Manufacturing and Book Production. Michael Winship. Of contributions by inventors and artizans to the great work of

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1 Note: This is an unpublished chapter from the forthcoming volume 3 of the History of the Book in America. Please do not quote, copy, or distribute without permission. Manufacturing and Book Production Michael Winship Of contributions by inventors and artizans to the great work of mental development, there are three that have been conspicuous in bringing out the modern outburst of thought.... Successfully employed in hastening a present, they are securing the future elevation of our race. Preventing retrogation in intelligence, they add daily to the general stock, and are posting it up for the use of our successors.... They are metallic types, paper and the printing press; a triad of achievements in mechanical science unrivalled in importance and value. While water, wind, steam, electricity and the gases, serve to animate material mechanisms, these are the elements of a higher and mightier prime mover; one destined to agitate and expand the intellect of the world; to extend and perpetuate the peaceful reign of science and arts over the earth. Report of the Commissioner of Patents, for the Year i In the United States, the nineteenth century was the great period of industrialization, and the benefits of industrial ways were an article of faith. As the epigraph to this chapter 50

2 makes clear, this belief was especially true for the manufacture of and trade in books and other printed materials: between 1840 and 1880 these objects changed substantially in their manufacture, appearance, and cost, as did the lives of those who produced and consumed them. When examining these changes and their implications, it is important to distinguish the invention of a new technology the most common focus of historical accounts or studies from its introduction into practical use and its widespread acceptance by industry. These two steps usually involved different people and new combinations of capital and ingenuity, and they likely occurred at different times. By 1840 many of the manufacturing technologies and changes described in this chapter had not only been invented, but some had also been introduced into practice. Only during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, however, did their use become general. Furthermore, even as the methods of book manufacture in 1880 varied substantially from those in 1840, the methods of 1880 would by and large continue to be in general use well into the twentieth century. Printing from plates, one of the most important and characteristic new processes adopted in the United States during the nineteenth century, is a useful illustration of these points. Scattered experiments with various processes of producing printing plates had taken place for several centuries in Europe and Great Britain, and they had met with some success, but the method of casting stereotype plates from plaster molds was finally perfected in England in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It was first successfully used in the United States in Over the course of the following decades this process for producing plates was supplemented by other techniques, most importantly by electrotyping, but also stereotyping from papier-maché flong molds. By the 1830s 51

3 printing from stereotype plates was becoming the standard form of book manufacture in the United States, at least by the larger firms: of 413 volumes published by Harper & Brothers in 1834, 192 (46 percent) were stereotyped, and by 1855 almost every work at the Harper establishment was electrotyped. The use of stereotype and especially electrotype plates for book production remained standard well into the twentieth century, and the use of stereotype plates made from flong molds, introduced in 1861 and widely adopted in the newspaper industry after the Civil War, remained common into the 1970s. ii The development of printing plates calls attention to several other general features of industrialization. First, new technologies usually supplement rather than replace older ones: even after plates became predominant, much printing continued to be done directly from type. Second, technological change does not happen in isolation. The ability to produce stereotype plates from flexible flong molds solved the problem of how to produce curved printing plates that could be attached to rotary printing presses, which in turn could efficiently print on paper in rolls rather than in sheets. Changes in plates, presses, and paper meant that the rate of printing could be greatly increased, and they were put to good use in the production of newspapers, whose editors and owners had made the currency of news a selling point. The discovery of news, however, was neither dependent upon nor determined by these technological developments: the daily penny press emerged in the 1830s, several decades before the introduction of curved stereotype plates or the widespread use of rotary presses. Even as the fallacy of technological determinism needs to be avoided, the implications of technological change demand close attention. 52

4 Industrialization and the introduction of new technologies of production inevitably affected practice, even if the effect was contingent and unpredictable. Although this chapter examines each of the many processes of book production separately, it is important to remember that they were utilized in a wide range of establishments to produce the tremendous variety of books and printed matter that characterizes the nineteenth century. The Adams flatbed platen power press used by William Dean Howells s father in his Ohio newspaper office was, in principle, the same as the twenty-eight Adams presses installed in 1855 by Harper & Brothers in their new factory in New York. Nevertheless, the two environments could not have been more different. In the Ohio shop the Adams press, like the hand press it had only recently replaced, was originally powered manually, and Howells s father used it to print directly from type inked by rollers that were fabricated in the shop. In contrast, the Harper establishment s steam-powered presses were part of a large, modern, fireproof book production facility designed to organize and rationalize the production process. iii Adams presses continued to be widely used after the Civil War: in the late 1860s they could be found at both the Riverside Press a large book manufactory in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in the much smaller shop of the Worcester, Massachusetts, job printer Charles Hamilton. But again these were different establishments specializing in different kinds of work. In 1868, when the Riverside Press purchased its first cylinder press, adding it to eighteen Adams presses, four hand presses, and one jobbing press, Hamilton was already operating two cylinder presses, as well as two Adams presses, two jobbing presses, 53

