“Printing is a good business. . . . It is celebrated as a trainer of people for higher stations in life.”

-Henry P. Porter

Of all occupations, printing is truly the renaissance profession. Individuals, trained in printing, have moved on to more celebrated careers. Individuals of significant accomplishment have come to printing after making other important contributions.

How many of the following people did you know were printers?

William Blake, the British poet and engraver, whose art and poetic works have mystical and visionary qualities. His contemporaries considered him quite bizarre and unusual. He said, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

Charles Dickens, the nineteenth century English author, also worked as a printer/publisher. His most famous short story was “A Christmas Carol.” Of his second profession he said, “…the printer is the only product of civilization necessary to the existence of free men.”

Thomas Alva Edison was America’s greatest inventor. His first job was selling newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railroad Line between Detroit and Port Huron. The young boy bought some old type and a press and published his own paper on the train to sell at each stop along the way. Edison went on to invent the mimeograph which he sold to a Midwestern lumber manufacturer, A. B. Dick. Dick, of course, built an office machine business around the invention.

Erasmus has been said to be the greatest classical scholar of the Renaissance. As Martin Luther worked to reform the Church from without. Erasmus worked within to bring about change. He translated, wrote, and designed books. He set the standard for page margins used by some even to day. “Twice as wide on the top as at the inside; twice as wide at the outside as the top and twice as wide on the bottom as on the side.”

Horace Greeley was the chief cheerleader of nineteenth century American westward expansion. “Go west, young man, go west!” was his slogan. He was a printer who rose to be a great publisher. His Civil War editorials rallied the Union, and called for reconciliation after the South lost. Greeley even posted bail for Jefferson Davis, the defeated Confederate President.

Warren G. Harding was the 29th President of the United States, but he said the job he loved the best was serving as a printer’s devil in the Caledonia Argus newspaper. His presidential administration was known for corruption and scandal He said, “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.”

Paul Revere, in addition to being a silversmith and late night Revolutionary War messenger, he engraved plates and printed currency. Securities engravers know him as the “Father of American banknote engraving.”

John Brown Russwurm was the first African-American college graduate in the United States. He was born a slave; yet, he successfully published the first newspaper in America for his race, published a newspaper in Africa, was head of public education in Liberia and died as head of state of a small African colony.

Carl Sandberg, the American writer was known for his free verse poems celebrating America, American people, and industry and for the biography Abraham Lincoln (1926-1939). He self-printed his first book of poems at Lombard College in the basement print shop of his professor. Shortly after he took to the open road to tramp around America.

Mark Twain, a.k.a. Samuel Clemens, got his start in the newspaper business in the days when reporters were called on to set type, do page make-up and run the press. Later in life, his entire fortune was lost on an ill-timed investment in the Paige compositor, an unsuccessful competitor to the Linotype. Much of the sharp humor we have come to associate with Twain’s writings was the result of having to go on the lecture circuit to replace the fortune lost in printing.

Walt Whitman was the American Homer. He authored only one book, in many revisions. “Leaves of Grass,” was first published in 1855. Whitman, a printer and editor, financed and did much of the typesetting and printing himself. Ralph Waldo Emerson called it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.”

Virginia Woolf, is a name most people would only know the from the play “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf.” This early twentieth century English novelist was also an early feminist, a literature critic, and a member of the famous Bloombury Group of writers. She and her husband operated Hogarth Press and published her works and those of other contemporary English authors.

Frank Lloyd Wright, the founder of the “prairie school: of architectural design. Wright not only designed a building, but the furnishings and fixtures as well. This desire to control the entire design of a project led him to design the invitations and publications associated with his buildings. He designed, and helped print on a hand press, “The House Beautiful,” a book on, what else, architecture.

The Wright Brothers were in the printing business long before the bicycle business and long before they took to flying heavier-than-air machines off the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk. They built one of their newspaper presses themselves, and Orville, later in life, invented another press to print on toy balsa wood airplanes.

These are a few selected at random. Who is your favorite printing personality? Write and tell me!