A Machine for the 19th Century: The Iron Hand Press

Originally published on the blog of the american bookbinders museum

The duke said what he was after was a printing-office. We found it; a little bit of a concern, up over a carpenter shop — carpenters and printers all gone to the meeting, and no doors locked. It was a dirty, littered-up place, and had ink marks, and handbills with pictures of horses and runaway slaves on them, all over the walls. The duke shed his coat and said he was all right now.

— Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Twain’s imaginary print shop may well have used an iron hand press, a type of letterpress invented in the first part of the 19th century and favored by newspaper printers. Twain knew whereof he wrote. While a teen he worked as a typesetter and apprentice printer in his brother’s newspaper office in Hannibal, Missouri, going on to work in a variety of print shops around the country.

Like wooden presses, the iron press used movable type set in a frame, along with pre-cut graphic images such as woodblocks.

The iron hand press offered improvements over the four-centuries-old wooden press, although it never completely replaced it. Made of cast iron, it was of course sturdier, less susceptible to damage, and easier to clean of, say, ink stains than its wooden counterpart. But the real advantage came in the improvements that drove the ‘press.’ In place of the long wooden bar that had to be pulled by a brawny arm to bring the platen onto the type, the iron presses used a variety of levers, counterweights, and coils to lower and release the platen. Though brawn was still required, the amount of force required for each “pull” was less, allowing the work to go much faster; it also allowed larger sheets of paper to be printed at one go.

The first iron hand press in the United States was created by George Clymer in Philadelphia in 1813. His very ornate Columbia Press, covered with symbols of Americana, did not take off stateside. Moving to England Clymer found a much more receptive market. (Lord Stanhope had invented the very first iron press in 1800, so the British were familiar with the concept.) Within a few decades his press and a number of others modeled on it were common across Europe.

Eight years following Clymer’s invention, fellow American Samuel Rust designed a somewhat simpler iron press which he called the Washington Hand Press. Like Clymer’s press, the design was not proprietary; many manufacturers began offering the Washington press in the decades that followed. Improvements included steam power and a rotary printing surface. The iron hand press continued to be popular into the early years of the 20th century, although by this time it was often adapted as a way to get a quick proof for a job that would be printed on a more mechanized machine.

One notable advantage of the Washington press was its ability to be dismantled for shipment, an important matter for a heavy object in a far-flung country. As their names indicate, these presses were big and heavy. For example the famed Kelmscott Chaucer was printed by William Morris on an iron hand press standing seven feet tall and weighing over one ton. (Apparently no one is willing to obtain an exact weight on the machine.)[1]

The American Bookbinders Museum obtained its Washington press from the local Odd Fellows Hall in San Francisco. It was manufactured by Ostrander Seymour Company in Chicago about 1904. Rumor has it that it was last used by book designer and printer Adrian Wilson (1923-1988) in the City by the Bay, but this has not been substantiated. Considered one of this country’s significant book artists, Wilson designed and printed a number of books and booklets at his studio, “The Press of Tuscany Valley,” including the influential volume The Design of the Book. If, indeed, our press was used by Wilson, it would have been a secondary piece of equipment.

Meanwhile back in a fictional Mississippi backwater town, circa 1845, Twain’s con man turns out to be something of an artist himself:

[The duke] had set up and printed off two little jobs for farmers in that printing-office – horse-bills – and took the money, four dollars. He set up a little piece of poetry, which he made himself, out of his own head — three verses — kind of sweet and saddish — the name of it was, “Yes, crush, cold world, this breaking heart” – and he left that all set up and ready to print in  the paper, and didn’t charge nothing for it.

— Eleanor Boba

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[1] David W. Dunlap, “Mature, Muscular, Literary and Available,” New York Times, 5 Dec. 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/arts/design/kelmscott-press-a-thing-of-iron-musculature-is-to-be-sold.html?_r=0 (accessed 12 June 2014).