5 and one hand press. If anything, Hamilton s equipment was more varied and up-to-date than that in Cambridge. iv Type, Printing Plates, and Composition If the use of printing plates was one of the characteristic developments in book manufacturing of the nineteenth century, the reproduction of texts from movable type, a process introduced into Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, remained at the heart of printing throughout the period. Printed matter continued to be set up in moveable type, just as it had been during the preceding four centuries, and much of it was printed from type in a fashion that would have been familiar to earlier printers. Despite this continuity a number of nineteenth-century developments in the production of type increased its availability and the variety of its design. The earliest was the invention and perfection of the pivotal typecasting machine by David Bruce, Jr., of New York during the 1830s and early 1840s. The heart of the machine, a pump turned by a hand crank, forced molten type metal made of the traditional mixture of lead, tin, and antimony into a type mold with an attached matrix, a bar of metal impressed with the negative image of the face of a particular character, or sort. The temperature, make-up, amount of type metal, and thrust of the pump had to be adjusted to match the size and width of each letter, but each revolution of the machine s handle cast and released a single piece of type from the mold. The resulting type was far more regular than type cast in a hand-held mold, having especially a sharper face, but each piece of type still had to be finished and dressed manually. The greater control of the casting process that the machine 54

6 allowed, however, made it possible to produce the elaborate ornamental and display types so characteristic of the period s typography. The typecasting machine was far faster than hand casting: an average of one hundred pieces of type of the ordinary sizes could be cast in a minute, though larger sizes necessarily had to be cast at a slower rate, while traditional hand casting could only produce a maximum of roughly four thousand individual types in a day though this rate had been doubled with the adoption of the lever hand mold early in the nineteenth century. From 1845 most of the type in the United States was produced by the Bruce pivotal typecasting machine. v A second innovation of the 1840s was the use of electrotyped matrices for typefounding. Traditionally, the matrix had been produced by striking a steel punch, with the shape of a letter laboriously carved on its end, into a bar of soft copper. Electrotyping eliminated the need for both punch and the operation of striking. In this process the model letter was cut out of type metal, which after proper preparation was submerged into an electrolytic bath with plates of zinc and copper. The action of the electric current within the bath caused the type metal to be coated with a thick shell of copper, which was then removed and backed up to produce a matrix. Although the resulting matrix was less sharp and less durable than the traditional one, electrotype matrices were widely used and served to encourage both the production and proliferation of new type designs, as type metal was far easier to work in making model letters than the steel used for traditional punches. It was also possible to reproduce any type already in hand by using the types themselves as the model for the electrotype matrices, though by the 1880s attempts were made to restrict this practice by means of the patent laws. vi 55

7 The manufacture of type remained a specialized branch within the printing trades throughout the period, with type foundries, which regularly issued type specimen catalogs to show off their wares in all their variety, located in the large cities across the country. vii Table 1.1, which gives the number and locations of type foundries from 1866 to 1878, shows that the overall number increased by nearly a third, but that in contrast to much of the book trade these establishments became less centralized, presumably because of the expense of shipping heavy type. <insert table 1.1 here> While the number of foundries in New York City fell from eight to five, new foundries sprung up across the country, especially in Chicago, where a single foundry in 1866 had multiplied to four by Type was sold by the pound and was normally divided into three classes for pricing: book and newspaper faces in both roman and italic, regular display faces, and more elaborate ornamental faces. Price also depended upon body size, which continued to be designated by time-honored names, from diamond (roughly 4½ modern points) through pica (12 point) to canon (48 point), with even larger sizes described as multiples of pica. The introduction of typecasting machinery does not seem to have reduced the cost of book and newspaper type significantly, though there seems to have been a slight reduction in cost over time, especially in the smaller sizes. viii Body size and to a lesser extent height to paper, the distance between the face and the foot of the type, continued to vary slightly from foundry to foundry, which made it impossible to mix type from different sources in a single form, though an important step toward standardization occurred in 1886 when the investigation of a committee formed by the Type Founders Association of the United States led to the widespread adoption of the American point system. ix 56

