Sam Clemens, Printer's Devil with his composing stick
My claims to be a letterpress
printer become increasingly threadbare, as my annual production is reduced to a
few classy envelopes and a minimalist Christmas card. But heavy printing equipment still
monopolizes a goodly part of my living space, and I remain attuned in various
ways to matters typographical, which show up in unexpected places. I would not have thought it likely that at my
august age I would find myself reading for the very first time a “new” work by
Mark Twain, but that is what happened when I picked up my volume of The Gilded Age and Later Novels and
started on the very latest: 44, The
Mysterious Stranger.
For a novel that is perplexingly
incoherent, incomprehensible, and incomplete, it is a pretty engaging
read. I might call it “post-modern” had
it not been completed before Modernism is supposed to have begun in 1913, and I
do call it “magical realism,” which is at least two thousand years older than
Gabriel García Márquez.
The time of the novel is the late
fifteenth century, the setting a strange Austrian castle occupied by a
printer’s shop. The first-person
narrator is a sixteen-year-old apprentice named August Feldner: a job the
novelist himself once had. The printers
are engaged in the enormous task of producing a large edition of a Latin Bible
for the ecclesiastical authorities. There
is in the book a strong strain of Masonic anti-Catholicism that has to be
genuine Mark Twain and reminded me of both my grandfathers.
A book report on The Mysterious Stranger could make a
decent blog essay, but the tangent I prefer to pursue is invited by the
book’s extraordinarily rich and accurate vocabulary of letterpress printing
technology. The author is all over quoins and friskets, makereadies and the
“stone” that was as fundamental to printers as to alchemists. There can have been but few writers more
typographically attuned than Mark Twain—for which fact there is a very good
explanation. Long before he was Mark
Twain, Sam Clemens had put in many a weary hour in the print shop. It is furthermore true that even more
memorable than the means by which one becomes rich are those through which one
becomes bankrupt.
Everyone knows about Johannes
Gutenberg, but how many know about Ottmar Mergenthaler? How many fewer about James W. Paige? Gutenberg’s double invention, which brought
together finely cast movable types with a machine capable of accurately
exerting considerable leveraged pressure against them, effected a true
“paradigm shift” in the manner of reproducing a written text. It is a sometimes sad truth of industrial
history that if a repetitive task performed by human hand can be performed by a
machine instead, the machine will win out.
Today we tend to emphasize volume:
the printing press could produce an indefinitely large number of identical
pages at a rate no scribe or scriptorium full of scribes could hope to
match. The early printers themselves
stressed also accuracy: the printed
word could carry the authority of having been corrected in proof by an expert
editor or even the author himself.
It is an exaggeration, though one I
permit myself, to say that Gutenburg’s printing technology of 1450 remained
largely unchanged until roughly 1950. In
that same period the demand for printed materials increased astronomically. My guess would be that in the period between
1750 and 1850 demand probably doubled.
Presses could be and were improved and speeded up by the application of
mechanical power, but there remained a bottleneck: the types had to be set by hand.
Compositors (type-setters) might become amazingly agile and productive
as compared with their Renaissance predecessors; but the entire printing
industry knew that the next big thing had to be an automatic type-setting
machine. Certainly Samuel Clemens did.
By the middle of the nineteenth
century inventors throughout the industrialized world were hard at work on the
idea. But America was the Land of
Invention, and it would be two Americans who in the 1870s would independently and almost
simultaneously succeed: James Paige (1842-1917), an engineer from Rochester,
and the German immigrant Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854-1899). Paige won the prize for bells and whistles,
Mergenthaler for lateral thinking.
Unfortunately Mark Twain put his money, and I mean all his money, on the Paige Compositor. That is, he invested heavily in a project
that might have made him a millionaire.
Paige compositor
Paige had come up with a huge and
almost supernaturally complicated machine that set individual pieces of type as
a human compositor would, only much faster.
A firm believer that hypothetical perfection should ever war against achieved
adequacy, he then kept fiddling with improvements for years while his
competitor went into production. This
competitor, Mergenthaler, had had one of history’s great brain waves. His machine would not juggle thousands of
small pieces of “cold” foundry type just dying to misbehave; it would be
instead a small foundry itself, casting in hot metal whole solid, stable lines
of text as they would appear in the columns of a newspaper or pages of a
book. For this reason he called his invention
the Linotype Machine.
Merganthaler's Linotype machine
In his will Shakespeare famously
bequeathed to his wife his “second best bed”—a legacy no doubt generously
conceived and gratefully accepted. But second
best is not always good enough. The vast
printing industry of the late nineteenth century turned out to be cruelly
uninterested in the second best mechanical composing machine on offer even if a
great American writer had bet the farm on it.
These days, of course, only a few antiquarians like myself are
interested in metal type at all—hot or
cold. No doubt there are also those who
collect Betamax and buggy whips.
