Gerald Lange is the proprietor and founder (1975) of The Bieler Press, a small printing and publishing firm that specialized in studio letterpress, typographic design, and the publication of finely-printed limited edition books and related matter. The Bieler Press provided photopolymer platemaking to the contemporary studio letterpress community from 1995 until 2019.
In 1985, the University of Minnesota established The Bieler Press Archival Materials Collection to provide and maintain historical documentation of the Press. In support of his early endeavors, Lange was awarded five assistance grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as grants from the Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation.
In 1991, Lange was selected as the first recipient of the prestigious Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design (in 2014 he was asked to serve as a judge for the 14th Award). His publications have also won awards from the Type Directors Club, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the Chicago Book Clinic. In 2005, Lange was chosen to present the Eighth Annual Stephen A. Kanter Lecture on California Fine Printing at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. In 2013, UCLA Library′s Center for Oral History Research conducted interviews of Lange for inclusion in their transcript collection.
Lange wrote extensively on typography and the book arts, contributing articles for publications such as
Parenthesis (FPBA),
book art object (CODEX),
Printing History (APHA),
Bookways, and
The Typographer. In 2007, he was selected to present a paper on contemporary typography for the 32nd Annual Conference of the American Printing History Association. His seminal monograph,
Printing digital type on the hand-operated flatbed cylinder press, was first published in 1998, and in 2018, a 5th edition was published by Chatwin Books, Seattle.
From 1986 to 1993, Lange was Master Printer at the USC Fine Arts Press. While at the University of Southern California, he was also editor of the scholarly journal
Coranto. Lange also taught coursework and workshops for Art Center College of Design (2000 to 2016) and Otis College of Art and Design (1997 to 2013), as well as Irvine Fine Arts Center (Master Printer Workshop), California Institute of the Arts, Minnesota Center for Book Arts (Masterclasses), Scripps College (Frederic W. Goudy Workshops), Kent State University (Blossom Visual Communication Design Workshop), University of Minnesota, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and others.
From 1990 to 1996, Lange was the editor of
AbraCadaBrA, the Journal of the Alliance for Contemporary Book Arts, an organization he co-founded in 1987. He was Chairman of the Fine Press Book Association (NA) from 1999 to 2001. In 2001, he founded PPLetterpress, an online group/forum for investigative, exploratory, and alternative printing and typographic techniques (after eighteen years it ended with the closure of Yahoo Groups in late 2019).
Exhibitions of Bieler Press work included
Catching the Light, Bookworks from Southern California, San Francisco Center for the Book, and concurrent Book Club of California broadside exhibition, 2018;
Men Over 25: California Edition, Printing Letterpress for Over a Quarter of a Century, Scripps College, 2012;
California Printers in the Fine Press Tradition, 1975–2006, Stanford University, 2007;
Master Printers, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery/Barnsdall Park, 2006;
Ninety from the Nineties: A Decade of Printing, New York Public Library, 2003.
Institutional collections of Bieler Press work include The British Library, University of California (various), Columbia University, Harvard University, University of Minnesota, New York Public Library, Princeton University, Stanford University, Victoria and Albert Museum, Yale University,
et al.
