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Editor: Thomas K. Ford

An Account of his Life & Times, & of his Craft

Ligatures, such as ct, sb, ss, si, ssi, sk, sl, ssl, ?, fi, ffi, ff, fl, ffl, were developed where a long "s" or an "f" overlapped the following Letter. Ca?ing the two Characters together avoided Damage to the overlapping Letter. Although some Ligatures have fallen into Disuse, the fi, ffi, ff, fl, and ffl are ?ill common today.

Strange though some eighteenth-century Printing may appear to today's Reader, there is one Point that should be ?ressed. The Idiosyncracies of a Type Page of the Period were not merely Whims of individual Printers. They were the Fashion of the Time. When a Printer used several Sizes and Styles of Type on a Page, he was practicing what he and his Contemporaries considered to be good Typography.

It was a place of many sounds and smells, and of much activity. There you would find ink-smudged printer's devils carefully sorting type under the watchful eye of the journeyman printer, an accomplished craftsman and exacting instructor. There you would also find the bookbinder among his calfskins, marbled papers, glues, and presses. And on the shelves, waiting for buyers, were pamphlets and leatherbound volumes produced in the shop or imported from England.

For these reasons, Colonial Williamsburg has re-created an eighteenth-century printing office as one of its series of craft shops. Here the twentieth-century visitor will find equipment such as was used two hundred years ago in similar printing establishments on Duke of Gloucester Street operated by Parks and later by William Hunter, Joseph Royle, Alexander Purdie, John Dixon, William Hunter, Jr., William Rind, and their successors. Here a master printer and his apprentice, in the leather aprons and full-cut breeches of the period, set by hand type closely resembling that which Parks used.

To print its pages of hand-set type, the present Printing Office has in operation three so-called "English Common Presses" such as were built in the eighteenth century. One, believed to have been made about 1750, was given to Colonial Williamsburg by American Type Founders, Incorporated, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Of the other two, one was designed by Ralph Green of Chicago after a careful study of the handful of known eighteenth-century presses in the United States, and both were built by Colonial Williamsburg craftsmen.

To provide the kind of paper used by eighteenth-century printers, Colonial Williamsburg began research in the 1930s into the history of the town's only paper mill. Started by Parks about 1743 with the help of his friend Benjamin Franklin, the mill is believed to have outlived him. Examples of its product were identified in 1936 in a German Bible and a song book printed in Pennsylvania in 1763. Paper that simulated the Parks paper was thereupon reproduced, and was used in some of the work of the Printing Office and in some Colonial Williamsburg books designed after examples of Parks's work. Even the specks and spots of the original Parks paper were imitated by a mixture of ground flaxseed incorporated into the paper to insure the appearance of authenticity.

Visitors to the Printing Office today may not see counterparts of the postriders who brought mail to Parks's printing shop and post office, but nearly everything else is there. As in colonial days, the central figure is still the printer, bending over his press and producing in a day's work what one modern, mechanized press can turn out in a few minutes.

Although the colony of Virginia was founded in 1607, it was not until the eighteenth century that printing was established there. This delay was largely due to governmental policy. In seventeenth-century England and her colonies, freedom of the press was yet to be established. Even laws passed by governing bodies could not without official permission be printed and circulated for the benefit of citizens. Until the Licensing Act of 1662 expired in 1695, the printing trade in England was confined to London, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and to the English city of York. The governors of the royal colony of Virginia felt empowered to refuse permission for the establishment of printing until the year 1690, after which printers were governed by royal instructions which required a license and permission from the governor as a prerequisite to setting up shop.

Sir William Berkeley, who was governor of Virginia from 1642 to 1652 and again from 1660 to 1677, summarized the attitude of most officials of his day in his famous statement, "But, I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both."

In 1682, a few years after Berkeley wrote, a printer named William Nuthead came to Jamestown, then the capital of Virginia, proposing to serve the government by printing the acts of the Assembly. He was ordered by the Governor's Council to await royal approval. Several months later a new governor arrived with an order from the king that "no person be permitted to use any press for printing upon any occasion whatsoever." Nuthead moved to Maryland, and printing in Virginia was delayed fifty years.

