29. Bowne & Co., South Street Seaport Museum (Barbara Henry)

Bowne & Co., Stationers is a recreation of a late nineteenth century printing office, operated by the South Street Seaport Museum. The area on the East River on the southeast side of Manhattan, nestled among the piers just south of the Brooklyn Bridge was familiar to DePol from a very early age. He used to sketch here as a boy, and among his first wood engravings (1950) are views of both South Street and Fulton Street, formerly the home of The Fulton Fish Market. One of his last wood engravings is of Wall Street, which is just to the south, and where he had his first job as a runner.

DePol’s association with the Museum began in the late nineteen seventies. In 1978, his work was featured in a one-man exhibition, and he was profiled in the Museum’s membership newsletter, in “South Street People: John De Pol.” In 1982, 1983 and 1984 Bowne & Co. invited DePol to teach classes in wood engraving. By then, Barbara Henry had become the curator/master printer. The partnership between Henry and DePol proved especially fruitful. Making use of the shop’s extensive collections of rare nineteenth century foundry type, they produced notecards and posters for the Bowne shop, including views of the Museum’s historical ships, the Peking (a four-masted barque) and the Ambrose (a lightship), and a portrait of Robert Bowne, who in the 1820s founded a printing shop on the site. They also produced keepsakes for The Typophiles and for the American Printing History Association (APHA), as well as a broadside for the APHA’s A Type Miscellany: Twentieth Anniversary Broadside Portfolio (1994), among whose contributors are several of the printers featured in Out of Retirement, Michael Peich, Morris Gelfand, Steve Miller, Neil Shaver and Michael Tarachow. Henry was the model for DePol’s design of a compositor at a type case.

Their major works are: The Wood Engraving Portfolio (1988), which includes a print by DePol as well as an extra print of the seaport. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1991), and Carroll Boltin’s A Practical Guide to Light Refreshment (1996). Henry also contributed a fascicle to John DePol a Celebration of His Work (1994), with DePol’s engravings of the shop, and curated an exhibition, “John DePol’s New York: an Exhibition of Etchings and Wood Engravings” (Nov, 1997–Jan, 1998), which traveled to Rutgers-Newark.