44 years’ worth of Annual E.F. Schumacher Lectures
The name Hildegarde Hannum is well known to longtime members of the Schumacher Center. She and her husband, Hunter, attended the first E. F. Schumacher Lecture in 1981 at Mount Holyoke College. Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson were the speakers in a program themed People, Land, and Community. Hildegarde joined the Schumacher board of directors that next summer, invited by Bob Swann, who appreciated her hand-written letter commenting on the lecture program.
It was author and board member, Kirkpatrick Sale, who together with Rutgers biologist, David Ehrenfeld, suggested we revive the old art of pamphleteering and print the Annual Schumacher Lectures. Every revolution, they argued, had pamphlets. They imagined the work of the Schumacher Center would lead to a revolution for good.
Working from taped recordings, in those days we typed the lecture transcripts on a Selectric typewriter. Careful to format in pamphlet form on half pages. First page/last page and so on. A mistake often meant retyping the whole document!
The office copier was put into overgear to print. The cover stock was baby blue, a donation of left-over paper from Rising, an international corporation with a mill on the Housatonic River in the Berkshires. Folded, the assembled pages gave the impression of a pamphlet.
But how to hold it altogether?
Using a bookbinding technique I learned while training in England as a Waldorf teacher, I would wax a strong linen thread with pure beeswax bought in big chunks for candle dipping. Then with needle held carefully would punch three holes down the middle of the folded pages. Starting in the middle sew out, then in through the bottom, out through the top, in through the middle, cut, and tie. Voila, a lecture pamphlet.
We still have some of these hand sewn pamphlets in the Library archives.
Gradually we turned over printing and stapling to Kwik Print, our local printing company, and moved to the sage green cover stock pictured above. But transcribing and editing was still an uneven in-house affair.
Left to right: Susan Witt, Hildegarde Hannum, and Bob Swann at the Schumacher Center, late 1990s
In 1991 Hildegarde attended Thomas Berry’s E. F. Schumacher Lecture at Searles Castle in Great Barrington, titled The Ecozoic Era. It moved her deeply. A consummate editor, she couldn’t abide the idea of anything less than a meticulous editing of the talk. She did not want clumsy editing to detract from the beauty of the vision. Hildegarde knew there was a fine art to turning a spoken lecture into print.
The editing of the Thomas Berry talk started a tradition. She went on to edit all future lectures and re-edit all past lectures.
In 1998 she worked with Yale University Press to publish People, Land, and Community: Collected E. F. Schumacher Lectures. Her careful editing helped establish the E. F. Schumacher Lecture series as one of the foremost in the field.
The edited Lectures are all free to read online, but in addition we print each one for those who like to read from print, and to continue to honor the fine art of pamphleteering.
Hildegarde Hannum died Christmas Eve at home surrounded by people she loved.
Thank you, Hildegarde.
Many good wishes,
Susan Witt, Executive Director
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People, Land, and Community: Collected E.F. Schumacher Lectures is available in hardcover for $30 (or 30 BerkShares) and paperback for $20 (or 20 BerkShares).
To arrange to purchase a copy of the book, please email schumacher@ To browse and order available individual pamphlets, visit here. |