"Advertisement, concerning Advertisements

"And, as these Papers will circulate not only all over This, but also the Neighbouring Colonies, and will probably be read by some Thousands of People, it is very likely they may have the desir'd Effect; and it is certainly the cheapest and most effectual Method that can be taken, for Publishing any Thing of this Nature."

William Parks's significant achievements seem even greater if one understands the difficulties of operating a business in the Williamsburg of 1730-1750. Because Virginia's colonial prosperity was based on a one-crop economy--tobacco--little "ready money" was in circulation within the colony. The weed itself became a sort of currency. The usual practice was for the plantation owner or the small farmer to subsist on his produce and his credit until the crop was harvested and shipped to English merchants, who from the proceeds of its sale bought for the planter such articles as he had directed. Because all American tobacco was transported to Britain in British vessels, shipping space was plentiful on the westward passage, and shipowners and British merchants offered Virginia buyers cheap freight rates on finished goods. Thus such English manufactures as cloth, furniture, pewter, silver, and ceramics were sold to Virginia planters and merchants.

The two-way trade between Virginia planters and British merchants slowed down the development of a large Virginia artisan group. Accordingly, local industry was limited in eighteenth-century Virginia, even in an urban center such as Williamsburg. Virginia craftsmen complained bitterly of unpaid accounts, the necessity of accepting such "country pay" as tobacco, corn, and beef, and the paucity of buyers who offered ready money.

It is easy to understand why William Parks found relatively few craftsmen in the Williamsburg of his day. Except for a few trades such as cabinetmaking, blacksmithing, coopering, wigmaking, tailoring, and shoemaking, the Virginia capital was largely a community of taverns, townhouses, and governmental institutions, and the colony itself was overwhelmingly rural. There is no doubt that Virginia's reliance on agriculture, a reliance approved by British mercantile theory, resulted in an overdependence on the industry of the mother country. We can thank the peculiarities of Parks's situation--the inability of English printers to satisfy Virginians' desire for regional news, and the subsidy Parks received as public printer--that his craft became firmly established in the 1730s in Virginia. Indeed, it seems clear that the prospect of becoming Virginia's public printer was what lured Parks from Annapolis to Williamsburg in the first place.

May 10, 1776. NUMBER 67. THE VIRGINIA GAZETTE. Always for LIBERTY, And the PUBLICK GOOD. ALEXANDER PURDIE, Printer.

In considering the craft of printing, it is important to remember that the western world has enjoyed the invention of movable type only since the middle of the fifteenth century. For several centuries thereafter, the new development was regarded with suspicion by church and state, which, as we have seen, feared the freedom of thought that would ensue if reading matter were readily available. Even in the eighteenth century, an era of enlightenment, printing was suspect.

Eighteenth-century appraisals of several printing houses indicate an average value of ?100 to ?125 currency. We may suppose that William Parks set up shop in Williamsburg in 1730 on some such scale as this, adding type and other equipment to the value of ?359 Virginia currency or ?288 sterling at the time his equipment was sold to William Hunter in 1751. Undoubtedly Parks's three presses and his type constituted his chief equipment. The presses presumably were of the English common sort, which had then been in standard use in the British Isles for nearly one hundred years. The type was an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, the letters having been cast in Holland or England, and probably was valued at more than the rest of Parks's facilities together. For the rest, equipment consisted of such printers' staples as poles for drying paper, "shooting sticks," quoins, planes, type cases, type racks, composing sticks, lye troughs, wetting troughs, and other paraphernalia. For bookbinding the printer needed other instruments, some of which could be made in Williamsburg. The majority of the tools, however, were imported from Great Britain or Holland.

As he received each font or size of type, the colonial printer would distribute it in a set of four wooden trays, two for Roman type and two for italic. These contained partitions for each "character," or "sort," as the letters and numerals were called. Such partitions varied in size depending on the frequency of use of each letter or numeral, and they were so placed as to permit the printer to assemble type with a minimum of movement.

In setting a page of printed matter the colonial printer rapidly plucked the necessary characters, one by one, from their compartments in the upper and lower cases. He placed them, with proper spacing, in a "composing stick" set to the proper length of line. When the stick was full he transferred the type to a shallow wooden tray called a "galley." Having assembled in the galley enough type to form a page, the printer "tied it off," i.e., bound a piece of string tightly around the whole mass. Then he could slide the assembled page off the galley onto the surface of the "imposing stone," a flat marble working surface. Such transfers of type--especially from composing stick to galley--were often attended with accidents. One of the printer's commoner frustrations was to have a stick, a galley, or even a whole page form of type dropped and "pied."

