A VAST PRINTING HOUSE.
A street somewhat famous in Paris is the Rue Lepelletier, famous not for
its length, for its breadth, for the splendid edifices it exhibits, or
for the scenes and events it has witnessed, but famous for the exploits
beheld by its neighbors, and the magnificent structures by them
displayed. Not that the Rue Lepelletier can boast no fine edifices, for
the grand opera-house would give the loud lie to such an assertion. And
then there is the Foreign Office near by, the Hotel of the Minister of
Foreign Affairs at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue des
Capucines, and other noted places.
But there is one structure on the Rue Lepelletier not very noticeable
save for its immense size and its ancient and dingy aspect, which has
witnessed more scenes and events, and is more important than all its
more splendid neighbors put together.
This edifice is of brick, five stories in height, and, as has been
intimated, is time-stained, storm-stained, smoke-stained and stained, it
would seem, by all other conceivable causes of stain, so begrimed and
dingy, yet so venerable and imposing, does it seem.
This vast and ancient pile can be said to represent no order of
architecture. Architectural elegance appears not to have been thought of
when it was designed, and yet the facade of the old building seems to
bear the same relation to the building itself as the face of an old man
bears to his body, and that face is full of character, as are the faces
of some men--sombre, sedate, serious, almost sinister in aspect. This
old face, too, seemed full of apertures, through which unceasing and
sleepless espionage could be kept up on the good citizens of the good
City of Paris. Doors, and especially windows, numberless, opened and
looked upon the street, and on a cul de sac at one end of the edifice.
One of the doors opening on the cul de sac, at its further extremity,
was broad, low, dark and sombre; like the gates of hell, as portrayed by
the English bard, it "stood open night and day." If you entered this
door and advanced, you would immediately find yourself ascending a
narrow, gloomy and winding flight of stairs. Having with difficulty
groped your way to the top, without having broken your neck, by having
first reached the point from which you started, to wit, the bottom; or
your shins, by stumbling against the steps--having, I say, accomplished
the ascent to the first landing, your further passage is effectually
stopped by a massive door, which resists all your efforts to open it;
and, as you are contemplating the dangerous descent which you now think
you are immediately and inevitably forced to make, an ivory bell-handle
against the wall, beside the door, arrests your attention, with the
words around it, which, with difficulty, you decipher by the dim light,
"Editor's Room--No Admittance," followed by the encouraging, but
somewhat contradictory word, "Ring," which, doubtless, means this: "If
you are a particular friend of the editor, or have particular business
with him as a journalist, ring the bell, and perhaps you may be
admitted." Supposing either of these positions yours, you "ring the
bell," and immediately you are startled by the tinkling of a small bell
in the darkness close beside you, and the ponderous door, firm as a
barricade till then, is now opened by unseen hands--by the same hand,
indeed, and by the same action of that hand which caused the bell to
tinkle.
You enter the door, and find yourself in a corridor or passage, long and
dark, for everything in this building is dark, and gaslight is the only
light eighteen hours in the twenty-four; you find yourself in a
corridor, I say, running the entire depth of the building, and bringing
you back again toward the Rue Lepelletier, which you left on entering
the cul de sac, to seek the low entrance below. As you traverse the
endless gallery, your attention is arrested by a deep hum, as of many
voices at a distance, with which the entire structure seems pervaded,
accompanied by a heavier sound, which rises and falls with measured
stroke. This mysterious hum might have been heard when you first
approached or entered the building; but the silence and solitude of the
corridor have caused you to notice it now for the first time, and to
wonder at its cause.
