- In case you are asked!
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- "To have a thing is nothing, if you've not the
chance to show it, And to know a thing is nothing
unless you know you know it."
- -Lord Nancy
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- From time to time, in a writer's notebook facts
and trivia organize themselves into what becomes an
article, story, or column. Other items of interest
float endlessly around never connecting with anything
that would make more than a paragraph of copy. Here
are some miscellaneous jottings from the Printing's
Past notebook.
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- The first college course on printing was taught at
Harvard University in 1911. The instructor was Daniel
Berkley Updike and the course was titled "An
Introduction to the Technique of Printing."
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- The very first printing school was started at the
famous social community school founded by Robert Owen
in New Harmony, Indiana in 1826. Printing, lithography
and engraving were the subjects that were taught. The
community failed and so did the printing school.
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- Abraham Lincoln gave approval for the founding of
the Secret Service to enforce counterfeiting laws on
morning of the day he was assassinated. The protection
duties of the Secret Service were added years
later.
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- Samuel Morse, of Morse Code fame, distributed a
galley of metal type to determine which letters were
used the most. The frequently used letters were given
the shortest codes.
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- Ben Franklin did not start the Saturday Evening
Post magazine as popularly thought. It was founded by
Charles Alexander and Samuel C. Atkinson in
Philadelphia in 1821. They set up their publishing
offices in the two-story brick building at 53 Market
Street where Franklin once published his Pennsylvania
Gazette.
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- William Morris, has been called the "Father of
Modern Printing." He founded the Kelmscott Press in
the late nineteenth century to restore an appreciation
in the beauty of books. One of Morris's best friends
was Karl Marx the "Father of Communism."
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- The question mark (?) evolved from the Roman
abbreviation for the word "question." "Quaestion" was
abbreviated using a "q" and a period as in "q."
Stylization of scribes and type designers lead to the
"?" we use today.
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- Charles Stillwell, a printer, in 1883, invented
the machine that made the flat- bottomed paper bag
used by grocery shoppers. He called it the "Self-
Opening Sack - the first bag to stand upright by
itself." He did his work in Fremont, Ohio.
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- The impression lever on the wooden press of
colonial American printer's was called "the devils
tail" owing to the historical association of printing
to the work of the devil and a black art.
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- The type designed in the eighteenth century by
John Baskerville was so fine and delicate he could not
print it by conventional methods. He had to invent a
way to make smoother paper and better ink in order to
print with it. He lost most of his money in the
process.
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- Lewis H. Douglass, the son of Frederick Douglass,
the American abolitionist, was refused admission
because of his race to the local Washington, D.C.
typographic union in 1869. An appeal to the National
Typographic Union was also unsuccessful.
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- Mark Twain worked as a printer before his success
as a writer. After achieving his fame and success he
returned to the printing and publishing business. His
most important project was the printing of the Memoirs
of Ulysses S. Grant. It was a best seller, but the
generous 70% royalty paid to Grant's widow broke the
firm. Twain had to go on the lecture circuit for four
years to pay off the debt. Much of Twain's caustic wit
can be traced to his forced return to public speaking
for pay.
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- Carl Sandburg, the poet, not only wrote his poems,
but set the type inked, the press, hand fed the paper,
and bound the books for his first volume of poems in
1904. He did this in the basement of his professor's
home at Lombard College in Galesburg, Ill. Shortly
after, he hit the road as a "hobo" like so many tramp
printers before him, but he never returned to
printing.
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- Matthew Brady, America's most famous Civil War photographer, learned photography from Samuel Morse, the inventor of telegraphy. Morse learned the part of photography from Louis Jacques Mendé Daguerre, the inventor of the Daguerreotype, on a trip to France.
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- Folklore of the nineteenth century stereotyped
pressmen as heavy drinkers and walking with a limp.
The limp possibly came from over exercising one leg
during the impression pull on the early wooden presses
and later the foot treddle-powered job presses. The
excessive drinking tag can be left to the
imagination.
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