Soon after he became president of The Typophiles in 1971, inveterate traveler Bob Leslie initiated group outings. Destinations that could be accomplished in a day rapidly evolved into fully organized overseas tours. To celebrate the 45th anniversary of The Typophiles in 1974, 45 members and their significant others, plus a few European colleagues, made a “Printers’ Pilgrimage to Israel.” They included Fritz and Toni Eichenberg, Alice Koeth, Berthold Wolpe, Hermann Zapf, Raymond Gid, Cathy Tyler Brody, Alexander Lawson ( director of the school of printing at RIT), Helen Barrow (former production manager at Simon and Schuster), Charles Vaxer (director of printing at Esquire magazine), Edna Beilinson of Peter Pauper Press and book designers Marilyn Marcus (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), Bertha Krantz (Random House) and Herbert Rosenthal.
Leslie enlisted the aid of Israel Soifer and Gideon Stern (Director of the Printing Information Center of the Israel Export Institute) to help plan a whirlwind sixteen days exploring historical and technical aspects of printing in Israel. The Typophiles met Israeli colleagues Moshe Spitzer, Elly Gross, Henri Friedlaender, Miriam Karoly and Jack Jaget and enjoyed receptions given by Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kolleck and Haifa Mayor Josef Almogi. The group visited Keter, Ltd. (producers of the Encyclopedia Judaica), the Government Printing Plant and the printing plant of the Jerusalem Post; and the Franciscan Press, the Hebron Press and the Peli Printing Works. They went to the Museum of Printing in Safed and the Islamic Museum in Jerusalem. They saw the Alphabet Museum in Haifa and met Gisa Frankel, an authority on Jewish paper cuts, at the Ethnological Museum and Folklore Archives in the city. Friedlaender organized a special exhibit, “The Image of the Hebrew Letter in Israel,” in honor of The Typophiles’ visit. The Jewish National and University Library at Hebrew University arranged a special display of Hebrew bibliophilic books for them. They visited the Schocken Library, the artists’ colony at Ein Hod and Jerusalem’s Burston Graphic Arts Center. Tourist spots were not neglected. In the end, the group managed to see the upper and lower Galilee, the Golan Heights, Caesarea, Acre, Safed, the Dead Sea, Masada and the Judean Desert.
