Acknowledgements

This book began to take shape at the annual conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Orlando, Florida (March 2018), where we jointly organised and chaired a session titled ‘The Imprint of Women: Printmakers, Printsellers and Print Publishers’. The overwhelmingly positive response to the papers and the lively discussions that ensued encouraged us to push forward with our intention to undertake the present volume and expand its geographic scope beyond the initial focus on England and France. As such, our first and foremost thanks must go to the participants from the conference session and to our fellow authors of this edited collection. We are deeply grateful to each and every one of them for sharing their expertise and insights on the subject of women printmakers, printsellers, and print publishers. Their perseverance, resilience, and grace in carrying out their research under the challenges of pandemic-induced lockdowns and the closures of archives, libraries and museums have been inspiring.

For the publication and production stages of our project, we give many thanks to our Commissioning Editor at Cambridge University Press, Bethany Thomas, who enthusiastically embraced the project and helped us through each stage with assurance. George Paul Laver, Editorial Assistant, gave us unfailing and responsive support with utmost kindness, as did senior content manager Thomas Haynes. We are especially grateful for the contributions of copy-editor Katherine Carr, whose professionalism and expertise improved our volume in so many ways. We further acknowledge production managers Pavithra Mouttou Kichenin, Flora Emmanuel, Subramaniam Vengatakrishnan and Dhivyabharathi Elavazhagan. The anonymous readers offered detailed comments for strengthening individual essays and provided valuable guidance on improving the cohesive structure of the book, and for this we are most appreciative.

We are honoured to be the recipients of the Association of Print Scholars (APS) 2020 Publication Grant, supported by C. G. Boerner and Harris Schrank, and we would like to express our gratitude to the APS and to the jurors – who were ‘universally impressed with the clarity of [our] proposal and the importance of [our] scholarship’, declaring the project both timely and necessary.

Additionally, we want to thank the many people, including Heather Hyde Minor, Andrew Robison, John Ittmann, Thomas Bruhn, and Karin Breuer, who helped us along the way to identify scholars, resources, and collections pertinent to our project. We also thank Susan Odell Walker and Kristen McDonald at the Lewis Walpole Library for their assistance with reference questions, images and permissions. For helpfully providing images and permissions for our authors, we also thank staff at various other institutions including the Albertina, the Bancroft Library, the British Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Istituto centrale per la grafica in Rome, the London Metropolitan Archives, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Rijksmuseum, the Staatliche Museum zu Berlin, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. We are indebted to Brian Hotchkiss for compiling the index, a formidable task which he undertook with considerable skill and efficiency.

We also wish to acknowledge with particular gratitude the support of inspiring colleagues, friends and family who motivated us from the start of the project: Laura Engel, Douglas Fordham, Meredith Gamer, Caroline Gonda, Janice Gurney, Pauline Lynch-Stewart, Eve M. Kahn, Zane Lombardo, Nancy McKinstry, Laura O’Brien Miller, Andy Patton, Maureen Robinson, Louise Roman, Margot Roman, Jill M. Taylor, Cristina Umaña de Martinez, Brian K. Parker, and Nathalie Dupuis-Désormeaux. Special thanks go to Nathalie for her input and assistance with editing over the many months of putting this book together.

Through the process of co-editing this collection, we both feel extremely fortunate to have been able to combine our respective strengths. This brought us much needed joy and connection with each other and our contributors in this time of global isolation. Finally, we want to express our deep appreciation to Lou McKeever, contemporary cartoonist, who produced the cover image which is inspired by the work of Mary Darly (1736–1791), the eighteenth-century artist, printmaker, and publisher. The illustration is an apt opening to our book, one dedicated to the long-standing achievements of women in the print trade, their contributions to the history of printmaking and their stories.