Printer's Error

by Rebecca Romney

  That’s, what, six pints of beer at work every day? Before, during, and after breakfast? It’s like the alcoholic equivalent of hobbit meals. Pressmen in London were consuming enough alcohol on a daily basis to employ an “alehouse boy,” whose only job was to ferry beer between the pubs and the printing houses.

  Franklin, on the other hand, drank exactly no beers at work each day. Unused to such high volumes of alcohol flowing through the workplace, he looked upon the actions of his beer-guzzling coworkers as “detestable,” and set out to change their ways. Hey, bugger off, Benjamin Franklin! says any American reader who wishes he could drink even one beer at work every day. But don’t be too harsh on young Franklin, dear reader. If it weren’t for him, you might still be British and saying things like “bugger off.”

  “On occasion I carried up and down stairs a large form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered to see from this and several instances that the Water-American, as they called me, was stronger than themselves, who drank strong beer!” Strong to drink is strong to labor: probably the singularly most successful workplace lie ever perpetuated upon English business owners.

  Indeed, strength, for pressmen, was one of the main requirements of the job. They spent so much of their day doing the hard labor of pulling a press that contemporary cartoons referred to them as “horses.” (On the other hand, compositors were later called “monkeys” because they sat hunched over and picked at small sorts of type from printing cases.)

  Franklin “endeavored to convince [one fellow pressman] that the bodily strength afforded by beer could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a penny-worth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer.” Nothing like a little science to put workplace alcoholism in its place. Or not. “He drank on,” Franklin observed.

  Young Benjamin probably was stronger than his English counterparts. Not only was he an energetic nineteen-year-old, but unlike most men in the 1700s, he swam, enjoyed fresh air and daily exercise, and ate a conscientiously healthy diet. He could haul twice the weight that other pressmen carried, and when he was promoted to compositor, he set his type with an “uncommon quickness,” which one could at least partially attribute to the alcohol-free clarity of his mind.

  But why set type so fast? Why be the office ass-kisser? Oh, right, for the money. When you’re a compositor and you set type faster than anyone else, you get paid more. In most cases, compositors were paid by the number of lines of type they set. The faster you worked, the more was sent your way. When you were fast, “job” printing (essentially single-sheet compositions) and time-sensitive projects, which paid noticeably better, landed on your desk first. Add to this the copious amounts of disposable income you didn’t waste at the pubs, and you can see the financial advantages to being the one sober printer in the office. Their paying a tab of four or five shillings out of their wages every Saturday night caused Franklin to remark of his coworkers, “And thus these poor devils keep themselves always under.”

  Still, Franklin paid for his responsible behavior in other ways. When you voluntarily withdraw from the office beer fund, for example, you can expect your fellow compositors to retaliate. In Franklin’s day, compositors selected letters from cases that were divided into separate sections for each letter of type, known as a “sort.” All the a sorts were in one section, the b sorts in another, and so on. The sorts for capital letters were further separated, at the topmost section of the case, thereby creating the terms uppercase and lowercase. Compositors knew their cases so well that they could pick sorts from each section without even looking, just as we type on a keyboard without staring at the keys. Mysteriously, Franklin’s sorts kept getting mixed up, greatly slowing his work. Disgruntled pranksters found other little ways of tripping him up as well. They transposed his pages. They broke his equipment. Sometimes they blamed the slipups on a ghost that was haunting the printing house. Being the office teetotaler was starting to cost Franklin in both the goodwill of his colleagues and in actual money.

  Realizing his mistake, Franklin tried to build relationships with his colleagues in other ways. In place of their prebreakfast and breakfast ales, he helped his coworkers substitute the following meal: “a large porringer of hot water-gruel, sprinkled with pepper, crumbed with bread”—all for the three half-pence price of a pint of beer. Cast away your ale, brother printers, I present you this bowl of watered-down oat flour and soggy bread. (You just can’t go back far enough in time to find English food that isn’t bloody awful.)

