Cathleen A. Baker
Cathleen A. Baker is a retired paper and book conservator with almost 50 years’ experience, and 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. Cathy is also proprietor of the award-winning The 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; this project continued in 2019 with a six-week research trip to Ireland, the UK, and Germany. The total number of Virgil first editions she has now seen is 187.