Terry Belanger
University Professor
Honorary Curator of Special Collections
University of Virginia

A Note from the Honorary Curator of Special Collections

DANIEL J. MILLER'S INTEREST in Armed Services Editions grew out of his participation in an undergraduate class at the University of Virginia (UVa) called "The Impact of Printing, 1640-1900" that I teach each fall, one section in the history department, and the other in the Department of Technology, Culture and Communications in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The course is taught in the Alderman Library classroom of the Book Arts Press (BAP), a bibliographical institute based at UVa. In the course, students are surrounded by (and immersed in) various parts of the extensive BAP collection of books (and parts of books) both new and old: examples intended to illustrate the history of paper, typography, printing, book illustration, bookbinding, publishing, and book collecting and the distribution of books.

In other coursework at the University of Virginia, Miller has concentrated on the history especially of the first half of 20th century America, and the BAP's collection of about 300 Armed Services Editions immediately attracted his interest. At the conclusion of the course in December 1995, he agreed to undertake an exhibition in the Rotunda dealing with this interesting venture in cooperative publishing as an independent study project in the spring of his final undergraduate year at UVa. This catalog is one of the good results of his many hours of hard work.