Letterpress

“ The work of its artists has absorbed so completely the interest and reality of the letterpress that the results are a model of what faithful yet imaginative illustration should be. In the illustrated magazines of this period, Once a Week, Good Words, Cornhill, London Society, The Argosy, The Leisure Hour, Sunday at Home, The Quiver and The Churchman’s Family Magazine, as well as others, is to be found the best work of this new school of illustrators; and with the greater number of them it cannot be mistaken that Millais is the prevailing force. ”

“ Printing, then, for our purpose, may be considered as the art of making books by means of movable types. Now, as all books not primarily intended as picture-books consist principally of types composed to form letterpress, it is of the first importance that the letter used should be fine in form; especially as no more time is occupied, or cost incurred, in casting, setting, or printing beautiful letters than in the same operations with ugly ones. ”

“ In some modern editions, in which an old style is affected, a wide margin on the top, bottom, and outer edge of the letterpress is preserved so wide that ample space might be found to introduce such trifling illustrations as would be amply sufficient to fix an impression or suggest to the imagination of the reader ideas which the mere letterpress might fail to awaken. ”

“ As a monument of study and research this [Pg 195] book will always remain a standard work of English topography; and it was not unworthily printed. The preparation of the numerous plates for the illustrations, and the setting up of so much intricate letterpress, must have been a very onerous work. This first volume, a large and handsome folio, came from the press of Richard Hodgkinson, and was printed in pica Roman in double columns, with a great deal of italic and black letter intermixed. The types were as good as any to be found in England at that time, and the press-work was carefully done. ”

“ I have at length discovered that writing letters is idleness without ease, and fatigue without a purpose. When newspapers only told weddings, births, and burials, a letter from London bore some value; but now that the public papers not only tell when men are born and dye, but every folly they contrive to insert between those periods, the literary correspondent has nothing left. Lies and dulness used to be valued in manuscript, but printing has assumed a right over the lies of the day and the amusement of the hour. ”

“ The fallacy of the proverb, that "those who run may read," being established, modern science set about the adoption of a medium, available to those sons of the century who are always on the run. Hence, the grand secret of ILLUSTRATION.—Hence the new art of printing!
The pictorial printing-press is now your only wear! Every thing is communicated by delineation. We are not told, but shown how the world is wagging. The magazines sketch us a lively article, the newspapers vignette us, step by step, a royal tour. ”

“ Do not send a blurred, blotted, slovenly note to any one; it will remain to call up a certain prejudice against you in the mind of the recipient. The fashion is not now, as it once was, imperative that a margin be left around the edge of the paper. People now write all over the paper, and thus abolish a certain elegance which the old letters undoubtedly possessed. But postage is a consideration, and all we can ask of the youthful letter-writers is that they will not cross their letters. Plaid letters are the horror of all people who have not the eyes of a hawk. ”

“ In other words, the output of a press was equal to one half the number of pulls a printer could give in an hour. It took so much muscular strength to pull the lever of the old-fashioned press that the services of a man were required. The only help a boy could be in the colonial print-shop was to ink the type : this he did, in many instances, with the help of a
deerskin ball filled with wool and nailed to a stick of hickory. Not until 1750 were printing-presses manufactured in America: in that year, Christopher Sower, Jr., began to turn out hand- presses at Germantown, Pennsylvania. ”

“ And contrast, if you will, the slow and inadequate composition and dissemination of intelligence by the laborious process of handwriting with the present-day marvelous facilities for publication when the linotype is mostly employed in setting the type-plates for periodicals and books, and when a single press will print and fold about thirty thousand copies of a metropolitan journal in one hour's time, and, from both comparison and contrast, you must have a higher appreciation for the printing-press as an instrumentality for the spreading of intelligence and the progress of civilization. ”

“ This terse, quick language will, after a period of reprobation, be adopted even by the less progressive newspapers, at first shocked to tears of indignant printer’s ink by the defilement of the mother tongue, and it will accelerate vastly the task of “running through the paper,” a task which must, even in the less hurried manners which I foresee for the future, be made as speedy as possible by the newspaper that would thrive and increase its circulation. Thus literature, already restive in an uncongenial wedlock, will finally obtain divorce from daily journalism. ”

“ That will probably be when they have found out all about how to put a harness on electricity. No one can predict when inventive genius will reach its limits in the printing press. Before this press was built, the fastest presses in the world were Hoe’s quadruple presses, which will turn out 48,000 four-, six-, or eight-page papers an hour, 24,000 ten-, twelve-, fourteen-, or sixteen-page papers an hour, and 12,000 twenty- or twenty-four page papers an hour, all cut, pasted, and folded.
The sextuple press has a well-nigh insatiable appetite for white paper. ”

“ There has been little change in stereotyping newspaper pages since August, 1861, when The Tribune adopted the papier-mache process. The New York Times soon adopted the new process, as did The New York Herald. Because of this process it was no longer necessary to add additional cylinders to the press. Pages could be duplicated to the number desired and several presses could be employed at the same time to print the same edition of the newspaper. Craske not only revolutionized newspaper stereotyping in America, but he also changed completely the construction of American printing-presses. ”

“ Heedless of the roar of artillery, the merry call of the bugle, and the groan of the dying, he wrote on at a great speed, for above all he was a writer. His pen sped over the paper with that precision which only comes from long practice—line after line, page after page of the small paper, perfect in punctuation, ready for the press in true journalistic form.
He folded the letter, and enclosed it in an envelope, which he addressed carefully in a legible roundhand.
'There,' he murmured, 'let that be the last line I write to-night. It seems to me that we are on the verge of a crisis. ”

