Walter Samuel Haatoum Hamady (1940-) was a papermaker, book designer, printer, publisher, artist, poet, and teacher. Hamady is best known for his Shadwell Paper Mill and the Perishable Press. Hamady founded both the Perishable Press and the Shadwell Paper Mill while he was a student at Wayne State University in 1964. In 1966, Hamady was hired as an art instructor at the University of Wisconsin where he taught letterpress printing for over thirty years. Hamady continued to operate the the Perishable Press with his wife Mary in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin. The Perishable Press issued works of by many important authors including: Leonard Baskin, Jack Beal, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, J.V. Cunningham, Harry Duncan, Robert Duncan, George Economou, Loren Eiseley, Mitchell Goodman, Donald Hall, Walter Hall, Sam Hamod, Michael Heller, William Heyen, David Kherdian, Galway Kinnell, Elizabeth Kner, Ellen Lanyon, James Laughlin, Denise Levertov, Harry Lewis, Robert Lowell, Khatchik Minasian, Toby Olson, George Oppen, Joel Oppenheimer, Rochelle Owens, Harry Mark Petrakis, Jerome Rothenberg, Norman Russell, Armand Schwerner, William DeWitt Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, Gilbert Sorrentino, William Edgar Stafford, Christopher Stephens, Louis Szathmary II, W. Thomas Taylor, Robert Vas Dias, Diane Wakoski, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, John Wieners.
Hamady has received numerous awards for his work. His books have been selected by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) for their annual exhibition called Fifty Books of the Year. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1969, has received three artist's research grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and, in 2006, was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Crafts Council. In 2004, he was chosen by I.D.: International Design Magazine as one of the top fifty designers in the U.S.
From the guide to the The Walter Hamady Collection, 1966-1993, (Lewis & Clark College Special Collections and Archives)