  After a year in Palmer’s shop, young Franklin finally made arrangements to return to Philadelphia. Once again taking up work with the incompetent printer Keimer, he soon realized he had outgrown his former employer. Why try to keep Keimer’s rotten ship afloat when he could build a new vessel and steer his own course? All he needed was two hundred pounds, or about two and a half years’ of his journeyman salary, to get things started.

  Compared to the lightning-fast service and reasonable shipping and handling fees of the twenty-first century, Franklin’s acquisition of a printing press seems positively Stone Age. For one, the colonies weren’t even close to self-sufficient. If you wanted a printing press, you had no choice but to order one from abroad. You couldn’t skip down to the local expo and select the latest two-pull printing press showcased by bikini-clad tavern women. American-made products were universally recognized as expensive to produce, of limited quantity, and vastly inferior to their foreign counterparts. So poorly was Colonial industry regarded that even the idea of an American Bible was suspect; everyone assumed they would be less accurate than European Bibles. This belief was held not just by readers and clergymen from around Europe, but by Americans. It wasn’t until the middle of the American Revolution that a complete Bible in English would proudly be published by the patriot printer Robert Aitken. This 1781 edition issued in Philadelphia, known in the rare book world as the Aitken Bible, is coveted by collectors of Americana and Bibles alike, and can reach prices of $150,000 or more.

  In addition to the presses themselves, paper and metal type also had to be ordered and shipped from England. Consider that, in the seventeen years Franklin personally ran his shops in Philadelphia, he purchased four thousand pounds of metal type. In any given shipment, thirty pounds were just replacement quotation marks. The first type foundry established on American soil didn’t even open its doors until 1796, thirteen years after the end of the American Revolution.

  The paper situation wasn’t any more encouraging. At this time, the best-quality paper came from the British Isles. That wasn’t so bad, as long as you didn’t mind waiting enormous shipping times and potentially incurring water damage along the way. It was a common enough problem that in one contemporary advertisement, a binder in the colonies boasted of his ability “to bind books neatly and to take salt water out of books.”

  It wasn’t very easy to acquire materials for binding books, either. Binding was an expensive addition to a product that was already expensive to produce. For this reason, books were much more commonly bound in sheepskin in the colonies, a notably cheaper option than the typical calfskin. Sheepskin comes with its own problems, however. The poorer-quality bindings don’t age well. As a result, a rare book dealer today can look at a shelf of worn sheepskin bindings and make a pretty good guess that it’s a collection of eighteenth-century American imprints.

  Scarcity of materials was simply a way of life for Colonial printers. Broken type, poor-quality paper, and worn sheep bindings might have made American books look cheap and unimpressive next to their London counterparts, but that was the reality of printing in America. In some cases, these problems have even translated into high prices within the rare book market today. Many American imprints were issued “stitched”—that is, without any of that expensive binding, but simply with the sheets sewn together. Iro
nically, most eighteenth-century American pamphlets carry a premium for collectors if they remain “stitched as issued.”

  The two hundred pounds sterling that Benjamin Franklin needed to open his own shop was not an easy sum to come by, but with the help of friends and investors (and despite one failed engagement), he was able to scrape together enough cash to make it happen. Now he was free to pursue the printer’s ultimate goal, which was documented as early as 1534: “nearly all master PRINTERS STRIVE first of all AFTER PROFIT.” But even with a printing press in hand, Franklin couldn’t just slap ink to type and make a living. Two printers stood firmly in his way: Andrew “the In-Law Whisperer” Bradford, who owned the government printing contracts; and Samuel Keimer, who swept up the leftover table scraps. Franklin had to break their stranglehold on Philadelphia, or go under.