 

Ink In Their Blood: Print Apprentices Make Good

 This essay was originally published on the blog of the American Bookbinders Museum

“James Franklin, printer, in Queen’s Street, wants a likely lad for an apprentice.”[1]

The life of a printer’s apprentice or “devil” was no picnic. It usually involved long hours of arduous labor for little or no pay with only small hope of advancement. Apprenticeship – until at least the middle of the 19th century – meant a multi-year iron-clad contract of indentured servitude. Runaway apprentices, and there were many, could be hunted down in similar fashion to escaped slaves.

Yet for boys of a bookish bent work in the printing or bookbinding trades offered opportunities to read, write, and mix with the educated. For a few “likely lads” apprenticeship was a springboard toward a literary career.

Silence Dogood was an opinionated widow in old Boston who liked to express herself in lengthy epistles to the New England-Courant. Widow Dogood was also the pseudonym of a 16-year old Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790). As an apprentice in his brother James’ print shop, Franklin was frustrated that his literary ambitions were confined to the “occasional ballads” he was allowed to print at the shop and sell on the streets. He hit upon the Silence Dogood persona as a way to express his opinions on a variety of topics in a public forum. His brother’s paper, like many of the day, was hungry for content and happy to print the 14 letters that were slipped under the office door after-hours.

An engraving based on an 1876 oil painting “Young Franklin at the Press” by Enoch Wood Perry, in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

It is easy to see the future patriot and statesman in the widow’s pronouncements:

I am naturally very jealous for the Rights and liberties of my Country, and the least appearance of an incroachment on those invaluable Priviledges, is apt to make my Blood boil exceedingly. I have likewise a natural inclination to observe and reprove the Faults of others, at which I have an excellent Faculty. I speak this by Way of Warning to all such whose Offences shall come under my Cognizance, for I never intend to wrap my Talent in a Napkin. (Silence Dogood letter #2, printed April 16, 1722)

Otherwise, Franklin put his time as apprentice to good use by reading everything he could get his hands on. He would beg, borrow, and buy books, even skipping meals to save up his pennies. (Franklin may or may not have coined the term “A penny saved is a penny earned”.) He also learned the print trade well enough to run the paper while his brother was briefly jailed for offending the local authorities.

A century and a half later Samuel Clemens (1835-1910) found himself in Franklin’s shoes. Like Franklin, he was apprenticed to his brother as a printer’s devil. He was allowed a bit more latitude for self-expression than Franklin, and apparently did not suffer the beatings Franklin endured at the hands of his brother. However, his association with his brother was not without friction of a different kind.

A Young Sam Clemens with a printer’s composing stick spelling out his name in reverse, as it would be for typesetting. The daguerreotype image is sometimes reproduced reversed so that we may read the name “SAM.” The date of the image is estimated at 1850 when Clemens would have been 15.

Clemens was allowed to contribute humorous pieces to the Hannibal Journal, his brother’s paper. And, like Franklin, he was allowed editorial control during shorts stretches of time when his brother was otherwise engaged. However, his brother Orion did not take kindly to some of Sam’s antics, including his habit of lampooning local figures in the paper. In one case Sam slipped a piece into the paper making fun of what may have been an actual suicide attempt by the editor of a rival paper; the story was accompanied by an unflattering woodcut.

Both Franklin and Clemens ultimately broke the bonds of apprenticeship and “lit out for the territories” – Franklin for Philadelphia where he paid more dues as a printer’s assistant before setting up in business for himself, producing a famous almanac, and entering into the political fray that was to result in the American Revolution. Clemens trained as a riverboat pilot and wandered around the country before returning to the newspaper business and, ultimately, a celebrated career as author and humorist.

“Wanted: An Apprentice to the Printing Business. Apply soon.”[2]

Clemens’ fascination with the printed word took him to the brink of financial ruin. Perhaps remembering the tiresome task of setting type by hand, Clemens – now Mark Twain – invested a huge share of his literary earnings in the development of an automatic typesetting machine, the Paige Compositor. Only two of these monsters were ever made and they didn’t work well. Twain lost his shirt.

