Printer

“ But the modern printer, as a rule, dumps down the page in what he calls the middle of the paper, which is often not even really the middle, as he measures his page from the head line, if he has one, though it is not really a part of the page, but a spray of type only faintly staining the head of the paper. ”

“ This last book shows that unknown or not Faques was a skilful printer, for it is one of the most beautiful books issued from the early English press. The type is sharp and brilliant, the printing in red well done, and each page is surrounded with a chain-like border. On the first leaf is the printer’s device, a very uncommon one, [Pg 170] consisting of two triangles. ”

“ And assuming that it was printed there, its printer may have been Johan Gutenberg, who was at Mainz in 1454.
A peculiarity of the above-mentioned “system” is that it ascribes two types, so different in size, shape and form, as those of B36 and B42, to one and the same printer, merely because they “resemble” each other. This shows that the “system” takes no account of the fact that the inventor of printing, and all the early printers who came after him, in manufacturing their types necessarily imitated the forms of the written characters of their time. ”

“ The Master and the Wardens of the Stationers’ Company might have three presses each and three apprentices. No other printer could have more than two presses. A master printer on the livery (a member of the Company) might have two apprentices, others only one. The master printers were to give work to journeymen when requested to do so. This enactment was not made out of any tenderness for unemployed journeymen but for the reason that the unemployed journeyman was always tempted to pick up an occasional shilling by printing unlicensed or objectionable books. ”

“ Then again quite half the editions produced for sale in England are without any imprint, so that we are left to conjecture who was the printer from the type or cuts used in the books. To further bewilder us, sets of cuts passed from printer to printer, and are very untrustworthy guides in assigning books. ”

“ Once the printer or his apprentices had set the type, pulled a proof, “made up” the type into pages with the proper spacing and ornaments, and then locked it into forms by means of furniture and quoins, he placed his form on the press and adjusted it to get the most even impression. Then he was ready to begin the actual process of printing. Whereas printing is commonly done today by automatic presses, fed with paper either mechanically or by hand, it had to be done one sheet at a time in the eighteenth century. ”

“ If the printing is to be done on a hand press, a lithographic leather roller is charged with printer's ink, and the plate, which has been fastened on a suitable bed-plate in the press, is rolled up while it is still moist. ”

“ It does not follow, however, that the printer’s responsibility has been proportionately increased. Mechanical appliances have now so far superseded hand labour that, apart from a thorough knowledge of the principles of lithography, which is in itself essential, successful lithographic machine printing is largely due to resourcefulness, alert perception, and a skilful blending of mechanical and technical knowledge. ”

“ But the miscellaneous ornaments I have in mind are usually found on the title-pages of books, and even there they are only occasionally met with in the sixteenth century, when it was usual for the printer to place his own device above the imprint. As these devices were often very artistic, they served their purpose of decoration very well. Vautrollier’s fine series of the Anchora Spei may be cited as an instance.
But there was at least one printer in the sixteenth century who did not follow this custom, and that was Henry Bynneman. ”

“ Whether the printers were their own copyists, or whether they employed some one else to do this part of the work, we cannot say, but quite early in the sixteenth century, and from thence onwards to the close of the seventeenth, almost every head and tail piece and initial letter was copied and copied again without limit, and it must not be assumed, without the most careful examination and comparison, that any blocks, found in books having no printer’s name, show them to have been published by a certain printer. ”

“ Printers’ ornaments include head and tail pieces, initial letters, borders to title-pages or text, and decorative blocks such as those which were used freely by the sixteenth century printer, Henry Bynneman, and others. Printers’ devices, being in the nature of trade marks, have no place in this volume, as, although decorative in themselves, they were not used simply for the sake of embellishing the page. ”

“ The processes incident to printing have been improved, in a mechanical way, until little is left for hope to feed upon. The trade of the printer has been broken into specialized units. The "all 'round" printer is no more. In his place there is the hand compositor, the "ad" compositor, the job compositor, the machine operator, the make-up man, the pressman, the press feeder, etc., each a proficient specialist7 but neither one a printer. ”

“ Some of them came to the conclusion that such a process would be quite practicable; others found by experiment that it would, in the case of small types, be wholly impossible. Nearly all the experiments, however, were made with the idea that the inventor of printing, or the earliest printers, started, or had to start, with as large a supply of type as a modern printer. ”

“ Noise Reduction Don’t just buy the fastest, the cheapest, printer. Look for one with good manners toward the humans nearby—a quiet printer.
A daisy wheel can be a real offender. What more can you expect of a machine with a metal hammer constantly striking away? And dot-matrix printers often make a higher-pitched sound that mercilessly cuts through walls. ”

“ Aldus’s anchor-and-dolphin device, and adaptations by modern printers
If a commercial printer has not been in the habit of placing an imprint on his product, and he decides to do so, customers should tactfully be made acquainted with the innovation. They probably stand ready to be convinced of its reasonableness. ”

“ This copper reproduction of the woodcut is filled in at the back with metal, mounted on wood, and is then ready for the printer, who has his ‘overlays’ all ready, and the business of printing begins.
There is nothing more wonderful in the history of printing than the rapid development of the printing machine and the extraordinary increase of its productive power. The ordinary press, though greatly improved, was found quite inadequate to the demands made upon it; and, the attention of practical men being directed to some more rapid means of production, the steam printing machine was invented. ”

