Richard-Gabriel Rummonds is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s pre-eminent handpress printers of the late-twentieth century. For nearly twenty-five years, using the imprints 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 retrospective exhibitions of his work in Rome, New York, San Francisco, Verona, and culminating with a major retrospective in 1999 at the Biblioteca di via Senato in Milan. His books can be found in many of the world’s most famous libraries, as well as numerous private collections of fine printing.

In 1984, he was appointed founding director of the MFA in the Book Arts program at the University of Alabama. Many of his students have gone on to become prominent fine press printers. He has also given workshops on problem-solving on the iron handpress at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY, and Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

Rummonds is the author of two definitive books on historical printing published by Oak Knoll Press and The British Library: Printing on the Iron Handpress (1998) and Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress (2004).

Photo © copyright Weldon DeBusk 2012.

Richard-Gabriel Rummonds