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Note: This is an unpublished chapter from the forthcoming volume 3 of the History of the Book in America. Please do not quote, copy, or distribute without permission. Manufacturing and Book Production Michael Winship Of contributions by inventors and artizans to the great work of mental development, there are three that have been conspicuous in bringing out the modern outburst of thought. Successfully employed in hastening a present, they are securing the future elevation of our race. Preventing retrogation in intelligence, they add daily to the general stock, and are posting it up for the use of our successors. They are metallic types, paper and the printing press;—a triad of achievements in mechanical science unrivalled in importance and value. While water, wind, steam, electricity and the gases, serve to animate material mechanisms, these are the elements of a higher and mightier prime mover; one destined to agitate and expand the intellect of the world; to extend and perpetuate the peaceful reign of science and arts over the earth. —Report of the Commissioner of Patents, for the Year 1850.i In the United States, the nineteenth century was the great period of industrialization, and the benefits of industrial ways were an article of faith. As the epigraph to this chapter 50 makes clear, this belief was especially true for the manufacture of and trade in books and other printed materials: between 1840 and 1880 these objects changed substantially in their manufacture, appearance, and cost, as did the lives of those who produced and consumed them. When examining these changes and their implications, it is important to distinguish the invention of a new technology—the most common focus of historical accounts or studies—from its introduction into practical use and its widespread acceptance by industry. These two steps usually involved different people and new combinations of capital and ingenuity, and they likely occurred at different times. By 1840 many of the manufacturing technologies and changes described in this chapter had not only been invented, but some had also been introduced into practice. Only during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, however, did their use become general. Furthermore, even as the methods of book manufacture in 1880 varied substantially from those in 1840, the methods of 1880 would by and large continue to be in general use well into the twentieth century. Printing from plates, one of the most important and characteristic new processes adopted in the United States during the nineteenth century, is a useful illustration of these points. Scattered experiments with various processes of producing printing plates had taken place for several centuries in Europe and Great Britain, and they had met with some success, but the method of casting stereotype plates from plaster molds was finally perfected in England in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It was first successfully used in the United States in 1813. Over the course of the following decades this process for producing plates was supplemented by other techniques, most importantly by electrotyping, but also stereotyping from papier-maché “flong” molds. By the 1830s 51 printing from stereotype plates was becoming the standard form of book manufacture in the United States, at least by the larger firms: of 413 volumes published by Harper & Brothers in 1834, 192 (46 percent) were stereotyped, and by 1855 almost every work at the Harper establishment was electrotyped. The use of stereotype and especially electrotype plates for book production remained standard well into the twentieth century, and the use of stereotype plates made from flong molds, introduced in 1861 and widely adopted in the newspaper industry after the Civil War, remained common into the 1970s.ii The development of printing plates calls attention to several other general features of industrialization. First, new technologies usually supplement rather than replace older ones: even after plates became predominant, much printing continued to be done directly from type. Second, technological change does not happen in isolation. The ability to produce stereotype plates from flexible flong molds solved the problem of how to produce curved printing plates that could be attached to rotary printing presses, which in turn could efficiently print on paper in rolls rather than in sheets. Changes in plates, presses, and paper meant that the rate of printing could be greatly increased, and they were put to good use in the production of newspapers, whose editors and owners had made the currency of news a selling point. The “discovery of news,” however, was neither dependent upon nor determined by these technological developments: the daily penny press emerged in the 1830s, several decades before the introduction of curved stereotype plates or the widespread use of rotary presses. Even as the fallacy of technological determinism needs to be avoided, the implications of technological change demand close attention. 52 Industrialization and the introduction of new technologies of production inevitably affected practice, even if the effect was contingent and unpredictable. Although this chapter examines each of the many processes of book production separately, it is important to remember that they were utilized in a wide range of establishments to produce the tremendous variety of books and printed matter that characterizes the nineteenth century. The Adams flatbed platen power press used by William Dean Howells’s father in his Ohio newspaper office was, in principle, the same as the twenty-eight Adams presses installed in 1855 by Harper & Brothers in their new factory in New York. Nevertheless, the two environments could not have been more different. In the Ohio shop the Adams press, like the hand press it had only recently replaced, was originally powered manually, and Howells’s father used it to print directly from type inked by rollers that were fabricated in the shop. In contrast, the Harper establishment’s steam-powered presses were part of a large, modern, fireproof book production facility designed to organize and rationalize the production process.iii Adams presses continued to be widely used after the Civil War: in the late 1860s they could be found at both the Riverside Press—a large book manufactory in Cambridge, Massachusetts—and in the much smaller shop of the Worcester, Massachusetts, job printer Charles Hamilton. But again these were different establishments specializing in different kinds of work. In 1868, when the Riverside Press purchased its first cylinder press, adding it to eighteen Adams presses, four hand presses, and one jobbing press, Hamilton was already operating two cylinder presses, as well as two Adams presses, two jobbing presses, 53 and one hand press. If anything, Hamilton’s equipment was more varied and up-to-date than that in Cambridge.iv Type, Printing Plates, and Composition If the use of printing plates was one of the characteristic developments in book manufacturing of the nineteenth century, the reproduction of texts from movable type, a process introduced into Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, remained at the heart of printing throughout the period. Printed matter continued to be set up in moveable type, just as it had been during the preceding four centuries, and much of it was printed from type in a fashion that would have been familiar to earlier printers. Despite this continuity a number of nineteenth-century developments in the production of type increased its availability and the variety of its design. The earliest was the invention and perfection of the pivotal typecasting machine by David Bruce, Jr., of New York during the 1830s and early 1840s. The heart of the machine, a pump turned by a hand crank, forced molten type metal made of the traditional mixture of lead, tin, and antimony into a type mold with an attached matrix, a bar of metal impressed with the negative image of the face of a particular character, or “sort.” The temperature, make-up, amount of type metal, and thrust of the pump had to be adjusted to match the size and width of each letter, but each revolution of the machine’s handle cast and released a single piece of type from the mold. The resulting type was far more regular than type cast in a hand-held mold, having especially a sharper face, but each piece of type still had to be finished and dressed manually. The greater control of the casting process that the machine 54 allowed, however, made it possible to produce the elaborate ornamental and display types so characteristic of the period’s typography. The typecasting machine was far faster than hand casting: an average of one hundred pieces of type of the ordinary sizes could be cast in a minute, though larger sizes necessarily had to be cast at a slower rate, while traditional hand casting could only produce a maximum of roughly four thousand individual types in a day—though this rate had been doubled with the adoption of the lever hand mold early in the nineteenth century. From 1845 most of the type in the United States was produced by the Bruce pivotal typecasting machine.v A second innovation of the 1840s was the use of electrotyped matrices for typefounding. Traditionally, the matrix had been produced by striking a steel punch, with the shape of a letter laboriously carved on its end, into a bar of soft copper. Electrotyping eliminated the need for both punch and the operation of striking. In this process the model letter was cut out of type metal, which after proper preparation was submerged into an electrolytic bath with plates of zinc and copper. The action of the electric current within the bath caused the type metal to be coated with a thick shell of copper, which was then removed and backed up to produce a matrix.

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