EARNEST ELMO CALKINS The Book & Job Print

From The Colophon, New Graphic Series No. 1. Copyright 1939 by the publisher. Reprinted by permission of the author and Mr. Elmer Adler.

I

The printing office was a long narrow room over a store. One front window was appropriated to a cubicle known as "the office"—seldom used, its desk piled high with galley proofs and dusty government reports. Frames for type cases occupied the two remaining front windows and the three at the back. In between were the hand-power cylinder press, the two Gordon jobbers, an imposing stone for the newspaper and one for job work. Along the walls ran the dump—sloping shelves divided longitudinally by strips of wood, holding galleys and standing jobs tied up with white packthread. The prevalent odor was a mixture of benzine and warm roller composition familiar to old-time printers, but sweeter than the scents of Araby to the young apprentice about to be initiated into the craft and mystery of printing.

They seated him on a high stool before a case in the darker part of the room, with a composing stick, a setting rule, and a piece of patent medicine reprint. A slug on a string hung on his upper case to hold the copy in place, for the oldest rule of the printing trade is "follow copy though it goes out the window." In each corner of the lower case boxes Big Sweeny, the foreman, had stuck letters from a job font to guide the youngster in learning the case.

For days the tyro was absorbed in the seemingly impossible task of setting a stick full of type and "dumping" it on the galley. The first lot exploded in the air; it took hours to distribute the "pi."

In a few weeks he had learned his case, except the small boxes around the edge, double ffls and ffis and little-used punctuation points. He could distinguish a 3-em space from a 5-em, and justify a line by distributing them judiciously, remembering, as was often impressed on him, to put more space between words ending in tall letters. He began to look about him and take stock of the curious world in which he found himself.

For years he had dreamed of printing, his appetite whetted by the life of Franklin in the Harper Story Books, and a manual of instructions for young printers in the same volume. He pored over type specimen books obtained from Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, and reveled in the amazing faces shown. Other boys had their ambitions—firemen, policemen, railroad engineer—but his hero was the journeyman printer, a green shade over his eyes, sleeves rolled to display a bright red undershirt, spitting tobacco with an accuracy that missed nothing but the spittoon. Tales told by typographical tourists, the tramp printers, were his folklore, and for some years after he learned his trade his chance to work came mostly in "subbing" for printers frankly laying off to get drunk.

Type had two names. He was setting brevier Roman; the smaller size used for quotations and for county correspondence was nonpareil. Other sizes with equally picturesque names piqued his curiosity. In the early eighties the point system had not reached the prairies. Later he became familiar with it. The old names of the types with approximate sizes in points that prevailed in the days of our young apprentice were as follows:

Diamond, 4-1/2-point; Pearl, 5-point; Agate, 5-1/2-point; Nonpareil, 6-point; Minion, 7-point; Brevier, 8-point; Bourgeois, 9-point; Long Primer, 10-point; Small Pica, 11-point; Pica, 12-point; English, 14-point; Columbian, 16-point; Great Primer, 18-point; Paragon, 20-point; Double Pica (strictly this should be Double Small Pica), 22-point; Two-line Pica, 24-point; Two-line English, 28-point; Two-line Great Primer, 36-point; Two-line Double Pica, 44-point; Canon, 48-point.

It must not be supposed that all these sizes were found in the office of the Book & Job Print, nor for that matter probably anywhere but in the warehouses of Barnhart Bros. & Spindler, Marder, Luse & Co., MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan Co., Bruce, or other type-founders.

Our apprentice was afflicted with one of those curious prying minds that sought to know the reason for all things. Much typographical history lurked behind the names given to type sizes. Diamond, agate and nonpareil, it seemed, were merely fancy names, but brevier was so-called because it had been used to print breviaries; canon, from the first lines of the canonical mass, and primer for primaries or elementary prayer books. Bourgeois has been attributed to the city of Bourges, to a printer named Bourgeois, and to having been used in cheap books for the middle classes, the bourgeoisie. Minion was said to be the French word mignon, darling. But the origin of pica, so constantly used as a yardstick for measuring leads, slugs, reglets, and the width of columns and pages, is as fascinating as it is baffling.

