Histories of Newark 1758-2008 has arrived
The 1,000 numbered books are sold out. We even saw one on eBay but forgot to check and see how much it went for.
We still have five (of twelve) of the $450 deluxe copies. The Deluxe Leather Bound Books were created by Don Rash, Plains, Pennsylvania. Each book has a full leather case binding with a 1758 British silver half shilling coin inset into the front cover. The material is black Nigerian goatskin. The titles are stamped in silver and gray on spines and front boards. Blind impressions of silhouettes of the citizen photos are stamped into the spine and covers, aligning with the images in the text. In order to allow the obverse of the coins to be visible without disfiguring the original endsheets, new endsheet sections incorporating cloth inner joints were sewn onto the textblocks. New pastedowns with circular cutouts frame the coins on the inside of the covers. The paper for the new endsheets is vintage Curtis Rag from the former Curtis Paper Company of Newark, Delaware. The top edges of the textblocks are toned with acrylics, and there is a black ribbon marker in each book. The books are housed in slipcases covered with black bookcloth.
Included with the book are a variety of ephemera associated with the project including unfolded dust jackets and end sheets, commemorative coasters, poster, handouts, and a variety of newspapers and magazines containing articles on the proect.
It was the vision of Mayor Vance Funk, III that set this project in motion. The mayor asked Paul Bauernschmidt of Farmer + Smith, LLC to head a group of Newark citizens to research, write and produce a coffee table book to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of our city. Paul brought in Deborah Haskell as Editor-in-Chief and Rebecca Johnson Melvin as text & image coordinator. After a year and with the final copy close to completion, Jill Cypher and Ray Nichols of Wallflowers Press (now Lead Graffiti), a local letterpress studio, accepted the responsibility for designing and overseeing the production of the book.
Work on the text extended through May, 2007. From the end of March through early June, 2007, a photo studio was set up in the old CVS building on Main Street to photograph Newark citizens who were included in a band that runs continuously across all pages of the book.
The design of the book was finished in late October and digital files were sent to the printer, Mercantile Press of Wilmington, Delaware.
Pre-orders started in October, 2007, and the unveiling of Histories of Newark 1758-2008 to the public occurred at a booksigning party on Friday, December 7, attended by approximately 20 of the authors and 250 of the public.
Panorama from the Newark Reservoir
Want to see a 540 degree panorama of Newark taken for Histories of Newark 1758-2008 in May, 2007? Click here. The original is 165" wide at a resolution of 300 dpi and weighs in at 728MB.