8 In addition to regular type, foundries advertised other material in their specimen catalogs, including exotic alphabets for foreign languages such as Greek and Hebrew, fractions and special figures, and music, as well as leading, decorative rules, borders, type ornaments, and a wide variety of stock cuts. This was also the period when American wood type emerged as an important supplement to traditional metal types, particularly for large and ornamental letter forms. The production of wood type cut by hand or later by machine router from the end grain of a tight-grained wood such as cherry, apple, or boxwood was a specialized trade and by the 1870s had come to be dominated by two firms, W. H. Page & Co. of Greenville, Connecticut, and Vanderburgh, Wells & Co. of New York City. Sorts of wood type were produced as large as 15-line pica (180 point), were priced by the character, and were particularly used for advertising and poster work. x The wide variety of type styles and sizes allowed for the extravagant and eclectic appearance of much printed matter from the period. This free combination of type styles was particularly characteristic of job printing posters, advertising fliers, and other ephemera but it was also a feature of title pages and advertisements in books, magazines, and newspapers. The text types used for bookwork were available and used in a great, if less obviously extravagant, variety of designs. In a major shift during the 1850s, the oldstyle type design (with slanted stress, bracketed serifs, and less contrast between thick and thin strokes characteristic of calligraphic letterforms written with a broad-nib pen) was reintroduced to supplement the predominant modern face (with vertical stress, hairline serifs, and exaggerated contrast between thick and thin strokes characteristic of copperplate lettering but also influenced by an almost mechanical devotion to symmetry). This shift in 57

9 typographic taste, in its most extreme cases, led to the peculiarly surprising use of such outdated letter forms as the long s in some texts printed in the 1850s and 1860s. The widespread use of stereotype and electrotype plates contributed to the eclectic appearance of typography from the period. On the one hand, plates increased the useful life of type, especially the expensive and often delicate ornamental faces, by providing a substitute printing surface for use on the press where most wear took place. On the other hand, since plates were cast a page at a time, a printer could make do with a smaller amount of type of any particular size or design: instead of needing sufficient type to set up an entire form before it could be proofed and sent to press, plates allowed type to be distributed and reused page by page. Inevitably, the use of plates encouraged printers to stock a greater variety, if smaller quantity, of different types, but it also meant that in large book shops type used for stereotyped or electrotyped matter was kept separate from type used on the press. Fresh type that was free from wear was necessary for producing a sharp cast in the plate that could be used for high-quality printing indeed, larger firms often sold type that had been used only for plates to country printers. Plates were made by several processes. Stereotype plates produced with plaster molds predominated before 1860, but after the Civil War electrotype plates became increasingly common in bookwork. Electrotyping, which initially was intended for reproducing woodcuts and wood engravings, was introduced in the early 1840s, most notably by the engraver Joseph A. Adams for his work on the Illuminated Bible ( ) published by Harper & Brothers. The process involved the use of a wax mold into which a page of type had been impressed. The mold was next coated with a thin layer of powdered 58

10 graphite, then submerged in an electrolytic bath where a thin layer of copper would be deposited on its surface. The copper shell, once removed from the mold, was backed up with type metal and finished in much the same way as stereotype plates. Electrotype plates reproduced finer detail than stereotype plates, and their copper surface was more resistant to wear. Printing from stereotype or electrotype plates had many advantages, chief among them that they allowed printers to preserve or duplicate the act of composition. By the 1850s most books for which any continued demand could be expected were being printed from plates, and it is a marked feature of publishing during this period that books, once published, remained in print. The economics of printing from plates meant that it was not unreasonable to print small runs of up to several hundred copies of a work to meet even a modest demand. The possession of a set of plates gave any publisher an economic advantage over a competitor who might wish to reprint the same text, a fact that certainly helped support courtesy of the trade conventions (see chapter 4, part 3). Indeed, publishers usually reckoned their capital worth as the inventory value of the plates that the firm owned, valued not as metal but as the right to publish. When plates were sold or auctioned, the sale regularly included both the physical plates and the rights to publish the text, if it was covered by copyright. The extent to which plates served to freeze a text, discouraging its correction or revision, is not clear. Certainly there was expense involved in correcting or revising a text that had been cast in plates, a process that involved chiseling away the original text and replacing it with the new text set in type, which was then soldered in place. If the revisions 59

11 were extensive, the new text might be cast separately as plates, which were then, with the originals, cut up and soldered together. Surviving evidence suggests that workmen became very skilled at working with plates, and there are many examples of texts cast in plates that were corrected or revised extensively. The longevity of plates and the skill with which old and battered plates could be renewed were also remarkable: the original 1852 plates of Harriet Beecher Stowe s Uncle Tom s Cabin were still in use in the late 1870s after having been used to produce several hundred thousand copies. xi The ability to duplicate a text by producing several sets of plates was chiefly useful in the newspaper trade, where it allowed a firm to print a late edition from multiple plates on multiple printing presses all in the interest of getting the news in print as quickly as possible. Such a rate of production, of course, was necessary only at the largest urban newspapers that could afford the heavy investment in presses, and printing from multiple plates probably became even more exceptional once the process of using curved plates on high-speed rotary presses was perfected. In bookwork the production of duplicate plates was uncommon, though it was used occasionally for running off copies simultaneously in two locations: for instance, sometimes the British edition of an American work was printed in London from a duplicate set of the American plates. It was more common, however, for duplicate plates of illustrations, especially of stock images, to be made for distribution or sale. Whether a text was printed from plates or directly from type, it was initially composed by hand in the traditional manner. For their work compositors were usually paid, and customers charged accordingly, a piece rate that was based on the area of type that had 60