In the last year of his life, the famed storyteller gave credit to the years when he paid his dues in the print industry:

One isn’t a printer ten years without setting up acres of good and bad literature, and learning – consciously or unconsciously – to discriminate between the two.” (From essay “The Turning Point of my Life,” Harper’s Bazar [sic], 1910.)

Walt Whitman (1819-92) had fond memories of his days as an apprentice and, like Twain, credited his early experiences with the start of his literary career:

I commenced when I was but a boy of eleven or twelve writing sentimental bits for the old “Long Island Patriot,” in Brooklyn; this was about 1832. Soon after, I had a piece or two in George P. Morris’s then celebrated and fashionable “Mirror,” of New York city. I remember with what half-suppress’d excitement I used to watch for the big, fat, red-faced, slow-moving, very old English carrier who distributed the “Mirror” in Brooklyn; and when I got one, opening and cutting the leaves with trembling fingers. How it made my heart double-beat to see my piece on the pretty white, paper in nice type.” (Whitman, Specimen Days, 1892).

Whitman’s career in printing and publishing gave him a thorough understanding and appreciation of type, design, paper, and binding. He brought these skills to bear on the publication of the various editions of Leave of Grass, his magnum opus, even setting some type himself for the first edition. He obsessed over the exact look of each page, each image, and the binding of each edition. He haunted the offices of the typographers hired to create the book, watching over every detail. In a letter to his brother concerning the 1860 edition, he wrote:

The typographical appearance of the book has been just as I directed it. The printers and foremen thought I was crazy, and there were all sorts of supercilious squints (about the typography I ordered, I mean)—but since it has run through the press, they have simmered down.[3]

The spine of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, second edition, 1856. Whitman included a sentence from a private letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson without that author’s permission: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

Technological breakthroughs in the printing and publishing industries had a huge influence on Twain and Whitman and their ability to achieve fame and some fortune. In Franklin’s day, the print industry was of an even more manual nature, but still a critical element in the service of political ideas. In 1953 a young Sam Clemens marveled at the progress that had been made in printing upon viewing Ben Franklin’s wooden hand press on display in the Museum of the Patent Office.[4]

The bed is of wood and is not unlike a very shallow box. The platen is only half the size of the bed, thus requiring two pulls of the lever to each full-size sheet. What vast progress has been made in the art of printing! The press is capable of printing about 125 sheets per hours; and after seeing it, I have watched Hoe’s great [iron hand press] machine throwing off its 20,000 sheets in the same space of time, with an interest I never before felt.” (from Mark Twain’s Letters, published 1917)

Franklin the inventor may well have predicted such advancements in the trade of his youth. He was always a printer at heart and felt strongly enough about the profession to incorporate metaphors of printing and bookbinding into the epitaph he wrote for himself as a youth and continued to espouse into old age:

The Body of

B. Franklin, Printer;

Like the Cover of an old Book,

Its Contents torn out,

And stript of its Lettering and Gilding,

Lies here, Food for Worms.

But the Work shall not be wholly lost:

For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more,

In a new & more perfect Edition,

Corrected and amended

By the Author.

 

When Franklin died, the printers and apprentices of Philadelphia took a prominent spot in his funeral procession.

 

— Eleanor Boba

Sources:

Branch, Edgar Marquess. The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950.

The Electric Ben Franklin. Independence Hall Association. http://www.ushistory.org/Franklin.

Fanning, Philip Ashley. Mark Twain and Orion Clemens: Brothers, Partners, Strangers. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003.

Michelson, Bruce. Printer’s Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

The Walt Whitman Archive, Ed Folsom & Kenneth M. Price, editors. The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. http://www.whitmanarchive.org.

[1] Actual text of advertisement published upon Benjamin’s Franklin running away from apprenticeship at his brother’s print shop.

