Cathleen A. Baker
Cathleen A. Baker is a retired paper and book conservator with more than 50 years of experience. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including By His Own Labor: The Biography of Dard Hunter (2000) and From the Hand to the Machine. Nineteenth-Century American Paper and Mediums: Technologies, Materials, and Conservation (2010). She has an M.A. in Art History from Syracuse University; and from the University of Alabama, an M.F.A. in Books Arts and a Ph.D. in Communication Studies. She is also proprietor of the award-winning Legacy Press, established in 1997, which specializes in publishing books about the printing, paper, and bookbinding arts. Her ongoing project to investigate the first wove paper manufactured in the West, which appeared in John Baskerville’s Virgil (1757), was awarded the Katharine Pantzer Senior Fellowship from the Bibliographical Society of America in 2018. After the pandemic, the project was revived in 2023 with a trip to Japan and a 15-day road research trip. The total number of Virgil first editions she has now seen is 208.