12 been set, reckoned in ems or the square of the body size of the type used, rather than on the actual number of individual pieces that made up the composed text. The rate per 1,000 ems varied depending on the nature of the text: composition set from printed copy cost less than that set from manuscript. Similarly, leaded text, which had leads or thin strips of metal inserted between the lines of type, was charged by area, as if it had been set solid, but usually at a lower rate. Tables and extra work involved in composing foreign-language or other unusual text were charged at an hourly rate, and the work was often done by a foreman or another specialist. If a text were to be cast as plates, the cost was roughly double that for composition alone, but the charges were reckoned on the same basis, with a small additional sum for the wooden boxes in which the plates were stored in the printer s vaults between their use. xii The mid-nineteenth century was an important period of experimentation with mechanical typesetting. By 1856 the large printing establishment of John F. Trow in New York City had installed five composing machines and a distributing machine, apparently the first such machines successfully employed commercially. Designed by William H. Mitchel, they were relatively primitive: the composing machine had a keyboard with thirty-four keys one for each of the lowercase letters, as well as points and spaces and when a key was pressed the appropriate piece of type would be released from a reservoir and carried by tape to an assembly point. Uppercase and other characters were set by hand, and a second worker was required to break up the assembled type into lines for justification. The distribution machine relied upon the fact that each sort had a distinctive 61

13 set of nicks on its body that allowed it to be dropped from a revolving cylinder, piece by piece, into the appropriate channel in the reservoir. xiii A more successful typesetting and distributing machine, first produced by Timothy Alden in New York City in 1857, worked on similar principles but had 154 keys and, after improvements made during the 1860s, was used for bookwork by D. Appleton & Co. and experimentally for newspaper work at the New York World. During the 1870s and later, composing and distributing machines produced by Henry A. Burr were even more widely adopted. No matter how refined, all of these machines depended upon hand justification of the type by a second worker who assisted the keyboard operator, but many of their features influenced and were incorporated in the ultimately successful linotype and monotype typesetting machines that were perfected and introduced at the end of the century. From the 1850s on women were frequently employed as the operators of these machines most notably Augusta Lewis (Troup), who was not only one of the founders of Women s Typographical Union No. 1 but also the most accomplished operator of the Alden Type- Setting and Distributing Machine. The employment of female operators serves as a reminder that one of the major incentives for developing this technology was to reduce, especially in newspaper shops, the bargaining power of the International Typographical Union and its male membership. xiv Paper and Papermaking Of all trades associated with printing and publishing, the relationship with the papermaking trades was the most complex. The paper used in printing made up a small part of the total 62

14 output of the trade, which also produced paper ranging from stationery and ledger paper of very high quality and strength to the much cheaper products used for wallpaper and wrapping and packaging papers. As a business papermaking was capital intensive and international in scope, depending on the import and export of technology, raw materials, and finished product. Not surprisingly, the paper trade developed its own business systems not only special retail and wholesale networks for printing papers, stationery, and other paper products, but also separate sources of capital, specialized manufacturers of machinery, and conventions of labor relations. The introduction and adoption of machine-made paper in the printing and book trades in the United States parallels in many ways those of printing plates, though if anything the substitution of machine-made for handmade paper had become even more universal by midcentury. The mechanization of papermaking involved many discrete and interdependent developments over many years, beginning with the introduction of the Hollander beater in Europe at the end of the seventeenth century for the preparation of stuff, the slurry of fibers and other materials from which paper was made. Experimentation with and adoption of alternative sources of fibers, as well as the development of effective chemical treatments to prepare them, continued over many centuries, though major developments occurred during the mid-nineteenth century. Sizing and finishing, processes necessary to make paper usable for printing, were also continually being perfected. The signal innovation, however, was the mechanization of molding and couching, the process by which paper is formed. As with printing plates, the initial 63

15 experimentation and successful development occurred in England and was adopted in the United States before Two distinct, if related, methods of forming paper mechanically were successfully developed at what came to be known as the wet end of the papermaking machine. Both involved the use of a finely woven wire web or screen, upon which the stuff was molded to form a felt of fibers that became paper. The cylinder machine, first designed in England by John Dickinson, had the web stretched around a rotating drum submerged in the vat of stuff. A slight vacuum maintained inside the rotating drum drew the water out of the stuff so that a web of paper formed on the drum s surface. In the Fourdrinier machine, first conceived at the Didot Mill outside Paris by Nicholas-Louis Robert, but perfected and produced in London in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the stuff was dribbled onto the surface of a moving endless web, and the paper was molded as the web moved away from the vat and water drained off. In both machines, the newly formed paper was then passed along to the dry end of the machine, where it was lifted off the wire web onto a second web, made of wool felt, and pressed between rollers to remove more water. It was then sized, polished, and cut into sheets as required. The cylinder machine was simpler and less expensive, but it produced paper of lesser quality. The Fourdrinier machine reduced the inherent characteristic of both to impart a distinct grain to the paper by shaking the wire web sideways as the paper was forming in order to interlock the fibers, and it eventually came to predominate though during most of the nineteenth century both were in common use. xv 64

