(save as Poor Richard), in favor of Franklin, the printer and
publisher. But it would be an effrontery to allude even briefly to
Franklin without mention of the _Autobiography_. Begun in 1771 in
the quiet charm of an English country-seat, the first great American
classic never was completed. The manuscript first appeared in print, by
an odd series of accidents, in French in 1791. Subsequently Franklin's
grandson, William Temple Franklin, issued it in a Bowdlerized English
version that would have afforded the old man quiet and somewhat
indignant laughter. The text was not definitely published until 1868,
soon after John Bigelow had come into possession of the original
manuscript.
Franklin's epitaph is easily the most familiar in American history,
and almost as well-known a document, perhaps, as Lincoln's Gettysburg
Address. It is not generally known, however, that the original version
of it was composed in 1728, the very year in which its author, a youth
of twenty-two, entered into partnership with Meredith. The version
written in that year, which differs in minor details from the final
draft, was this:
THE BODY OF
B FRANKLIN PRINTER,
(LIKE THE COVER OF AN OLD BOOK
ITS CONTENTS TORN OUT
AND STRIPT OF ITS LETTERING & GILDING)
LIES HERE, FOOD FOR WORMS.
BUT THE WORK SHALL NOT BE LOST;
FOR IT WILL, (AS HE BELIEV'D) APPEAR ONCE MORE,
IN A NEW AND MORE ELEGANT EDITION
REVISED AND CORRECTED,
BY THE AUTHOR.
_Note_: A documented account of the various transcripts of Franklin's
celebrated epitaph appeared in _The New Colophon_, Volume 3, New
York, 1950. It discusses the date of its composition, place of first
publication and the differing texts, and was written by Lyman H.
Butterfield, associate editor of the Jefferson papers.
COMPOSED IN BASKERVILLE TYPES
[Illustration]EARNEST ELMO CALKINS[Illustration]
_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,--
_A diller, a dollar, a ten-o'clock scholar,
What makes you come so soon?
You used to come at ten o'clock,
But now you come at noon._
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.