“ There should be more sympathy between the book printer and the job printer, and also between the printer who regards his calling as a business and the printer who regards it as an art. The employer and employee who consider printing only a means to an end and that end money, are as near right and as near wrong as they who produce art printing for art’s sake and forget the pay envelop and the customer’s check. The first starve their souls, the last their bodies.
EXAMPLE 51
Another method of determining the page length. ”

“ Some theories have been based on, and others have been considered to be upset by, the supposition that the early printers always required as much type as printers of the present day, or at any rate so much as would enable them to set up, not only a whole quire of 4 or 5 sheets (= 8 or 10 leaves = 16 or 20 pages) , but even two quires (= 40 pages) . Consequently calculations have been made that, for instance, the printer of the 42-line Bible required a fount of at least 120,000 characters. See Bernard, Orig. de l'impr. i. 164, who was a printer himself and speaks very strongly on this point. ”

“ For his first book the St Alban’s printer used a beautiful type which, except as signatures in two other books, never appeared again.
It is extremely unfortunate that a source from which we might no doubt have learnt something about the introduction of printing into Oxford, and some details about the first printer, seems irrevocably lost. This is the volume of the registers of the Chancellor’s court covering the period between 1470 and 1497. ”

“ No doubt every printer is aware that the prints produced from the same negative and on the same sample of albumenised paper similarly sensitized vary considerably in richness and depth on different days. For instance, when the light is bad, and when, consequently, the printing takes a long time, the colour of the darkened surface will be found to be much duller than on a day when the light is powerful. ”

“ We have here an instance of the printer aiming at directly imitating and supplanting by his craft the art of the calligrapher and illuminator, and with such a beauty and perfection of workmanship as must have astonished them and given them far more reason to regard the printer as a dangerous rival than had (as it is said) the early wood engravers, who were unwilling to help the printer by their art for fear his craft would injure their own, which seems somewhat extraordinary considering how closely allied both wood engraver and printer have been ever since. ”

“ At present we do not know much about the early business of type-cutting, but it seems clear that, soon after the commencement of the sixteenth century, different printers went to a common source for their type, and that type-cutting was not a part of the printer’s business, as it was when printing was first invented, but a special trade. ”

“ Bookbinding came to be regarded as a separate industry at about the same time.
Ink making was done by the printer until comparatively recently. The ink balls which were used for distributing the ink on types were made by the printers themselves until the ink ball was superseded by the roller with the coming in of modern presses. Even then rollers were made in the shops for a long time, and indeed the practice is hardly now entirely discontinued. ”

“ General Magazine advertising of paper has been principally devoted to writing paper. This is natural, since of all paper products this commodity has the largest number of buyers, and the matter of taste is not so over-shadowed by technical considerations, as in the case of printing papers.
The specifications for general printing, involve more knowledge of printing processes than most people possess, hence the final decision rests in a majority of cases on the printer’s judgment, so that logically the printer is the most necessary individual to convert. ”

“ It was also, although this purpose was probably secondary, intended to protect England from foreign competition. The name of the printer, the author, and the publisher, and the place of publication and sale were to be placed 41in every book. No person was permitted to erect a printing press or to let any premises for the purpose of carrying on printing without first giving notice to the Company, and no carpenter was permitted to make a press without similar notice.
The number of master printers was limited to twenty. Every master printer had to give a bond of £300 for good behavior. ”

“ The Kleinschmidt printer, designed to operate at 100 to 150 words a minute, employs a new method for operating a typebar printing mechanism, comprising a type basket movable across the printed page and carrying the required set of type bars. Each type bar has a connected push rod extending to the rear of the type basket and is made operative to cause printing when a rotating finger, selectively positioned by a coded stop cage, is struck against the push rod. ”

“ Again, in some small books, two, three or four blank leaves are found at the end, showing a miscalculation of the printer at the commencement. Moreover, numerous itinerant printers of the 15th century established a press for a short time wherever they went, which proves that the furniture of the earliest printing-offices cannot have been of any great extent. ”

“ There is a general belief that the correction of these oversights is the duty of the printer, and the writer too often throws this duty largely on the compositor and the proof-reader. During the last fifty years there has been no marked improvement in the average writer's preparation of copy for the printer, but there have been steadily increasing exactions from book-buyers. The printing that passed a tolerant inspection in 1850 does not pass now. The reader insists on more attention to uniformity in mechanical details. ”

“ We have just installed new machines in our printing plant in New York and intend selling the old ones to some small job printer who can use second-hand machines. Now, I can pick out a small press, stitcher, and other things that you will need, and ship them out here. You have electricity here, and a small motor will furnish the power. When you are ready to go to press, I will send out an experienced man from our shop to direct the work and see that everything is done properly. The addressing and wrapping can be done by all of you. ”

“ But the machine-room of the printer, closed for more than half its time, heated perhaps by hot water or steam pipes, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, in wet weather damp, in summer alternately very dry and damp, what wonder if paper expands, contracts, and causes trouble at machine.
The establishments where scientific conditions are observed reap the benefit in increased output, because less work is spoiled by bad register, and less time is spent in getting work to register. ”

“ The rapid improvements which have taken place in the printing-press during the last twenty years, afford another instance of saving in the materials consumed, which has been well ascertained by measurement, and is interesting from its connexion with literature. In the old method of inking type, by large hemispherical balls stuffed and covered with leather, the printer, after taking a small portion of ink from the ink-block, was continually rolling the balls in various directions against each other, in order that a thin layer of ink might be uniformly spread over their surface. ”