16 New Jersey papermaker Charles Kinsey succeeded in making printing stock on a rudimentary cylinder machine patented in 1807, but the earliest known commercially produced machine-made paper in the United States came from the cylinder machine developed by Thomas & Joshua Gilpin of Wilmington, Delaware on 15 April 1818 this paper was used to print an issue of Poulson s American Daily Advertiser. The earliest Fourdrinier machine, valued at $30,000, was imported to the United States in By the following year George Spafford and James Phelps in South Windham, Connecticut, had inaugurated the production of an American-built Fourdrinier machine, which in 1829 sold without accessories for $2,000. By the early 1830s, Fourdrinier machines were being made in Morristown, New Jersey, by Stephen Vail, and Fourdrinier machines, probably imported, were available from C. M. Pickering of New York. During these early years cylinder papermaking machines predominated in American mills; however, by 1837 a fully equipped Spafford & Phelps Fourdrinier cost just $3,750. By then machine-made paper was well on the way to replacing handmade paper: by 1845 only two hand-making paper mills remained in operation in the United States, and by 1880 handmade paper produced in America had all but disappeared. Between 1840 and 1880 the paper used for printing was machine-made. xvi Another fundamental innovation of nineteenth-century papermaking was the widespread introduction of new sources of fiber, the raw material from which all paper was made. The traditional source was linen rags from used clothing, and the collection and sale of rags for papermaking remained important throughout the nineteenth century: the cost of rags in various European and Near-Eastern ports remained a regular feature of lists of 65

17 prices current in commercial periodicals throughout the century. However, the cotton gin, invented and adopted in the 1790s, meant that cotton, chiefly grown in the southern states, rather than linen became the major vegetable fiber used for clothing in the western world. More and more the rags that were collected and traded were made of cotton instead of linen. The worn fiber from cotton rags was considerably weaker than that of linen, and increasingly rags were supplemented or even replaced for better quality paper by the stronger raw cotton waste bought directly from spinning and weaving mills. By the 1840s cotton had become more common as a source for fiber than linen in the paper used for books, making up 65 percent of the fiber content (as opposed to 30 percent for the preceding four decades) according to one study. xvii The longstanding search for an alternative to linen and cotton rags led to continuing experiments with almost all types of fibrous materials, including especially straw, but also wood and even wasp nests. While the cellulose strands in vegetable matter were ideally suited for making paper, the raw material contained other substances, such as lignin and resins, that quickly weakened and discolored the resulting paper. After midcentury, paper made from ground-wood pulp was used on an experimental basis; the first commercial paper mill to produce mechanical wood newsprint paper went into operation in Curtisville, Massachusetts, in The 7 January 1868 issue of the New Yorker Staats- Zeitung was printed on wood-pulp paper, and during the 1870s many city newspapers followed this lead. During these same decades experiments were underway in developing chemical processes that would purify the cellulose fibers in wood pulp. The earliest successful method for producing chemical wood paper involved boiling ground wood 66

18 chips in an alkaline solution of caustic soda, but the resulting pulp was inferior and was usually mixed with rag pulp. Experiments with a better method, the sulfite process, were first conducted in Paris in 1857 by two American brothers, Benjamin C. and Richard Tilghman, and then successfully developed in Sweden and England. In 1882, the first American paper mill to use sulfite pulp commercially was that owned by C. S. Wheelwright of Providence. In succeeding decades the sulfite and later the sulfate processes ensured that wood pulp increasingly replaced rags as the primary and most important raw material used to produce the paper needed to meet an ever-increasing demand and market. Although wood fibers began to be mixed with rags in very small amounts in the 1850s to produce the paper used in books, not until the 1870s did they predominate. Even then most paper remained mixed in one sample of fifty books from the 1870s, only 20 percent of the paper was made from pure rags and just 10 percent from pure chemical wood. xviii Printing papers varied considerably in weight, opacity, color, and strength depending on the quality of the raw materials, the manufacturing method, and especially on the chemicals and other materials added to the stuff in the vat or used in sizing and finishing the sheets. Machine-made paper used for printing was originally wove in finish, displaying the smooth surface that came from being molded on a web, but it was early discovered that the addition of a dandy roll, a small cylindrical, patterned roll placed at the wet end of the machine, could impress the traditional laid pattern, and even watermarks, typical of sheets of handmade paper. When first introduced, the smoother and more uniform appearance of the wove, machine-made paper was prized, especially for 67

