Printing and publishing

I recently found The Printing Revolution in early modern Europe (New Edition) by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein on the shelf.  My husband was a printer and we had a printing business for many years, so printing is very much appreciated in this household. 

It is rather heavy going and I will not read it through, but I did check to see if Benjamin Franklin is mentioned...yes, he is.  Here is the passage, which includes a surprising fact:

“Authors who “composed” their work with a composing stick in hand were not uncommon in the age of Erasmus – nor in that of Benjamin Franklin.  Indeed, the simplicity of the early press made it possible for American men of letters to act as their own printers – much as Italian humanists had acted as their own scribes.”

Karl Mannheim’s Essays on the Sociology of Culture is quoted too:

“A literate person – man or woman by the way – with a copy of Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683) in hand could teach himself or herself the trade, from beginning to end.  Simplicity of operation was not a factor of prime importance in London…But it was crucially important in the provinces and colonies, where printing-houses were small and pressmen few.  There, if necessary, one man who knew his business could mix his own ink, compose his folio halfsheet page at type cases, operate the press himself, dry the pages and even take the papers in his own hands to the neighboring taverns and coffee houses for sale and distribution if he did not have a printer’s devil and could not find a boy who would do it for him for a penny.  The process was a natural school for the autodidact and the way was open for the development of authors who could complete the process by actually composing their work, in both senses of the word with the composing stick.  Two who did so were those autodidact printers Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin.

So, what do you know: printing and publishing have, to some extent, gone full circle.  Not that today’s author has a composing stick in hand!  Rather, the computer is his joy.  My husband and I have done just this with the setting and printing, and binding of my little book A Girl from Bribie Island.  My expertise (?) comes from being a “typiste” – a designation from my time working at the Commonwealth Bank designation.  Ken put the text into pages and then added appropriate photos.  We printed it at home and collated it and then (in the first edition of 20 copies for family) Ken stitched it, and bound it.  But we didn’t go to the taverns and coffee houses to sell it!  Ken’s own book is still in the setting stage.

Joyce Voysey

PS

Oh dear.  I sent that bit off to the editor and now I have found another interesting titbit in the before-quoted book: Even in the early nineteenth century, a professional man of letters such as Sir Walter Scott could write:  ‘I love to have the press thumping, clattering and banging in my ear.  It creates the necessity which always makes me work best.’