Now had you the power of those magicians, necromancers, clairvoyants and
demi-devils, whether of the flesh or the spirit, who, at a glance, can
gaze through massive walls and peer down the chimneys of a great city,
and who, almost without glancing at all, can see through partitions,
key-holes and iron doors, your wonder at the cause of these unknown
sounds would instantly cease, while it would be yet more excited by
those causes themselves, for the vast building all around you, and
through which you are passing, and which envelops you in its ceaseless
hum, like the voice of a great city, would seem to you nothing less than
a leviathan of life and action--a Titan--a Frankenstein--a mental and
material giant, with its acoustic tubes, like veins and arteries,
running all over the structure, just beneath the surface of the walls,
and uniting in every apartment; with its electric wires, like bundles of
nerves, which, having webbed the whole body with network, converge into
a focus-tube, and thence pass down into the vaults, through the massive
foundations, and beneath, the pavements of the thronged streets of the
metropolis, and thence, rising again to the surface, branching on
distinct, diverse and solitary routes without the suburbs all over
Europe. You would see, too, the mighty heart of this Titan, whose heavy
heavings you have felt, heard and wondered at--THE PRESS--in its
subterranean tenement, amid smoke and flame. THE PRESS; which, like the
animal heart, receives eventually all that the veins convey to it, and
flings forth everything in modified form through lungs and arteries.
Tireless and untired in its action, never ceasing, never resting, for as
well might a man think to live when his heart had ceased to beat, as a
printing office exist when the throbbings of its press were no longer
felt; and as well could a man be supposed to live without breath as a
printing-office of the nineteenth century without its lungs, the steam
engine, or its breath of life, the subtle fluid by which it is moved.
But to drop metaphor. In the basement of the building you would find the
press-room, with its steam engine, its furnaces, its presses, its dark
demi-devils, and ghostly and ghastly gnomes and genii groping or
flitting about amid the glare and gloom, begrimed and besmoked,
seemingly at work at unhallowed yet supernatural toil, which toil, as if
a punishment for sin, like that of Sisyphus, or the daughters of Danae
in the heathen Tartarus, was eternal. The press never stops.
On the first floor you would perceive the financial and publishing
department in all its endless ramifications, with the separate bureaus
for folding, enveloping, mailing, etc.
On the second floor--but that you will shortly behold, and it will
describe itself.
On the third floor you would discover immense magazines of
material--paper, ink, of every hue and quality, and type of every known
description; and all in quantities seemingly as useless as incalculable.
On the fourth and fifth floors you would find the composition rooms,
whence fly the winged words all over the world, peopled by its whole
army of compositors; while from the long platoons of cases,
"click--click--click" is heard, the sole and unceasing sound which alone
in those apartments is ever suffered to fall on the ear. If we add that
the entire structure is warmed in winter by heated air, conveyed in
tubes from the furnaces of the press, our description will be complete,
and we may say such is the printing office of the nineteenth century in
Paris. How changed from that of German Guttenberg or English Caxton,
three hundred years before! Such is it by daylight. Flood every object
and apartment with gaslight, and you have the scene at night--through
all the night, for couriers and dispatches never cease to arrive--and
the journal issues with the dawn--and the workmen are relieved by
constant and continuous relays. Such an office gives employment to
hundreds and bread to thousands. It demands twenty editors, exclusive
of their chief, twenty reporters, exclusive of the same number in the
commercial and mercantile corps; twenty-five clerks and bureau agents,
sixty carriers, twenty mechanicians and margers, sixty folders, twenty
pressmen, seventy correctors and compositors and five hundred
distributors, besides a numberless and nameless army of attaches and
employes too numerous to be specified. The aggregate compensation of
this army is ten thousand francs per day, the annual income is nine
millions of francs, the circulation is ninety thousand copies daily, and
each number is read by half a million people, and through their
influence by half a million more.
The daily tax of the Government is nine thousand francs. The press has
been called the Third Estate of France. It is not! Nor is it the
second--nor is it the first! It combines all three. Nay, the power of
all three united equals not its tithe; and its position--its
rank!--royalty itself bows to the press! Ask the history of the past ten
years. Point to the man of power or position in the court or State, who
owes it not to the press! Where is the statesman who is not, or has not
been, a journalist, or the savant, the philosopher, the philanthropist,
the poet, the orator, the advocate, the diplomat, even the successful
soldier? The sword and the pen are emblems of the power of France--its
achievements and its continuance; Sir Bulwer Lytton says,
"The pen is mightier than the sword!"