[2] Actual text of advertisement published upon Samuel Clemens’ running away from apprenticeship at his brother’s print shop.

[3] “Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog and Commentary,” by Ed Folsom. The Walt Whitman Archive, http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00150.html. Visited August 30 and 31, 2014. This extensive article describes Whitman as a book artist, the influence of times on his design work, and the influence of design on the interpretation of his poetry.

[4] The press Clemens saw is now in the collection of the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian Institution. It is associated with Franklin’s sojourn in England in the 1720s and was obtained by an American banker in that country in 1841. Seventy years later it was sold to the Smithsonian.

 

For All Time: The Victorian Gift Book

 This essay was originally published on the blog of the American Bookbinders Museum.

“Jo was the first to wake in the gray dawn of Christmas morning. No stockings hung at the fireplace and for a moment she felt as much disappointed as she did long ago, when her little sock fell down because it was crammed so full of goodies. Then she remembered her mother’s promise and, slipping her hand under her pillow, drew out a little crimson-covered book. She knew it very well, for it was that beautiful old story of the best life ever lived, and Jo felt that it was a true guidebook for any pilgrim going on long journey. She woke Meg with a “Merry Christmas,” and bade her see what was under her pillow. A green-covered book appeared, with the same picture inside….Presently Beth and Amy woke to rummage and find their little books also, one dove-colored, the other blue, and all sat looking at and talking about them while the east grew rosy with the coming day.” (Louisa May Alcott, Little Women)

It would be easy to assume that the impoverished March girls have received bibles as their only Christmas present. However, it is likely their mother may have provided them with a book of scriptural readings designed for young people. (The Marches would have possessed one family bible.) There were many such volumes among the plethora of books brought to market during the 19th century in England and American specially designed as gifts-to-be-given for the holiday season.

Newspapers of the day devoted columns to advertising these products during the season. For example, the Boston Post of December 18th, 1850 advertised the following:

Superb New Illustrated Works for Christmas and New Year’s Presents

Just published by D. Appleton & Co. 200 Broadway

1.Our Savior, with Prophets and Apostles

A series of Eighteen highly finished Engravings, designed expressly for this work, with descriptions by several American Divines. Edited by J.M. Wainwright, D.D. One volume imperial octavo, in the following varieties of binding:

Emblematic, with raised figure of our Lord, $7; Superantique beveled morocco extra, $10; Do col’d $15 [the same, colored]; Do. do. with miniature painting on each style of binding, on plate glass in centre, $15; Do, col’d $20; Do. Do. Papier mache framed in beveled morocco $12; Do. Col’d $18; Do. Plate glass, with superb painting on whole of sides, $25.

The publisher offers the book in a range of binding styles to suit every pocketbook; it is entirely possible that Marmee March, despite straitened circumstances, might have procured a simpler version of this book or something similar for her girls.

Beauty Inside and Out

Note that the advertisement above touts the high quality illustrations of the volume; gift books inevitably were illustrated with either wood cuts, steel engravings or both. New technology available after about 1810 made intricate steel cut engravings affordable to the masses.

The advertiser goes on to praise both the outer beauty of the book and the intrinsic value of its contents:

We can scarcely conceive of a work more commendable as a gift book, its interior and exterior being alike attractive to any person of pure and elevated taste. There is nothing ephemeral or perishable about it…it is a book, not for a season, for all time.

The clever copywriter has summed up the essence of the Victorian gift book: it was a status symbol for an increasingly literate population, first in England, in the first part of the century and then later in the United States. Elegant gift books made the perfect present for anyone aspiring to “pure and elevated taste.”

Whether read or not, a beautifully bound book could be shown off in the parlor; it was the coffee table book of the times. (One supposes that books bound with glass plates, as mentioned in the advertisement, were intended largely for display.) Lavishly produced gift books might have included ornate or embossed cloth, silk, or leather, a decorative frontispiece and end papers, an engraved presentation plate at the front, gilt edges, and a number of fine illustrations with hand-inserted tissue paper protectors. The volume might have had its own casing to keep it pristine. All of this was made possible by advances in machine-embossing, book stamping, engraving, and color lithography. Although machines made this luxury affordable for the middle class, the process of creating high end gift books was still very labor-intensive.