19 bookwork, and suited the new typographic styles of the modern-style typefaces that were popular, but with the reintroduction of the old-style type designs in the 1850s machinemade laid paper also began to be used. xix Another major change in printing papers over the period was the increasing use of a chemical alum-rosin size in place of the traditional animal gelatin size to set the ink and keep it from spreading or offsetting, something that became increasingly important as presses became faster. Almost unknown before the 1840s, alum-rosin size was almost universal in book papers by the 1870s. As it was acidic and tended to break down the cellulose fibers, its use was one factor in the subsequent rapid deterioration of much of the paper used during the period. xx Despite these many changes, throughout the nineteenth century papermaking remained as much an art as a science, and the quality and appearance of paper varied considerably from mill to mill and lot to lot. In placing an order for paper, printers and publishers would typically include a sample piece of paper, which they requested be matched in weight, color, and finish. xxi The use of the papermaking machine meant that for the first time the dimensions of the final sheet were freed from the human limits imposed by the hand mold: in theory, the only limit to the dimensions of a machine-made sheet was the width of the web on which the paper was molded. Indeed, it was feasible to make a continuous roll of paper. In practice, however, the size of existing printing presses and the market s demand that products appeal to consumers usually conservative expectations meant that paper continued to be produced in sheets in traditional dimensions and proportions. New and larger printing presses could handle larger sheets, and the size of the sheet did increase, but the larger sheets typically preserved the dimensional proportions of the handmade sheet: a 68

20 table of the sizes of American book papers from 1871 shows the traditional sizes, from medium (19 x 24 ) to imperial (22 x 32 ), as well as larger sizes from medium-and-half (24 x 30 ) and double medium (24 x 38 ) to double imperial (32 x 46 ). Printers and publishers records bear this out, but they also indicate that, if traditional paper sizes continued to be used, the traditional names for paper size were early replaced by the practice of recording the dimensions of a sheet of paper in inches and concomitantly by an increasing variety of sizes available for order. Not until the successful adoption of the rotary press and curved stereotype plates did the use of rolls of paper become practical in the printing trades. xxii Throughout the period the cost of paper was relatively high in comparison to the other costs of printing, though the general trend seems to have been toward lower prices as the production and market for paper expanded with the introduction of new raw materials and manufacturing methods. Prices were reckoned at cents per pound of a ream of paper and fluctuated considerably the range typically varied from fourteen to twenty cents depending not only on the specifics of a paper s material content and finish but also on the general state of the economy, reflected in the cost of raw materials and credit. Because of its expense, printers and publishers usually ordered paper only for specific jobs and from wholesale paper merchants rather than directly from the mills. These wholesalers typically arranged for the manufacture and speedy delivery of printing paper and offered their customers extended credit often of three, six, or even twelve months on their orders, thus helping to finance the book trade by relieving their customers of the expense of warehousing paper and the obligation to pay immediately for a raw material that, for 69

21 publishers at least, would not return a profit until a book was manufactured, distributed, purchased, and paid for. The wholesale paper trade was closely allied not only to the mills, but also to the retail stationery trade, which dealt in a wide range of products beyond paper. xxiii Printing Presses and Presswork No innovation served as a greater public symbol of industrial progress in book manufacturing than the power-driven, cast-iron printing machine. At the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the newest and largest models Hoe s perfecting press and Bullock s rotary perfecting press, each with a mechanical folder attached were prominently displayed in Machinery Hall, side by side with the traditional common hand press that Benjamin Franklin had used when he visited London. In the Campbell Press Building, just west of Machinery Hall, a daily newspaper was printed on a Campbell s rotary perfecting press, which stood next to another common press, borrowed from the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, that was used to print a facsimile of a 1776 newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence. Centennial publications and guides gave extensive accounts of these exhibits that fully illustrated and described these modern newspaper presses, stressing their intricacy, size, and speed. xxiv Like many other bookmaking technologies, the printing press changed only in minor ways before the end of the eighteenth century, though the exact details of the earliest printing presses are a matter of speculation. The eighteenth-century common press, made of wood and metal, was in itself a complex machine that managed the variety of actions 70