Pica is Latin for magpie, and it has been ingeniously supposed that some work now lost, an account of that thievish and mischievous bird, was printed in type now bearing that name. De Vinne[38] cites a far more amusing derivation: "Like great primer, pica takes its name from its early use as a text letter. 'The Pie,' writes Mores, 'was a table showing the course of the service of the church in the time of darkness. It was called the Pie because it was written in letters of black and red, as the Friars de Pica were so named from their party-colored raiment black and white, the plumage of the magpie.'" And is it not at least probable that "pi," a jumble of unsorted type, is also derived from the same source, either because of the pied feathers of the bird, or from its habit of assembling a miscellaneous collection of objects in some hiding place?

As he explored his upper case, our apprentice discovered that while the capitals and small capitals were ranged in alphabetical order, J and U were left to the end like substitute ball players on the bench. By studying an unabridged dictionary he learned that those letters were late comers into the alphabet; the old scribes, finding that I tended to become confused with the last stroke of the previous letter, gave it a tail to distinguish it. The two forms were used indiscriminately for the consonant and vowel sounds of I until in due course they were separated. In the same way V was half of W, distinguished as singleyou and doubleyou. V was carelessly written as U and even as Y, and had all the sounds, but was at length assigned one job, and the U added to the alphabet. How long ago that happened! So conservative was the printing art that even after two hundred years the case had not been shifted to accommodate them, and dictionaries as late as 1800 still used both forms in the same classification. Our apprentice felt that the office where he was learning his trade had not changed greatly, typographically at least, since Plantin.

II

The number and variety of faces at the disposal of the master printer equalled their ugliness, though this apprentice considered them all beautiful. There were of course the Roman faces, some of which were good, and still are, but these were strangely distorted as condensed, extra-condensed, extended, expanded, as well as shaded, open, skeleton, contour, sloped (both ways), ornamented, and hair-line letters.

One would think these were enough for all the printing anyone would want to do, but there was also a bewildering multitude of so-called job types of fancy and fantastic design. Each foundry put out a book as big as a dictionary, filled with bizarre creations in which the innocent alphabet was twisted and tormented and decorated until some of its masterpieces were illegible.

Among them were a number informally standardized and cast by all foundries. Such were Antique, Boldface, Gothic, Lightface, Clarendon, Caledonian, Ionic, Doric, Egyptian, Runic, Celtic, Rustic, Script, Grecian, Monastic, Norman, Title, and these too were also condensed, extended and otherwise squeezed, stretched and pulled about. When the type-writer came there was added that monstrosity, type-writer type. But the pride of each foundry was its own exclusive creations, to which were given names as fantastic as the designs, putting Pullman nomenclature to shame, such as Pansy, Olive, Asteroid, Van Dyke, Vulcan, Schwabacher, Florist, Teuton, Text, Eastlake.

From such an array the country printer was expected to choose the types to equip his shop. His outfit consisted of fair quantities of Roman, nonpareil, brevier and long primer for straight matter—the weekly newspaper, booklets and pamphlets, with larger sizes for job work, too many faces with few fonts large enough to set more than a line or two. This did not matter since it seemed obligatory to set in a different letter each line of display, advertisements, title pages, as well as dodgers and handbills, the greater the contrast and variety the better, with "ands" and "thes" in lines by themselves, centered and flanked by flourishes on each side. Type larger than two-line canon was made of wood, and was called "stud-horse type" because used for the big bills tacked up on barns and trees to advertise the services of a stallion.

Small fonts of job type were listed in foundry catalogues "5A 13a," to indicate quantity, other letters being in proportion. There was seldom more than one of little used letters, necessitating a shift to another font when a line turned up with two Xs or two Zs. Job types were laid in cases like the uppers of Roman, the boxes all of a size, capitals on one side, lower case on the other.