On the imposing stone a rectangular wrought-iron frame or "chase" was then placed around the type, and the finished page was locked into place with wooden blocks and wedges called "furniture" and "quoins." After being locked, it could be picked up and moved to the printing press without danger of the type falling out of place.

The eighteenth-century printer used paper made by hand from linen rags, importing it from Great Britain in the earlier years while domestic mills were gradually developing. Because such paper was uneven in texture and poorly sized, it was dampened before being put on the press to provide a more pliant working surface. For ink, Parks and his contemporaries used a combination of lampblack and varnish, which remain the chief constituents of printer's ink today. Lampblack was obtained by burning various materials and collecting the carbon in flues, while varnish was made of pine resin boiled in linseed oil until a clear liquid resulted. Most printers "rubbed" or mixed the lampblack and varnish thoroughly. If the mixture was too thick, it could be thinned with linseed oil or whale oil. If red ink was desired for two-color printing, vermilion could be substituted for lampblack.

Once the printer or his apprentices had set the type, pulled a proof, "made up" the type into pages with the proper spacing and ornaments, and then locked it into forms by means of furniture and quoins, he placed his form on the press and adjusted it to get the most even impression. Then he was ready to begin the actual process of printing. Whereas printing is commonly done today by automatic presses, fed with paper either mechanically or by hand, it had to be done one sheet at a time in the eighteenth century. Two men usually worked the press, and the printing of a single impression required approximately a dozen different manual operations.

To ink his press, preparatory to printing, the "beater" spread the necessary amount of ink on his mixing block and rubbed it to an even consistency--that of stiff molasses--with a wooden brayer. With two leather-covered balls attached to wooden handles, he then collected ink from the stone, beat the "ink balls" together to distribute the sticky fluid over their surfaces, and then with a rapid rocking and rolling motion, transferred it onto the type. Then the "puller" placed his paper on a skin-covered wooden frame called a tympan and folded over it another light covered frame, called a frisket. These two frames in turn folded down onto the bed of the press, where the type was locked in its iron form or chase.

Two experienced pressmen, working at full speed, could turn out a "token" or 240 printed sheets per hour. Such a speed could not long be maintained; the practical output was closer to 200 sheets per hour. But wages were low, working hours were long, and the printer could keep his force on the job until the work was done.

Because of its close association with literature, the craft of printing has generally attracted a more intellectual type of craftsman and enjoyed a prestige greater than most others. Over the centuries, master printers have jealously enforced the standards of their predecessors, insisting today, as in the eighteenth century, on a long apprenticeship for learners. Upon completion of the stipulated learning period and achievement of the required proficiency, the apprentice then, as now, became a journeyman. A mature and experienced worker at this stage, he was qualified to take his leave of his master, if he desired, and to practice his craft where he wished. When such a printer engaged in work for himself and employed others, he became a master printer.

The apprentice system was in some respects a great boon to eighteenth-century craftsmen, for it provided cheap labor in return only for training and the necessities of life. Each master took into his establishment a number of youngsters, hoping that some might prove of "bright genius and good disposition." To these he obligated himself to provide food, shelter, and in most cases, clothing. The apprentice thereupon became a member of the printer's household, performing any chores assigned to him in the home, shop, or printing office. But although apprentice labor was cheap, it was unskilled and often inept. Apprenticeships were frequently broken off, and only the relatively few youths who were suited for the work and desirous of learning the "art and mystery" of the craft kept at it until accepted as journeymen at the age of twenty-one.

The apprentice system largely supplied the printer's need for unskilled labor, but he could supplement it with slaves or with indentured servants. The latter were usually young Englishmen of the lower classes who had emigrated to America and who had bound themselves to a term of labor in return for their voyage. Unlike apprentices, however, they were not required to be taught to print.

Trained, or journeymen, printers were scarce in colonial times, and they seem to have been often on the go. Even master printers moved about frequently. William Parks had engaged in printing in three English towns and in Annapolis before coming to Williamsburg in 1730. William Rind, who established his paper in Williamsburg in 1766, came there from Annapolis. Of Williamsburg's other master printers and journeymen, some were locally trained but others had been apprenticed in England.