  The first step was to destroy his former employer. Three years before Franklin opened his own shop, Keimer contracted with the Philadelphia Quakers (or Friends, as they were known) to print The History of the Quakers. The tome was destined to be the largest and most expensive book printed in Philadelphia up to that point. At 722 pages, it was the size of a briefcase and may have contained more pages than all the books Franklin would later print over his twenty-year career. Keimer had been dragging his feet on this behemoth, so when Franklin opened his doors in 1728, he went behind Keimer’s back and stole the contract. It paid off, too. Franklin printed the last quarter of the book in about two months. Considering that there were five hundred copies printed for this edition, it would have taken a total of 361,000 individual pulls of the printing press to obtain every sheet for The History of the Quakers. If Keimer had been able to accomplish this at Franklin’s rate, he would have finished the Quaker history in nine months, not the three-plus years that had already stacked up.

  The History of the Quakers was a brilliant success for Franklin. Not only was his work noticeably better than Keimer’s (which is funny, because Franklin worked on the first three-quarters of this book while in Keimer’s employ), but the speed with which it was printed afforded his business “character and credit.” As James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass put it, “the ostentatious, almost superhuman speed with which [Franklin and his associates] finished the job was designed to show everyone how industrious they were and how slothful Keimer had been all along.”

  That was one nail in Keimer’s coffin. The second came with Franklin’s decision, in 1729, to begin printing a newspaper. Philadelphia already had a newspaper, Andrew Bradford’s American Weekly Mercury. According to Franklin, it was “a paltry thing; wretchedly managed, and no way entertaining,” but it was a newspaper nonetheless, with words and news and stuff. Why would anyone need more than one newspaper in a city? Back in 1720, when Franklin’s older brother started the New-England Courant, concerned friends made the argument that the American colonies already had a newspaper, the Boston News-Letter. “One newspaper [was], in their judgment, enough for America.”

  Getting wind of Franklin’s plans, Keimer retaliated against the younger printer’s scheming and started his own newspaper first, the Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences: and Pennsylvania Gazette. As it turns out, Keimer was just as bad at running a newspaper as naming one. Wracking his brain for something that might give him an edge over Bradford’s Mercury, he came up with the brilliant (not brilliant) idea to headline each issue with an entry from a 1728 encyclopedia. Front-page news of issue number one would have been the lexical entry for “A.” Yes, just “A: “A vowel, and the first letter of the English alphabet. See LETTER, VOWEL, and ALPHABET; where what relates to A, considered in each of those capacities, is delivered.”

  Whew. People in the 1720s found that about as interesting as you just did. Franklin publicly observed that, at the rate Keimer was publishing his newspaper, “It will probably be fifty years before the whole can be gone through”—if that were something a person would even want to do, which it was not. In the fall of 1729, struggling to keep the paper afloat, Keimer gave in and sold it to Franklin for pennies on the dollar. And in case you’re wondering . . . “Air.” That’s how far Keimer made it: Air.

  Within a few months of selling out to Franklin (who mercifully shortened the paper’s name to the Pennsylvania Gazette), Keimer sold his shop to his apprentice and moved to Barbados. His apprentice couldn’t do any better and closed down within the year. That left just Andrew Bradford, the man who had very recently convinced Franklin’s potential in-laws to abandon their matrimonial negotiations. Time for some payback.

  DISMANTLING BRADFORD’S organization would not be easy. Franklin had to follow the money, and that trail led right to the government contracts, delivery routes, and paper mills owned by the Bradford family.

  Good morning, Mr. Franklin.

  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to undermine Andrew Bradford’s printing syndicate. This cheap Colonial piece of paper will self-destruct on its own in five seconds.

  Good luck.

  The first step in taking down Bradford was diverting that sweet, sweet government printing. Franklin’s plan was simple: let his work speak for itself. In March of 1729, as the official printer to the Assembly of Pennsylvania, Bradford printed the speech of Governor Patrick Gordon. Maybe familiarity and a false sense of job security caused Bradford to cut corners. The text he printed was a mess, full of clumsily arranged, broken, and missing letters. One look at the printed speech, and the Assembly would have been compelled to conclude, Clearly this man does not give a shit. But Franklin did give a shit, and he demonstrated it by reprinting the governor’s speech using aesthetically pleasing arrangements and fonts, and bold, clean, accurate letters. After Franklin circulated his copies for comparison (and with a bit of help from political allies), the Assembly voted to turn the government contracts over to him. Speeches, broadside proclamations, minutes of meetings, and official government news and documents all had to pass through his shop now.