New type was an abomination. The compositor's fingers, already tender from the lye used to wash forms, were cut by the sharp edges, and his eyes blinded by the glare from sorts, and the printers were forever prowling the shining metal. There was chronic clack of up and down the live bank with tweezers, pulling out the needed letters, and inserting an equal-sized type upside down to mark the place. Another source of trouble was the font from a different foundry, supposedly the same body, but with a slight variation, that was forever getting into the wrong case and being set up, dropping out when the form was lifted.

III

The apprentice was kept too busy to have much time for the acquisition of abstract knowledge. In return for instruction in the art and mystery of printing he was expected to perform the duties of a "devil." He arrived at half-past six, started the fire in the pot-bellied stove, swept up (no light job, for the continuous barrage of fine-cut and plug formed a coping around the feet of every frame, and the trimmings from the big knife lay in windrows). All day he ran errands with proofs, handbills, billheads, advertisements, to submit to customers; wet down paper for the weekly run of the newspaper, and pasted the subscribers' names on them for the mail; distributed "pi," and rushed the growler for thirsty journeymen.

But he learned that the printers in one shop were a "chapel," the head was the "father," who was not the foreman. It thrilled him that such expressions went back to the time when Caxton had his press in Westminster Abbey. A small group of men working on the same job was a companionship, and had strict rules as to who was to do what. Points of procedure, such as the first or a "fat take," or the selection of a victim to set up the beer, was determined by a curious custom. The men gathered around the imposing stone, and each in turn shook out a few em-quads, five or seven, throwing them on the stone like dice. The one with the most nicks uppermost was the winner.

These were time-honored practices, but each shop had customs peculiar to itself. He learned not to whistle at his case, for a sponge of dirty water was apt to take him squarely in the mouth. When late he found lines set up in his composing stick, which he had to distribute before he began work, at his own expense—when he was finally promoted to piece work,—

For some time his tormentors had alluded mysteriously to the "type louse" that haunted the forms, and promised to show him one when found. A journeyman working at the stone over a newspaper form wet down for distribution called him over, and pointing excitedly, cried,

"Now, there, look!"

He looked.

Handfuls of type had been removed, and the water gathered in small pools between the columns. The apprentice bent over eagerly to behold the strange insect, whereupon the journeyman shoved up a column of type, forcing the water to rise like a fountain into the apprentice's innocent face, while the force roared with laughter and pounded with their composing sticks on the frames.

IV

In a small office in pre-union days, every printer was or became an "all-round" man. Not only could he stick type (and some old-time printers had a wonderful instinct for spacing), but he could "kick" a jobber, impose, make ready, and feed a cylinder press. Some of the vagabond printers who drifted back and forth across the West, working a few days at each halt, were not only craftsmen but characters. It was amazing how promptly they became at home in a strange shop, in a few moments working as if they had been there for years. The saga of the typographic tourist has yet to be told.

It was not long before he found himself standing on one leg like a stork, working the treadle of the Gordon jobber with the other, feeding some small job, milk tickets or dodgers or billheads, against three 3-em quads pasted to the tympan in lieu of gaugepins. As the press had no grippers the feeder must grab the printed sheet before the ink pulled it off and insert the next, regulating the speed according to his need. Pasting scraps of cardboard on the quads to project a bit helped hold the printed card or paper. The regular gaugepins sold never seemed to work as well as quads, and anyway, old-time printers were self-helpful and never bought what they could make.

From feeding press he graduated to making ready and locking up forms. There were always enough odds and ends of furniture for small jobs without cutting new, but for big work, particularly a book or pamphlet, the furniture was cut to fit the job. The form was "locked" by driving quoins, wedge-shaped bits of hard wood, along the tapering side sticks with an implement known as a shooting stick, notched at one end. The form was planed with a block of wood beaten over the form to drive down type that might stick above the printing surface. Something like this still prevails, no doubt, but not with such primitive tools, and very little printing is now done from the type. I am sure the shooting stick and wooden quoins must be as obsolete as ink balls.

