As I have tried to say, the printers of that day had nearly all some
affinity with literature, if not some love of it; it was in a sort
always at their fingers-ends, and they must have got some touch of
it whether they would or not. They thought their trade a poor one,
moneywise, but they were fond of it and they did not often forsake
it. Their hope was somehow to get hold of a country paper and become
editors and publishers; and my friend and I, when he was twenty-four
and I eighteen, once crossed over into Pennsylvania, where we had
heard there was a paper for sale; but we had not the courage to offer
even promises to pay for it. The craft had a repute for insolvency
which it merited, and it was at odds with the community at large by
reason of something not immediately intelligible in it, or at least not
classifiable. I remember that when I began to write a certain story
of mine, I told Mark Twain, who was once a printer, that I was going
to make the hero a printer, and he said, “Better not. People will not
understand him. Printing is something every village has in it, but
it is always a sort of mystery, and the reader does not like to be
perplexed by something that he thinks he knows about.” This seemed
very acute and just, though I made my hero a printer all the same,
and I offer it to the public as a light on the anomalous relation the
country printer bears to his fellow-citizens. They see him following
his strange calling among them, but to neither wealth nor worship,
and they cannot understand why he does not take up something else,
something respectable and remunerative; they feel that there must be
something weak, something wrong in a man who is willing to wear his
life out in a vocation which keeps him poor and dependent on the favor
they grudge him. It is like the relation which all the arts bear to
the world, and which is peculiarly thankless in a purely commercial
civilization like ours; though I cannot pretend that printing is an
art in the highest sense. I have heard old journeymen claim that it
was a profession and ought to rank with the learned professions, but
I am afraid that was from too fond a pride in it. It is in one sort a
handicraft, like any other, like carpentering or stone-cutting; but it
has its artistic delight, as every handicraft has. There is the ideal
in all work; and I have had moments of unsurpassed gladness in feeling
that I had come very near the ideal in what I had done in my trade.
This joy is the right of every worker, and in so far as modern methods
have taken it from him they have wronged him. I can understand Ruskin
in his wish to restore it to some of the handicrafts which have lost it
in the “base mechanical” operations of the great manufactories, where
men spend their lives in making one thing, or a part of a thing, and
cannot follow their work constructively. If that were to be the end,
the operative would forever lose the delight in work which is the best
thing in the world. But I hope this is not to be the end, and that when
people like again to make things for use and not merely for profit, the
workman will have again the reward that is more than wages.
I know that in the old-fashioned country printing-office we had this,
and we enjoyed our trade as the decorative art it also is. Questions of
taste constantly arose in the arrangement of a title-page, the display
of a placard or a handbill, the use of this type or that. They did
not go far, these questions, but they employed the critical faculty
and the æsthetic instinct, and they allied us, however slightly and
unconsciously, with the creators of the beautiful.
But now, it must be confessed, printing has shared the fate of all
other handicrafts. Thanks to united labor, it is better paid in each
of its subdivisions than it once was as a whole. In my time, the hire
of a first-rate country printer, who usually worked by the week, was
a dollar a day; but of course this was not so little in 1852 as it
would be in 1892. My childish remembrance is of the journeymen working
two hours after supper, every night, so as to make out a day of twelve
hours; but at the time I write of the day of ten hours was the law and
the rule, and nobody worked longer, except when the President’s Message
was to be put in type, or on some other august occasion.
The pay is not only increased in proportion to the cost of living, but
it is really greater, and the conditions are all very much better.
But I believe no apprentice now learns the whole trade, and each of
our printers, forty years ago, would have known how to do everything
in the kind of office he hoped to own. He would have had to make a
good many things which the printer now buys, and first among them the
rollers, which are used for inking the type on the press. These were
of a composition of glue and molasses, and were of an india-rubbery
elasticity and consistency, as long as they were in good condition. But
with use and time they became hard, the ink smeared on them, and they
failed to impart it evenly to the type; they had to be thrown away, or
melted over again. This was done on the office stove, in a large bucket
which they were cut up into, with fresh glue and molasses added. It
seems in the retrospect to have been rather a simple affair, and I do
not now see why casting a roller should have involved so much absolute
failure, and rarely have given a satisfactory result. The mould was a
large copper cylinder, and the wooden core of the roller was fixed in
place by an iron cap and foot-piece. The mixture boiled away, as it
now seems to me, for days, and far into the sleepy nights, when as a
child I was proud of sitting up with it very late. Then at some weird
hour, my father or my brother poured it into the mould, and we went
home and left the rest with fate. The next morning the whole office
crowded round to see the roller drawn from the mould, and it usually
came out with such long hollows and gaps in its sides that it had to
be cut up at once and melted over again. At present, all rollers are
bought somewhere in New York or Chicago, I believe, and a printer would
no more think of making a roller than of making any other part of his
press. “And you know,” said my brother, who told me of this change,
“we don’t wet the paper now.” “Good heavens,” said I, “you don’t print
it _dry_!” “Yes, and it doesn’t blur any more than if it were wet.” I
suppose wetting the paper was a usage that antedated the invention of
movable type. It used to be drawn, quire by quire, through a vat of
clear water, and then the night before publication day it was turned
and sprinkled. Now it was printed dry, I felt as if it were time to
class Benjamin Franklin with the sun-myths.