Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  I am in one of the most interesting places on Earth; well at least to me it's one of the most interesting places.  This is the Cary Collection in the Wallace Library of the Rochester Institute of Technology.  Here you have a collection of paintings that were commissioned by Kimberly Clark in the 1950s to indicate that landmarks in the history of printing.

This one, by the way, is Aldus Manutius talking to his editor who happened to be Erasmus.  That's Aldus standing there.

Here we have the development of the Serif typeface, if you will; the first font by Nicolas Jenson.

All of the paintings are here.  I'm not going to spend a lot of time on each one.  This is the invention of the papermaking machine. This is the first of the papermaking companies in Europe came about after paper came to Europe.

This is the first of the offset presses.  The first of these, by the way, that was built was sent to San Francisco and arrived just before the earthquake, so we don't have it anymore.  

This is a George Phineas Gordon and the platen press.  He said that Ben Franklin came to him in a dream and said that he should reinvent the printing press.

Here we have Tolbert Lanston and the development of the monotype; the first device to separate the functions of input and output.

Here's a very young Ottmar Mergenthaler working on the first band machine, the first device that showed the concept of a keyboard indicated through the simple lines of type.

This is the Cary Press and this is where they publish some wonderful books and if we look out here we now see our reception for David Pankow.  David has been the curator here for -- oh, my goodness -- 32 years and he has made many friends because the story behind every book, the story behind all the images are in his head.  We're going to have to somehow have him do a mind dump so we can save all of his material for future reference and as you can see many of his friends have come to this particular event.

Over here, by the way, on a regular basis they do various displays.  Here he's got one on binding, on covers that has been done, and then inside the Cary Collection, the Melbert B. Cary, Jr. Graphic Arts Collection, is a wonderful library.  It's a library within a library of rare materials associated with the printing industry.  Mr. Cary collected all of this stuff and it was donated to RIT in the 1950s and '60s and as time went on that grew into a very large collection.

And here's some more of the display of various covers that have been done; beautiful covers.  

I want to see eBooks do this.  This would be very interesting to me because with an eBook you can't tell a book by its cover because there is no cover. 

So here we are to honor David Pankow and a wonderful audience, a wonderful event, and believe it or not that's my opinion.  Thank you.