The night before the newspaper was run off, the paper was laid down on a broad platform, a quire at a time, drenched with water, covered with a wide board, and a heavy stone placed on top to squeeze the water out. Dampening was necessary to make the ink stick. Subscribers received their papers so wet they had to dry them before reading. The press was a cylinder with a large flywheel having a handle attached. It was run by human power—a husky Negro, who also furnished the muscle for the big knife, or guillotine, with which books were trimmed. In the words of the proprietor he "always gives a scent back no matter what we pay him." The apprentice and devil doubled for the porter when he was otherwise engaged, but shortly steam was installed, adding greatly to the excitement on press day.

Feeding the dampened sheets against the gripper was not easy, and often he missed. To stop the press he grasped the long switch lever and threw the overhead belt on to the idle pulley. If it failed, as it sometimes did, the tympan was inked, and several sheets must be run through before it ceased to offset on the wrong side of the paper, a waste of which his employer made him emphatically aware. It had been easier to stop the press when it was turned by hand.

A daily chore which fell to his lot cruelly sharpened the appetite of a hungry boy toward the noon hour. This was the menu card from the local hotel with corrections for the day's dinner (square meal, 25 cents). He picked up the standing type, slid it on a galley, and proceeded to pull out yesterday's banana fritter and stewed corn and insert today's pear fritter and stewed tomatoes. He then ran off thirty copies, taking extra care as the stock was special and had the word Menu embossed in gold and other decorations. It was a sort of Barmecide's feast for him, whetting an appetite that needed no whetting.

Every printing office boasted one of those geniuses expert at rule twisting, who with shears, file and pliers bent brass rule into patterns that would print scrolls and flourishes around headlines and on title pages, ornaments for the corners of boxes, and when needed extra long braces. Some could create intricate designs, birds with streamers in their beaks in which type could be set, like those that were the pride of the writing masters. Like leads, brass rule was bought in lengths of a foot or so, and cut as needed. Much ingenuity was required to make the corners meet, until the arrival of "labor-saving," with corners mitered or beveled.

V

When work in the printing office became slack he was moved to the bindery, where the files of Godey's, Peterson's and Ballou's Magazines were put in dull black covers with names lettered on the spine. Its principal work, however, was the manufacture of account books, made to order to fit the individual book-keeping methods of bank or merchant. The ancient ruling machine of mahogany looked something like a loom for weaving cloth. Until the advent of loose-leaf books and adding machines, business men kept their accounts in three enormous tomes labeled respectively Day Book, Journal, and Ledger. Every transaction was entered in the Day Book chronologically. It was reëntered in the Journal to separate outgo from income. Finally, each item appeared in the Ledger under the name of the customer, or creditor, to show the status of individual accounts.

Sheets of paper, bearing picturesque old names—Royal, Crown, Demy, or Foolscap—were fed to the ruling machine, and came into contact with a battery of pens, each with its own little fountain of ink, red or blue, as the line demanded—both colors ruled at once. The sheets were then printed at the top of each page with the name of the firm, numbered by hand, and bound in the familiar heavy books, with covers half an inch thick, hinges of rawhide, red leather backs and corners, and sides decorated with marbled paper.

The marbled paper was made in the shop. A square tray or pan of slate was filled with a thin sizing of water and gum tragacanth. On its surface were gently shaken little blobs of color that spread slowly on the surface of the pool. The fashion in blank books seemed to run to red, blue and white. The spots of color were combed into the wavy patterns peculiar to such books. A sheet of paper laid on the surface of the water took off a fine impression of the pattern. These sheets were used for end-papers as well as covers. The edges of the book were also marbled. All this was once done in a small printing office in a prairie town of about 12,000 inhabitants. The books were sturdy and durable. I have seen many of them preserved in vaults beneath banks, filled with the neat Spencerian hand of the bookkeepers of that era, the pupils of the writing masters who drew without taking pen from paper the flowing florid birds trailing messages from their bills.