22 required to produce printed sheets: text composed in type was imposed and locked into a chase, a cast-iron frame, with wedge-shaped quoins; the chase in turn was attached to the bed of the press, where the type was inked; a blank sheet of paper, properly prepared by wetting, was held in place precisely on the tympan and masked by the frisket so that the text, once printed, would appear as a clean image in the correct position on both sides of the sheet; the bed was cranked under the platen; and the platen, lowered by means of a screw turned by a bar, applied pressure against the paper and inked type on the bed of the press to transfer the ink from type to paper. Typically, two pressmen operated the press, one of them responsible for handling the sheets of paper and making the impression, and the other for inking the type. Often, however, a single pressmen worked at half press to perform both operations. Careful adjustment of the press and type, as well as coordination between pressmen, was required to produce printed sheets of acceptable quality. All these processes were mechanized in one way or another during the industrial era. The screw-driven platen of the wooden common press could only make an impression on half of the form of type held in the bed, which meant that two pulls of the bar were required to print even one side of a sheet. In England at the turn of the nineteenth century, Charles Mahon, Third Earl of Stanhope, who had been instrumental in perfecting the plaster-mold method of stereotyping, also designed and built a metal hand press with a full-size platen that could print the entire form of type with a single pull. Because the traditional screw mechanism to lower the platen proved no longer adequate to apply sufficient pressure over the greater area of impression, the Stanhope press depended on a lever-powered system. These two innovations replacing wood with metal, chiefly cast 71

23 iron reinforced with forged steel, and replacing the screw with a lever-powered and later a toggle-joint system became standard for all hand presses that were designed and produced during the nineteenth century and beyond. Copies of the original Stanhope press were in use in New York City by 1811, but over the century many different American designs for iron hand presses were patented and produced. Two, in particular, predominated. The Columbian press, designed and first produced in Philadelphia by the American George Clymer about 1814, went on to become one of the standard hand presses used in nineteenth-century British printing shops after Clymer moved his manufacturing operations to London in The Washington press, first patented in 1821 by the New York printer Samuel Rust, was a simpler and lighter machine. After the New York firm R. Hoe & Co. purchased Rust s entire establishment and patent rights in 1835, the Washington press became one of that firm s signature products and the predominant hand press used in the United States into the twentieth century, its design widely copied by other firms after the original patents expired. An 1894 article in a dictionary of printing praised the Washington press: For simplicity and accuracy it is difficult to see how any machine can surpass it. xxv Further developments in press design came from progress in discovering alternatives to the hand-pulled lever for applying pressure on the platen to transfer the printed image from inked type to paper. Again, experiments were underway by the turn of the century, chiefly in Europe and England, but American inventors and press makers soon joined them. Isaac Adams of Boston drawing on innovations made by Daniel Treadwell, another Bostonian, but one who had spent time in England developed a successful power 72

24 press by about The Adams press, with continuing further improvements designed by Isaac s brother, Seth Adams, became the standard press used for book manufacturing in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. In 1859 R. Hoe & Co. purchased the patents and became the primary manufacturer and supplier. A description of the press from 1871 reported that Hoe s Catalogue says that for letter-press and cut work of the finest quality, these presses cannot be equaled; and, in spite of the numerous improvements in cylinder presses, this assertion is believed by many experienced book-printers. xxvi By century s end, however, the larger and faster cylinder press had become the choice of most book-printers, though many Adams presses continued in use into the new century. xxvii Although quite different in appearance, the Adams press shared a basic principle with the traditional common press, for it consisted of a flat bed which held the form of type, and later plates, in place and a flat platen, although on the Adams press the bed rather than the platen was lowered and raised by means of a toggle joint in order to transfer the image from type to paper while the flat platen remained stationary. On cylinder presses, a cylindrical platen was used in place of a flat one to make the impression, progressively applying pressure as it was rolled across the inked type. This method had the advantage of allowing an increase in the size of the sheet that could be printed from a single form, as it was no longer necessary, as with a flat platen, to apply the entire pressure required to transfer the printed image in a single instant. As early as November 1814, the London Times had successfully installed the first two cylinder machines, which had been designed and perfected there by a German, Friedrich Koenig. The earliest cylinder presses used in the United States were those designed and 73

25 manufactured in England by David Napier and imported during the second half of the 1820s, but around 1830 R. Hoe & Co. had begun manufacturing them in New York. xxviii Cylinder machines were the primary presses for newspaper work (especially after the introduction of the penny press in the 1830s) until the end of the century and were also increasingly used in magazine offices. Their reputation for producing work of inferior quality and for causing wear or damage to type, plates, and illustrations in the process of printing, however, meant that book printers preferred the Adams press through Further experiments during the mid-nineteenth century led to the successful development of rotary printing machines in which the printing surface, whether composed type or printing plates, was itself attached to a cylindrical surface and rotated against the cylindrical platen to make the impression though again experiments with this method of printing had been longstanding. The earliest commercial successes were made with type-revolving presses, which depended on several techniques to hold rectangular type to the curved surface of the platen: making the cylindrical platen of such large diameter that the arc of the surface was only slightly curved, casting type on a tapered body or with notches and projections, and using specially prepared wedge-shaped rules and quoins to hold them in place in a curved chase called a turtle. The Philadelphia Public Ledger of 22 March 1847 was issued on a type-revolving press supplied by R. Hoe & Co., though it was a primitive machine that used a flat platen to print paper supplied in sheets. Over the next decades Hoe produced and successfully marketed a perfected version of its type-revolving Lightning press: by 1855, the first twenty-three had been sold to big-city newspapers including, incredibly, one to La Patrie in Paris. During the 1860s, however, 74

