I grew up in a printing family. The printing factory was where my sisters and brother and I spent many hours and days during school holidays helping out and earning some good pocket-money collating, folding, gluing. I loved the smell of the ink and the thrumming regularity of the big Heidelberg printing presses which provided an unrelenting rhythm to our work. I also loved the paper - reams and reams of it, especially the off-cuts tossed into the big hessian bag. Here were the bits no-one wanted, except me. I would collect up treasured wads and cart them home.
My Dad tells me that he only ever printed one book. Most of his work was business stationery. The quality of the paper chosen made a difference - and spoke to the quality of one's business. Mostly, that is a thing of the past. I was saddened to receive two new books, hot off the presses (both title were printed 'on demand') yet so disappointingly ordinary in design, quality of materials and assembly. These are definitely not examples of fine workmanship.
William Dana Orcutt's account (Mary Baker Eddy and Her Books) of working with John Wilson at University Press in Cambridge in the late 1800s reveals a world of hand-writing, hand-ledgers, hierarchy and pride of craftsmanship.
Describing the 'counting room', Orcutt envisages the view of what we would now call the 'office' at University Press in 1881 by a potential customer, such as the emerging religious leader, public figure and author Mary Baker Eddy. It was
as English in layout as if located in old London itself. As Mrs. Eddy entered she would have found the clerks and the bookkeepers sitting on high stools, wearing skullcaps and long, black, alpaca coats. Mr. Wilson would have been sitting at a table, on which he wrote all business letters by hand. p. 11
From these premises, Orcutt tells us, were
manufactured the epoch-making volumes of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jared Sparks, William Hickling Prescott, John Gorham Palfrey, Josiah Quincy, Edward Everett, Richard Henry Dana, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin H. Tichnor, and James Russell Lowell. p. 12
The Longyear Foundation has an interesting article which gives additional background to our story of Mrs. Eddy's association with the company, as she strove to bring clarity to her message to the world by eliminating the 'countless errors occasioned by the carelessness of the printer' (p. 13) who had worked on a previous edition of Science & Health.
Julie Swannell
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