“ For a mere nothing—a yes, or a no—idle, gushing people fire off continual notes and insist upon answers. Now this kind of letter-writing exists only because postage is cheap; if such correspondents had to pay twenty-five cents for giving their opinions, they would not give them at all. It is an impertinence also, for though we may like persons well enough to receive from them a visit, or even to return it, it is a very different thing to be called upon to retire ourselves with pen and ink and note paper, and give away time and interest which we are not inclined to give. ”

“ XV THE PRESS OUR NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS I have always been very much interested in the newspaper and periodical press, and in everything that has any connection with printing. When my father, my grandfather, and great grandfather set up struggling papers in a provincial capital, it may be said that they were not printers in vain.
Because of my fondness for newspapers and magazines, it is a grief to me that the Spanish press should be so weak, so poor, so pusillanimous and stiff-jointed. ”

“ So, in 1821, the periodical press might be said to have power of life and death over the creations of the brain and the publishing trade. A few lines among the items of news cost a fearful amount. Intrigues were multiplied in newspaper offices; and of a night when the columns were divided up, and this or that article was put in or left out to suit the space, the printing-room became a sort of battlefield; so much so, that the largest publishing firms had writers in their pay to insert short articles in which many ideas are put in little space. ”

“ The press was of the best modern construction, and folded, cut and counted the papers automatically, with a capacity for printing three thousand copies an hour.
"And at that rate," observed Patsy, "It will run off our regular edition in eight minutes."
Aside from the newspaper press there were two "job" presses and an assortment of type for printing anything that might be required, from a calling card to a circus poster. A third man, who came from the city Thursday morning, was to take charge of the job printing and assist in the newspaper work. ”

“ The printing-press — said to be the greatest benefactor of mankind— is equally employed by the tyrant and the philanthropist, the wise and the foolish, the religious fanatic and the coolest thinker, the honest, conscientious scholar and the shameless quack: the Press will serve, as it has ever done, the direst as well as the noblest purposes. ”

“ The newspaper is the great educator of the nineteenth century. There is no force compared with it. It is book, pulpit, platform, forum, all in one. And there is not an interest—religious, literary, commercial, scientific, agricultural, or mechanical—that is not within its grasp. All our churches, and schools, and colleges, and asylums, and art-galleries feel the quaking of the printing-press. ”

“ Nowadays, thanks to the printing-press, which multiplies thought and scatters it to the four winds of heaven, an author can enter into communication with the public without going beyond the threshold of his study. ”

“ Copies thus decorated are not very common, but the Aldine “Homer” of Francis I., rescued by M. Didot from a rubbish heap in an English cellar, had its due illuminations. In the earliest books the guide to the illuminator, the small printed letter, does not appear, and he often puts in the wrong initial.
3. Irregularity and rudeness of type is a “note” of the primitive printing press, which very early disappeared. Nothing in the history of printing is so remarkable as the beauty of almost its first efforts. ”

“ If we go back to the days when the seeds of the modern press were planted, we find them in the hand-printing done by the Chinese with their engraved blocks, and with the simple press used by Gutenberg about 1450, when he printed the first book from movable types.
His press consisted of two upright timbers held together by cross pieces at top and bottom. The flat bed on which the types rested was held up by other cross timbers, while through another passed a wooden screw, by the aid of which the wooden “platen” was forced down upon the types. ”

“ Fires burnt indeed the brighter for the Change—and spread. . . .
§ 3
Picture to yourself what happened between the printing and composing of the copy of the New Paper that lies before me now. It was the first newspaper that was printed upon earth after the Great Change. It was pocket-worn and browned, made of a paper no man ever intended for preservation. I found it on the arbor table in the inn garden while I was waiting for Nettie and Verrall, before that last conversation of which I have presently to tell. ”

“ One pressman and an assistant easily printed the Herald, and another daily paper as well, in those days, upon one small handpress; now forty men find constant employment in attending the engines and the six latest improved perfecting-presses required to issue the editions on time. ”

“ That a proper method of doing presswork was devised in the infancy of the art may be inferred, not only from the permanency of the primitive form of press, all the important features of which are still preserved in the modern hand-press, but from the meritorious presswork of the first books. The Bibles of Gutenberg were certainly printed on a press which quickly gave and quickly released its pressure, and which had the attachments of a movable bed, tympan and frisket, and contrivances for neatly inking the types and for keeping the paper in position. ”

“ The Text.—The main desire of newspaper publishers, besides preparing the news, seems to be to have the matter set in the smallest size of type that can possibly be read. The large city dailies habitually use a seven-point type-face, which is the smallest that should appear on any newspaper. (See Example 406.) During the recent prevailing high cost of print paper some publishers began to use six-point in order to save paper, but they found that this move was a mistake. Newspapers are published to be read, and everything possible should be done to make the reader’s task an easy one. ”

“ The newspapers are crowded by letters tingling with penetration, often memorable in phrasing, written by men and women in every class and place. The level of intelligence and of expression was never so high. People are writing not only to the press but to each other better letters than ever before. Impressions are so intense that they compel utterance. One proof of the prevalence and popularity of letter-writing to-day is in the many books and articles that are the chance discoveries of the mail box. For such revelations, such unintentional literature, every editor is on the alert. ”

“ There are two hundred licensed printing-presses here, and it takes usually four men to a press—two to set the type and get [Pg 119] things ready, and two to run the press. This does not count, of course, the men who write the books, and those who make the type and cut the blocks from which they print the pictures for the illustrations. At first, you know, the books they printed in Venice had no title-pages, initials or illustrations. ”