The Plain Wrapper Press Redux Team

Book collectors worldwide acknowledge GABRIEL RUMMONDS as one of the world’s pre-eminent handpress printers of the late Twentieth Century. For almost 25 years, using the imprints of Plain Wrapper Press and Ex Ophidia, he printed and published illustrated limited editions of contemporary literature on iron handpresses, primarily in Verona, Italy, and Cottondale, Alabama. Rummonds has had several exhibitions of his work in Rome, New York, San Francisco, and Verona, culminating with a major retrospective exhibition held at the Biblioteca di Via Senato in Milan, Italy, in 1999. Many of the world’s most famous museums (including The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art) and libraries (including the rare-book libraries of Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, The University of Georgia, The University of Oregon, and The University of Texas), as well as numerous private collections of fine printing, house his books.

The University of Alabama appointed Rummonds the founding director of its MFA in the Book Arts Program in 1984. Several of his students have become prominent fine-press printers. He has also given workshops on Problem-Solving on the Cast-Iron Handpress at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY, and at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Rummonds has authored four trade books on printing: Problem Solving and Printing on the Cast-Iron Handpress (Rochester Institute of Technology, 1991), Printing on the Iron Handpress (Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 1998), Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress (Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 2004), and Fantasies & Hard Knocks: My Life as a Printer (Ex Ophidia Press, 2015). He has won a prestigious “Fifty Books of the Year” award for excellence in book design from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Photo courtesy of Weldon DeBusk