Entering the Printing Office, the visitor finds himself in a typical Williamsburg structure of the eighteenth century. Fireplaces on each floor of the shop warm the workers in cold weather and dry the printed sheets of paper hung on overhead racks. Many-paned windows provide most of the shop's illumination during daylight hours, and also a place--in the bays on Duke of Gloucester Street--for the printer to post signs and samples of his work. At night and on dark days candelabra hanging from the ceiling and tin sconces against the walls hold candles whose smoky flames blacken the plaster as they help to light the working areas.

On the street floor are the post office, stationery, and bookselling counter--one of the important areas of the normal colonial printing office, since it combined three of the most important sidelines. Along with the shelves of books for sale, some bound in leather and some in temporary paper covers, there is a mail rack with slots for letters and newspapers.

Excavation of the Printing Office site and careful study of the surviving eighteenth-century foundations and brick flooring gave evidence--in the form of reinforced footings--as to where at least one press may have stood. This was in the lower floor of the building, where again today the shop's printing operation is concentrated. There the three presses mentioned earlier occupy the center of the room, all of them in working order. Large racks for the storage of type line the wall, surmounted by open, slanting cases of type in current use. The cases contain a complete set of Caslon letters, from the diminutive Nonpareil to Six Line Pica , which is one inch tall. Usually the printer employs the Pica and English sizes, which were customarily used in colonial times. He and his colleagues identified type sizes by name only; since the present point system was not in use then.

Printer's ink and its ingredients--varnish, lampblack or vermilion, and linseed oil--are kept in saltglaze jugs. Other vessels contain drinking water, and the wetting trough is filled, ready for dampening paper before printing. On the floor, weighted boards atop stacks of wetted paper keep the sheets from curling as the dampness permeates evenly throughout the pile.

AN INQUIRY INTO THE Rights of the BRITISH Colonies,

Intended as an Answer to

Here the printer and his helpers set type, pull proofs and correct their galleys, make up pages on the marble imposing stone, prepare paper and ink, run off the job on one or more of the presses, and finally, redistribute the type to the cases. The printed sheets, in the meantime, may have to be hung on ceiling racks to allow both ink and paper to dry out.

In the small back shop, a separate building, the similarly cluttered bookbinding shop may be found. In it the bookbinder of today, working with the tools and methods of his eighteenth-century predecessors, sews together the printed and folded signatures that make a book, binds them in boards, and covers the boards--perhaps in elegantly decorated leather bindings. He may use marbled paper of his own making for end-papers or on the outer covers of smaller books. For tooling and lettering the cover he has a collection of brass dies, some of which are designed from lettering stamps excavated in the vicinity of his--and William Parks's workshop.

From the crude presses of Williamsburg came an ingredient essential to the movement toward American self-government and independence--the political pamphlet. In the world of the eighteenth century, devoid of radio, television, or the bulky daily paper, the substance of political debate came from such pamphlets. It was also an era which took its political philosophy seriously, and the author of a pamphlet could count on wide readership among the planter-aristocrats who controlled the machinery of government. Williamsburg, as the colony's capital and its political and intellectual center, was the obvious city to lend its imprint to the speculations of Virginia's pamphleteers.

A SUMMARY VIEW OF THE RIGHTS OF BRITISH AMERICA. SET FORTH IN SOME RESOLUTIONS INTENDED FOR THE INSPECTION OF THE PRESENT DELEGATES OF THE PEOPLE OF VIRGINIA. NOW IN CONVENTION.

WILLIAMSBURG: Printed BY CLEMENTINA RIND.

To the Williamsburg printer we owe a word of thanks for the important part that he has played in the affairs of this early Virginia capital--affairs that had notable influence on the course of American history. Since civilization began, the communication of ideas has largely depended upon the written word. The eighteenth-century printers of Williamsburg--and all America--served that need at a time of great moment, when the destiny of the emerging ideals of political democracy, free speech, a free press, and freedom of conscience was uncertain. They had the privilege of enlisting their craftsmanship in the service of freedom, peace, and plenty, goals that continue to beckon mankind.

Transcriber's Notes

--Silently corrected a few palpable typos.

--Transcribed the text of specimen pages.

--Where possible on specimen pages, retained long-s and ligatures in the UTF and HTML versions.

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