(photo via the University of Virgina/Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library)

Between the covers

Of course, any type of book could be elegantly bound and presented as a gift. However, the gift book phenomenon truly took off when publishers competed for the public dollar by commissioning anthologies of verse, short stories, moral essays, and original artwork.

A special type of gift book was the annual – an anthology of writings and original artwork artfully bound and printed, with the year stamped on the cover. These volumes were released to the public in months prior to the cover date, in order to be given as holiday gifts. They were also sold throughout the year for use as prizes in school competitions or to commemorate birthdays and anniversaries. Sub-categories of annuals included volumes for children, those espousing the abolitionist cause, and others representing various charities. A popular annual would appear in new editions for several years.

The desire for new material for these literary compilations was a boon to aspiring authors stateside. New writers might see their work published alongside established authors such as Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Emerson. In deference to the “pure and elevated taste” of the American reading public (particularly women), much of the content featured in anthologies was overly sentimental or romance based. In contrast, a portion of writing was given over to more meaty subjects, including mystery and horror (both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe contributed stories to gift books.) Atypical of these volumes was any actual Christmas content — these were books for Christmas, not about Christmas.

(photo from The Library of Birmingham’s copy of The Girl’s Own Annual 1887, pages 483-484. Parker Collection of Children’s Books BQ 0871.1 699955)

While they were a target audience for gift books, women also found their place as writers and editors for many of these publications; Mary Shelley and Harriet Beecher Stowe both contributed to annuals over the course of their careers.

Jo March, herself, (a thinly disguised Louisa May Alcott), helped her family by writing sensational short stories for public consumption:

“She…began to feel herself a power in the house, for by the magic of a pen, her “rubbish” turned into comforts for them all. The Duke’s Daughter paid the butcher’s bill, A Phantom Hand put down a new carpet, and the Curse of the Coventrys proved the blessing of the Marches in the way of groceries and gowns.”

A British literary “Annual” for 1823, this Forget-me-Not was published late in 1822 for the holiday market. Many annuals had sentimental names evoking their character as gifts: The Gift, The Token, The Talisman, The Keepsake, to name a few. Illustrations with classical or romantic themes were typical. (photo from Wikipedia.)

This edition of the beloved Scott poem displays the elegant binding of a high-end gift book. The Lady of the Lake, originally published in 1810, became a favorite gift book on both sides of the pond. The gold stamped cover includes the bookbinder’s initials (JL for John Leighton) within the centerpiece, indicating that he had standing above the usual bookbinders and artists who toiled to make these works of art. Unlike most gift books, this 1863 volume includes actual photographs. Image courtesy of Echoes from the Vault, a blog of the Special Collections at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

This American gift annual, the Christmas Blossom (1849) features gold stamping on blue rib-grain cloth. The words “Altemus Binder,” not visible here, are inserted into the garland at bottom left. From the website Publishers Binding Online 1815-1930: The Art of the Book.

Further suggested reading:

A great deal has been written on the subject of gift books, annuals, and their cousins, much of it quite academic. If you’re not particularly interested in exploring the “objective correlative” or “blurred lines of the vignette,” I recommend the following:

• A well-written and amusing essay on the gift book, its antecedents, and the variety of its bindings come from Kevin MacDonnell, “The American Gift Book” for the Antiquarian Bookesellers Association of America: http://www.abaa.org/member-articles/the-american-gift-book
• Another excellent overview is “Tokens of Affection: Art, Literature and Politics in Nineteenth Century American Gift Books” for Publishers’ Bindings Online: http://bindings.lib.ua.edu/gallery/giftbooks.htm

 

— Eleanor Boba