26 William H. Bullock s Printing Press Company of Pittsburgh designed and perfected a rotary web press using curved stereotype plates that could also print both sides of a web of paper, which was then cut into sheets, all in a continuous motion able to produce over 20,000 perfected (i.e., printed on both sides) sheets an hour. Hoe and other press manufacturers soon entered the field with web presses of their own, though the market for these fast, but large, heavy, and expensive, printing machines was for many years limited only to urban newspapers with the largest circulations. xxix At the same time the industrial era brought about the development of the jobbingplaten press, a versatile and inexpensive machine that was popular in many shops and that allowed for the proliferation of printed ephemera. The platen jobber was a strictly American development, based on early experiments by Bostonians Daniel Treadwell, who also worked on the early development of the platen power press, and Stephen Ruggles; it was perfected at mid-century successively by George Phineas Gordon and his draughtsman Frederick Degener. Characteristic of the platen jobber was that bed and platen, both flat, were joined by a hinge and brought together by a horizontal rather than a vertical movement, that the ink was distributed automatically by rollers revolving over a rotating ink disc, and that the frisket was dispensed with. These features meant that the press could be operated effectively by a single pressman, and over the century the platen jobber developed in opposing directions: with a treadle or lever, it became a small, hand-operated press chiefly used for small jobs or by amateurs, whereas the power-driven version was used by professional printers efficiently and rapidly for a variety of jobs and eventually would work side by side with large cylinder presses. xxx 75

27 These new printing presses depended for their success on many ancillary inventions and improvements: the replacement of traditional ink balls by composition rollers for distributing the ink; an increasing variety of faster-drying or colored printing inks suitable for use on the larger and faster printing machines; metal grippers to feed and position the sheet of paper precisely over the printing surface; fly mechanisms to remove the printed sheet from the press; and mechanical folders to cut and fold the printed sheet. For book printing the development of patented stereotype blocks platforms that were locked in the bed of the press, that fastened the printing plates in place by means of small hooks, and that brought the plates up to type height simplified the processes of imposition and makeready (the preparation of the type or plates for the press run), especially with the larger sheets made possible by machine-made paper and the larger beds of power-driven printing machines. Industrial presses were powered by various means: hand levers and foot treadles persisted throughout the nineteenth century on smaller presses, especially jobbing presses, whereas horse- and water-power, transferred to the shop floor by means of belts and overhead shafts, was widely replaced by steam engines, a substitution that helps explain the frequent fires that bedeviled larger printing and bookmaking establishments. Electric power, introduced toward the end of the century, would eventually predominate in industrial printing plants. xxxi While more efficient, the new printing presses were generally less versatile. This fact explains the different arrays of equipment, mentioned earlier in this chapter, that were found in the printing establishments of Charles Hamilton and the Riverside Press: Hamilton, an industrial job printer, owned a variety of presses in order to meet many kinds 76

28 of printing requirements, whereas the Riverside Press was chiefly a book-printing plant that depended on Adams flat-bed presses. xxxii The cost of presses was also a factor: in 1856 small jobbing platen presses and Washington hand presses cost only a few hundred dollars, depending on the size of the bed, whereas Adams presses and cylinder machines, which began at less than $1,000 for the smallest sizes, could cost as much as $4,500 for the largest double-cylinder machine. xxxiii In 1867 R. Hoe & Co. advertised its largest tencylinder type-revolving machine at $41,250, with boxing and carting an additional $780 and other extras, $647. xxxiv The large rotary presses that were being installed in big-city newspaper offices during the 1870s and that were exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition must have cost many thousands more: in 1882 the St. Louis Globe-Democrat paid $80,000 for a Hoe web rotary press with an attached folding machine. xxxv This great variety of presses, many of which were necessarily dedicated to particular types of work, makes it impossible to generalize about the rate and cost of production during this period. Any press s performance largely depended on the nature of the work and the number of copies to be produced: the time required for makeready could be considerable, especially on the large new printing machines or for high-quality or complicated work. Table 1.2 estimates impression rates for several kinds of presses in 1871, although these rates fall far below those that were often advertised for large cylinder and rotary presses. <insert table 1.2 here> Theodore L. De Vinne, who made these estimates based on his practical experience, nonetheless reported that based on the abstract of an entire year s business, the average daily performance of a large press room in New York containing twelve cylinder presses, two large Gordon platen jobbers, 77