the real American printing press
The platen jobber developed in the United States for flexible short run printing of anything from flour sacks to wedding announcements.
We just installed the 7″ x 11″
Star Kelsey in our Historical Printing Studio (see October 27). The clanking rachet of the ink plate and the spining of the S spoke flywheel of this very press provides the animated backgound of scenes in Gunsmoke. It is a real American press.
Link and image from
Briar Press
early adopter
ìI have claimed that I was the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in his house for practical purposes; I will now claim ñ until dispossessed ñ that I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I wrote the first half of it in 72í, the rest of it in 74í. My machinist type-copied a book for me in 74í, so I concluded it was the one. That early machine was full of caprices, full of defects ñ devilish ones. It has as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues.î (unpublished autobiography, 1904, Mark Twain) (see
Paige Typesetter)
remarkable new book
A Splendor of Letters, The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World by
Nicholas Basbanes, Perennial paperback, 2003 is a remarkable book. To begin with there are over 400 pages of the epics of libraries and books. These epics of destruction and replication include the heroic story of John Dean at Cornell and the effort to save Cambodian libraries and archives.
Another stupendous feature of this book are its haptic and audio-kenetic characteristics. It is an incredibly pliant and noisy book. The docile, right-grain text paper and limp cover wrapper stock enables the book to be easily fluted into a scroll. It is so flexible that any given opening can be draped around under the reading page. But it is the noise that really enters a new sensory domain. It is an extremely loud book producing sharp, squeegee cries as the book is flexed. Is this a cold tack phenomenon, alternately gripping and releasing?
Extremely docile, right grain books are becoming more prevalent. Perhaps publishers now feel that the norms of a stiffer handle are no longer needed. But now lets see how all the screeching will enter into the reading experience. Or is this sound from martyred librarians and, therefore, peculiar to the meaning of this book alone?