake from the Stinehour Press. Envelope addressed by Rocky Stinehour. 
 

 

No. 205

Grand
By Tennessee Williams. New York, New York, House of Books, Ltd., 1964

First Edition. 7 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches; 34 pages. 300 copies signed by the author; bound in yellow cloth over boards.

 

No. 251

Jan Van Krimpen:  A Perspective on Type and Typography, by John Dreyfus. 
Printed for Gallery 303, New York, 1965

9 1/4 x 6 1/2 inches; 20 pages. 300 copies saddle wire stitched into white paper cover. First appeared in Printing and Graphic Arts, VII, 4 (1959); here printed for the Heritage of the Graphic Arts lecture series. Designed by Roderick Stinehour.

 

No. 320

 
 

The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse

Illustrated by Wenday Watson. Printed by The Stinehour Press in 1967 as a Christmas keepsake.
Designed by Edith McKeon, thirty-two pages, 4 x 6 inches.

Available for purchase from the Shop

 

No. 375

Philip Hofer as Author and Publisher

Introduction by Ray Nash. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard College Library
Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, 1968

10 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches; 64+ [2] pages; illustrated; bibliography. 500 copies bound in printed gray paper and red quarter cloth over boards. Designed by Roderick Stinehour.

 

No. 570

The Visions of Mary

Edward Tyler with wood engravings by Gillian Tyler.

9 1/4 x 7 inches; 26 pages. 350 copies bound in beige paper over boards. Designed by Roderick Stinehour.
Lunenburg, Vermont; Privately printed, 1972.

 

A Bibliographical Checklist of the First Thirty Years is available for purchase in the Shop