He was for some years a "two-thirder." A two-thirder received two-thirds the wages of a journeyman printer, which were fifteen dollars a week. They did not have piece work at the Book & Job Print, but later he entered another world, worked on the evening newspaper of the town and tasted the excitement of a race against bogie, the average day's work of ten thousand ems, the printer's measure familiar to all crossword puzzle fans. The piece rate was twenty-five cents a thousand, whether leaded brevier or solid nonpareil. A rapid compositor could set ten or more thousand a day, according to luck with "takes." One learned the fine art of jockeying for position, slowing up when the next take on the hook, was an undesirable one, or speeding in the race for a fat one. Fat takes were pickups—railroad time table, baseball score, market report, taken from the live bank, corrected and added to one's string to be paid for as if set. Each compositor had a numbered slug that he dumped on the galley with his stickful of set matter. When the galley was proved he kept a copy, and at the end of the day pasted up his work, being careful to join the takes closely, signed his name and turned it in. As soon as the paper was up there was a let-down, the tension relaxed, pipes were lit, conversation was possible, and the men picked up incredibly long handfuls of type from the forms returned from the pressroom, and proceeded to throw in a thumping big case against next day's work.

Cuts, if any, were of wood. There was an engraver in the town who supplied illustrations when badly enough needed and plenty of time was available. He made both the drawing and the block, and was a better engraver than artist. His pictures were what is now modernist and even surrealist. An ingenious method of making cuts in an emergency was nipped in the bud by the progress of zinc etching. That was the chalk plate. A metal plate coated with a film of chalk could be drawn on with a sharp instrument, cutting through the chalk to the plate. The plate was then used as a matrix to make a casting that would print the lines drawn, something after the manner of a stereotype.

But the pride of the country press was its stock of ready-made cuts—Lodge emblems: Masonic, Odd Fellows, I.O.G.T.; patriotic: eagle, star, flag, Liberty Bell; trade symbols: mortar and pestle, false teeth, piano, anvil, watch, domestic animals, together with the inevitable pointing finger (fist) and clasped hands. There were houses, ships, buggies, and, even still on hand in some offices, runaway slaves. These were used to embellish circulars, invitations, or programs, and were also used in small ads in the newspaper.

There were molds for casting rollers that looked much like huge candle molds. The roller composition was a mixture of glue and molasses, consistency varying according to the season of the year. It was more practicable to buy rollers by this time, but homemade rollers were still cast occasionally. In a near-by village as late as 1889 a four-column folio weekly newspaper was run off—pulled, I should say—on a hand-lever press, one page at a time, the same method and almost the same press as that which printed the Virginia Gazette, or the earlier Saturday Evening Post, or for that matter all incunabula.

It is quite likely that all the old-time editors of country newspapers were printers. The tradition no longer holds, but one apprentice printer in my old shop whose destiny was no doubt influenced by this early contact with type was John Finley, who became editor of the country's greatest newspaper. There are still men, though not so many as there were once, playing important roles in world affairs who at some time in their lives experienced the thrill of handling the twenty-four (now twenty-six) potent little lead soldiers that change the history of the world. No man ever loses that sense of the importance of printing, or can look upon a printed thing with indifference, who has once felt it. Nor for that matter does he ever forget the lay of the case. It is a craft that gets into the blood.

In 1889 or thereabouts I witnessed a scene which foretold the great change that was coming to the art I had learned with such patience and diligence, as revolutionary as the change of shipping from sail to steam. There arrived and was set up a machine intended to set type. Its name was Thorne, and its principle was to release the letter called for when the key was pressed by means of nicks in the body of the type, like the tumblers of a Yale lock. The type travelled in the channels to a galley, and was justified by hand, if I remember rightly. Obviously the device depended upon a hair-trigger nicety of adjustment. Even the mechanics who came with it had difficulty in making it work. It jammed repeatedly, and before many hours the floor was covered with broken sorts. After a few months it was packed up and sent back, and the old-fashioned method of setting by hand was reinstated, until that day when that office, like every one of its class, was equipped with a battery of linotypes. Thus vanished a craft that had been four hundred years in the making, that uncanny skill with which a good printer manipulated type.

The tramp printer, with his thirst, his steel setting rule, his budget of gossip of all the printing offices in a wide territory, has become extinct. The callous forefinger of the printer is as much a legend as the miller's sensitive thumb.