  Franklin’s newspaper stood to be his biggest moneymaker. The Gazette was objectively a better paper than Bradford’s Mercury. In addition to the stream of European headlines, Franklin reported news from neighboring colonies and strove for higher-quality offerings than his competitor. His newspaper introduced a unique blend of instructive and entertaining writing. “As I know the mob hate instruction, and the generality would never read beyond the first line of my lectures . . . If I can now and then . . . satirize a little . . . the expectation of meeting with such a gratification, will induce many to read me through, who would otherwise proceed immediately to the foreign news.”

  But quality does not by itself guarantee selling power. If consumers can’t access your product, they aren’t going to buy it. This is where Bradford’s second stranglehold came into play: he was the postmaster of Philadelphia. The postmaster controlled the main distribution networks throughout the colonies. When Franklin began printing the Philadelphia Gazette in 1729, Bradford slapped a ban on any of his post riders carrying Franklin’s newspaper.

  Franklin’s paper needed a steady stream of revenue from advertising. A lot of money was made using subscriber numbers to attract advertisers. One Colonial printer called advertisements “the life of a paper.” Because Andrew Bradford “kept the post-office . . . his paper was thought a better distributer of advertisements than mine, and therefore had many more, which was a profitable thing to him and a disadvantage to me.”

  Advertisers want the biggest pool of potential consumers. Distribution determined the size of that pool. Without the postmastership, Franklin was severely handicapped. Not only was he missing out on advertising revenue, but he was having to dig into his own pockets to pay off Bradford’s postmen—“what [newspapers, etc.] I did send was by bribing the riders, who took them privately.”

  Whatever finagling happened behind the scenes is lost to history, but all Franklin really needed to do to break Bradford’s postal siege was wait. In 1737, Colonel Spotswood, acting Colonial postmaster general, called on Bradford for an ac
counting of his books. Franklin uses words such as negligence, inexactitude, and lack of clearness and punctuality, when describing the reasons for Bradford’s sacking. “Inexactitude” sounds an awful lot like “embezzlementitude” to us. Whatever the details may have been, Bradford was fired, and the job was offered to none other than Benjamin “Whose Printing Business Ain’t a Profitable One Now?” Franklin. The issue of the Gazette that appeared just after this promotion contained twice as many ads as the one preceding it. By the time Franklin left the Gazette in 1748, subscriptions had jumped from ninety to fifteen hundred, and paid out eight hundred pounds per year. Advertising accounted for an additional two hundred pounds a year (roughly the cost of opening a whole new print shop annually). Together, these constituted more than 50 percent of Franklin’s income at his Philadelphia shop.

  Next, the problem of paper. Ordering paper from England meant waiting out the enormous shipping times, and it carried the risk of incurring water damage. Purchasing from a local dealer would have been so much easier. The problem was, there weren’t many paper mills in the colonies. In Philadelphia there was only one, established in 1690 through a joint venture between the Rittenhouse family and William Bradford, father of Andrew. The Bradfords used their influence over the Rittenhouses to cut off paper to anyone they felt posed an economic threat to their organization. Back in the mid-1720s, Andrew Bradford forced Nicholas Rittenhouse and his son-in-law John Gorgas to stop supplying Keimer with local paper when he was attempting to print The History of the Quakers. They targeted Franklin in a similar manner, “forcing Franklin to use imported paper in everything he printed.” Considering the hazards of shipping, on top of poor exchange rates for colonists, imported paper could cut heavily into an American printer’s profits.

  In 1733, Franklin was so desperate for paper that he had to go halfsies with his Bradfordian nemesis on a psalmbook because, without Rittenhouse’s support, he wouldn’t have had enough paper to finish the printing. This appears to have been the final straw for Franklin. A few months later, he began to setup a new local paper mill.