It is difficult for a contemporary reader to conceive of machine-made paper as new technology, or of paper as a reincarnation of cloth, but in the poet Emily Dickinson’s lifetime—1830 to 1886, the embossed writing paper she used to compose poems and letters was quite literally cloth—highly-processed cotton and linen textile “rags” transformed by new papermaking technology into paper. As is often the case, the very small—the unseen fiber—connects to something larger just out of view. How many hands have touched this paper in all its forms—pulp, cloth, thread, plant, seed? What were the terms of those labors? What is a poem supported by? As the artist Vanessa German asks, "What is touching us back?" I want to question, make visible, and trace the local and global provenance and complex material history of Dickinson’s paper supports and surfaces.

Jen Bervin is a visual artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice weaves together situated poetics and entangled relationships between text and textiles. Bervin’s conceptual, scientific, and literary investigations of material histories are attuned to the embodied, visual, and tactile aspects of language; these research-driven works frequently result from long-term collaborations with artists, scholars, and scientists. She is a 2025-2026 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. https://www.jenbervin.com/

For our fall pilgrimage, we will tour of Superior Packaging and Finishing, which operates from two buildings with 200,000 ft² of space and 200 staff. Superior specializes in custom solutions for programmatic clients by managing the complete food chain from website development, order capture, product manufacture, and delivery. They manufacture books, record sleeves, packaging, and specialty services with order sizes from 1 to millions. 

The tour will include their pressroom with an HP large format 6-color latex press, two Indigo 15000 digital presses, a Landa S10 Nanopress (a full Kamori offset press with Landa inkjet technology enabling printing of 6500 unique sheets per hour at 1200 dpi and up to 7 colors), a Heidelberg 4-color Speedmaster, a Heidelberg 6-color Speedmaster, and a Heidelberg 10-color Speedmaster with roll feed printing at 18,000 sheets per hour. You will see their structural design lab where they create custom products for packaging and book applications, as well as the bindery with state of the art, cutting, folding with robotic stacking, die-cutting, in-line folding and gluing, saddle stitching, mechanical binding, spot UV and foil embellishment, foil stamping, Smyth sewing with robotic stacking, case making, perfect binding, hard cover casing-in, shrink wrapping and packing.