But I have left you, dear reader, perambulating the dim corridor--so
dim that your eyes can hardly decipher, although it is now high noon,
the various signs upon the series of doors in the wall on your left,
designating the various rooms of the editorial corps, for to the
editorial department is devoted the second floor of this extensive
edifice. The last door in this prolonged series bears the name of the
chief journalist. You ring a bell, are bid to enter, and the apartment
is before you. Immense windows, rising from the floor to the ceiling,
and opening upon a balcony, which overhangs the Rue Lepelletier, afford
abundance of light for your eye to detect everything in the room by day,
and an immense chandelier with gas-burners and opaque shades, pouring
forth its flood of mellow radiance, would facilitate the same
investigation yet more at night. Beneath the chandelier is spread the
immense oval slab of the table. At it sits a man writing. Well, let him
write on, at least for the present. Beside him, pile upon pile, pile
upon pile, rise papers, wave after wave, flood upon flood, nothing but
papers; on the floor beneath his feet, on the table and under the table,
before him, behind him, and all around him, naught but papers, papers,
rising, rising, as if in wrathful might and stormy indignation, while
the very walls are lined with papers in all languages, from all climes
and governments, and of every age and dimension, deposited in huge folio
volumes and arranged in huge closets, along one whole side of the room.
From the four continents, yea, and from the islands of the sea
likewise, has this vast army come. In those tall closets extending from
floor to ceiling might be found the full files for years of every
leading paper in every part of Christendom, affording a treasury of
reference, universal, unfailing, exhaustless, of knowledge of every
conceivable description, rapidly found by means of exact and copious
tables of contents.
Upon the other side of the apartment extend ranges of shelves, from
floor to ceiling, filled with ponderous tomes in black substantial
binding, seeming to belong to that class of standard works chiefly
valuable for reference as authorities, and bearing ample testimony in
their wear and tear, and their soiled appearance, to having been
faithfully fingered. No thin, delicate and perfumed duodecimo is there,
resplendent in gold and Russia, with costly engravings on steel, and
letter-press in gilt or hot-pressed post. No, the books, the table, the
journalist and the whole chamber bear the dark, stern, toil-soiled
aspect of labor, the severe air of practical utility. The only
ornaments, if such they can be styled, are busts--the busts of the
silver-tongued Vergniaud and a few of his political brothers--the victim
Girondins of '92 being conspicuous. Here, too, in a prominent niche is
the noble front of Armand Carrel, the brave, the knightly, the
chivalric, the true Republican, the true statesman, the true journalist,
the true man--Armand Carrel, who, with Adolphe Thiers, his associate,
sat first in this apartment as its chief--Armand Carrel, who fell years
ago before the pistol of Emile de Girardin, a brother journalist, the
founder of the cheap press, the hero of scores of combats before and
since, yet almost unscathed by all.
Such are some of the ornaments of the chief editor's sanctum. At the
further extremity of the apartment, the wall is covered with maps and
diagrams, as well as charts of the prominent cities and points in
Europe; and a large table beneath is heaped with books of travel,
geographical views, and historical scenes arranged with no regard to
order, and seeming to lie precisely as thrown down after having been
used.
In a word, the whole room bears unmistakable evidence of stern,
practical thought. In it and about it display is everywhere scrupulously
eschewed. Practical utility is the only question of interest as touching
the instruments of an editor, as of those of a carpenter; and the
workshop of the journalist bears no inconsiderable similarity to that of
the artisan in more respects than one. To each a tool is valuable, be
that tool a book or a chisel, only for its usefulness, and the facility
and rapidity with which it will aid the possessor to accomplish his
ends, and not for its beauty of form, or costliness of material or
construction.
In one respect only was there variance from this settled custom to be
perceived, and that was in that delicate mechanism embodying the
triumphs of modern science, which facilitates transmission of thought,
and which, by skillful adaptation, made this one chamber a focus to
which ideas and feeling in every other apartment of that vast
establishment converged, and which enabled one man, without rising from
his chair, to issue his orders to every department, from press-room to
composing-room, from foundation stone to the turrets of that tall pile,
everything being governed by the will and impulse of a single mind.
Indeed, to such an extent is labor-saving carried in the Parisian
printing office that the compositor may never have seen the journalist
whose leaders he has spent half his life in setting up, for copy, proof
and revise glide up or down as if by the agency only of magic, and the
real actors rarely meet.