PAGA Logo

We acquired a number of chops from Stinehour Press when they closed and are trying to identify some of them. The first is the Printing and Graphic Arts logo (PAGA). I am familiar with the publication, but does anyone know who did the original carving?

The second is this maple leaf with a pine tree inside. We have so many of these. Is it a logo? Who carved the original.

Thanks

image: PAGALOGO.jpg

PAGALOGO.jpg

Log in to reply   8 replies so far

Read your post earlier today. I could not remember the fellows name. Oddly enough, I ran into one of the acct. executives, John Quay, who was there when I was the pressroom foreman and he was there a time before me. He said if the woodcut has a (rough) appearance, it could have been John Mellanson who cut it. Steven Harvard cut stones, but not sure if he did any wood cuts or not. Dean Bornstein of Perpetua Press cuts blocks and was at Stinehour Press for a number of years, but that would have been before his time, I think.

Are those electros or zincs or copper engravings? If electros they could be from woodcuts or wood engravings; if zincs or solid copper they were probably drawn rather than cut in wood, and photoengraved. Both look like they could possibly be copper, and both look to be nailed to wood blocks.

Bob

They are some kind of synthetic material…definitely not copper. Possibly zinc. Thanks for the tips!

I’ll ask Rocky.

I’ve been near seventy years at the printing trade…pray tell…what are chops????

A chop is a carved personal seal used in Asia to authenticate documents; in the West, printmaking studios emboss a chop into prints as another form of authentication.
This seems to be another case of art terminology being wrongly applied to commercial printing, in this case, chop instead of logo (which short for logotype, which originally meant multiple letters or words cast as a single piece of type, but evolving into company names cast as one type, and eventually company symbols). Or perhaps the orivinal post is just confusing chop with cut.

Thanks to parallel_imp. Seems I learn something new every day. Now I see a connection…in numismatics (coin collecting) chop marks were Chinese characters stamped by merchants to show that a U.S. silver or trade dollar was authentic. Thanks again!!

Speaking of the term logotype or “logo,” the original pronounciation was ‘log-O-type,’ NOT ‘low-go-type’ or ‘low-go’ as it is now almost universally incorrectly pronounced.

Thanks for info on chops, I did not know that either.