VI

Did they print books in those far-away prairie printing offices? They certainly did. One of the rarest items of Western Americana bears a Galesburg imprint. A pioneer of that town, a genius who played the flute and made many inventions, one of them the rotary plow still used to clear snow from the tracks of western railroads, was Riley Root. In 1849 he caught the gold fever and made the trip to Oregon and California over-land in a covered wagon. He had many adventures, and on his return wrote a book that was printed in Galesburg and is now a collector's item. A famous Boston book-seller became excited when he discovered a copy. "Unknown," he wrote in 1932, "to Wagner, Smith, Cowan, or as far as we know to any other bibliographer of the West, and unrecorded in the entire run of American Book Prices Current."

The front wrapper reads:

Journal of Travels / from / St. Josephs to Oregon / with / observations of that country / together with / a Description of California, / its agricultural interests, / and / a full description / of / its Gold Mines. / By Riley Root / Galesburg, Ill. / Intelligencer Print / 1850.

The matter on the wrapper is repeated on the title page with some minor variations. The book is a substantial pamphlet, size 9-1/2 by 6 inches, 144 pages, uncut. The Boston bookman continues:

"Riley Root's Journal has everything that a rare piece of Western Americana should have. In the first place, it looks rare. Like several rare Western items of which only a few copies exist, it was printed in a small mid-Western town. 'Galesburg, Illinois, 1850' is an imprint that has charm for the collector."

It must be excessively rare. The only other copy of which I know, besides the one described, is now appropriately in the Seymour Library of Knox College. Of this copy the librarian said (when he acknowledged the gift to the Library in 1931):

"This little unbound pamphlet was written by Riley Root who came with his family to this prairie country in 1836, when he was 37 years old, and helped to build the houses of Log City, the forerunner of Galesburg.... It was printed in Galesburg in 1850 by the 'Intelligencer Print' and bears in the border of the cover the name of the compositor, Southwick Davis, who graduated from Knox in the first class—that of 1846. This creditable piece of printing was done only about fourteen years after Galesburg was staked out and when Knox College was graduating its fifth class.

"In April 1848 Riley Root left Galesburg to make this over-land journey, crossing the continent by way of the Oregon Trail to Oregon City, a distance of 1846 miles from St. Josephs on the Missouri River, which was regarded as the starting point for the long journey through the Indian Country. Although gold had been discovered at Sutter's sawmill in California on February 10th, 1848, nearly two months before Mr. Root left Galesburg, it is not probable that he learned of that famous event until he reached Oregon in mid-September. The news spread slowly even on the Pacific coast, credible reports reaching San Francisco only in May. Mr. Root says that the excitement ('yellow fever,' he calls it) began in Oregon about the middle of August, and that within one month nearly 2,000 persons left Oregon for the gold fields. The purpose of Mr. Root's over-land journey to Oregon is not stated, but it would seem from an entry in his diary seven months after reaching Oregon City, to the effect that he had been 'roaming up and down the valley, in pursuit of information,' that he was scouting for new lands on a new frontier. Finding himself in the midst of all the gold rush 'commotion' he may very well have been attacked by the 'yellow fever' bug himself. At any rate he left Oregon in April, 1849, just a year after leaving Galesburg, and going to San Francisco and the California gold fields, spent five months, returning to Illinois by way of Panama and New Orleans. He arrived in Galesburg, January 8, 1850.

"This little pamphlet records the details of this epic journey, and if Riley Root's reputation rested on this alone he would take high rank as a historian. It is extremely well done and is a faithful journal of not only the day to day happenings, but of the country and its climate, the wild animals, the Indians, the geology and botany, the mountains, the forests and streams, and many other features that give evidence of the observant eye of the author. One interesting and important chapter relates the harrowing details of the Indian massacre of November, 1847, in which Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife lost their lives. This story was supplied to Mr. Root by eye-witnesses and is said to be its earliest publication in book or pamphlet form."

Among the many changes of ownership of presses in Galesburg, it would be difficult to decide whether the shop in which I learned my trade was a descendant of the Intelligencer Print or not, but it was produced in just such a primitive and resourceful plant.

FOOTNOTES: