Printer's Error

by Rebecca Romney

  By the end of his career, Franklin claimed to have established eighteen paper mills in the colonies. Between 1739 and 1747, his ledgers recorded sales of eighty-three tons of rags sent to seven papermakers throughout Philadelphia, earning him in excess of a thousand pounds sterling silver. Franklin became the Godfather of American paper. In keeping with this theme, a wise man once said, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” But Franklin’s nemesis was not a wise man. By attempting to choke out his competitors through a backroom paper drought, Andrew Bradford inadvertently created a monster, a papermaking Corleone monster with English silver running through its veins. It’s just business, Mr. Bradford, nothing personal. Well, you did break up my engagement and try to push my press out of Philadelphia, so, yeah, I guess it’s a little personal.

  Government printing, postal distribution, and paper—these three haymakers certainly put Bradford off his feet, but it was the smaller body blows that really made Franklin the most successful printer in the colonies. The Gazette was going strong, and Poor Richard’s Almanack was introduced in 1732, selling thousands of copies a year for the next twenty-five years. Almanacs were immensely popular; print historian James Raven notes that in eighteenth-century England “more copies of almanacs were sold than all other types of publication put together.” These pamphlets contained articles of varying utility, from calendars, to weather forecasts, catalogues of British kings, dates of fairs, descriptions of road systems, nuggets of wisdom to be cross-stitched onto throw pillows, financial interest tables, and chronologies of “things remarkable.” They were also the source for most of your favorite Franklin quotes, such as “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards,” “He that drinks fast, pays slow,” and “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

  Franklin didn’t stop there. He knew how to “[contrive] a copper-plate press,” which helped him to win contracts for printing currency in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware. He made his own ink. He could “cast his own [metal] type when sorts were lacking, something no one else in America could do.” He eventually became the largest wholesale and retail bookseller in the colonies, dominating the transatlantic book trade. In an environment of chronic scarcity, the ability to create, control, and divert the American printing supply line was practically the equivalent of being able to print money, which he was also legally allowed to do.

  But in addition to the high-minded newspapers, government speeches, and English literature, Franklin’s second-largest source of income was from small incidental contracts, or job printing. These were your blank forms, your handbills, bills of sales, apprentice indentures, powers of attorney, bail bonds; even labels for medicine bottles and “wrapping papers for soap and tobacco.” In the history of print, job printing is the intelligent but ugly older sister. Considering its value, job printing deserves a lot more attention than it gets, but this kind of printing hasn’t historically been as sexy to scholars and collectors as books.

  Jobbing work comes in an enormous variety, from orders for four thousand salad oil advertisements to the first printing of the Declaration of Independence. They are usually printed cheaply and have a devastating rate of survival, which is all the more depressing when you consider what we can potentially learn from them. Many of these printed materials would have seemed utterly mundane to an eighteenth-century audience, but today they serve as valuable windows into the past, like printed receipts, lottery tickets, advertisements, and labels.

  Yet, herein lies the problem. Most of this work seems so unremarkable or so fleeting that it doesn’t always register on our radar as important. The Dunlap broadside, the first printed copy of the Declaration of Independence, is one of those extravagant exceptions that proves the rule. In 1989 the twenty-fifth known surviving copy of the Declaration, printed by John Dunlap on the night of July 4, 1776, was discovered within the frame of an old painting bought for four dollars at a flea market. The document sold at Sotheby’s for $2.42 million in 1991; then it sold for $8.14 million when put up for auction again in 2000. On the other hand, most ephemera have typically sold for zero dollars at auction because such humble sheets aren’t deemed important enough to buyers. There are some exceptions, such as the nineteenth-century advertisement for carpet that artist William Blake was commissioned to illustrate. (This is a real thing: one scholar calls it “surely the most delightful carpet advertisement ever created.”) But would a collector normally be interested in an otherwise random advertisement for carpet from 1820? No, which is our loss. But as historians and collectors attach growing importance to this seemingly modest detritus of print, we’re seeing prices change and dealers handle job printing more. This is an important and exciting trend.

  During the early years of the printing press, job printing sustained many printers. Given the time, labor, and materials required for these smaller printing jobs, they tended to be proportionally more profitable than projects we assume to be a printer’s bread and butter. This makes sense when you consider the financial risks of a larger project such as a book. With capital tied into long-term investments, printers “needed the relief of regular, quick turnover, relatively simple jobbing.” If Franklin sniffed out a path to make money, he followed it. These “little jobs” meant ready cash, and they were so important to Franklin’s business that he literally stopped the presses whenever an order came in.

  Add to this the hefty revenue from paper and the general supplies sold out of his print shop (which could include not only stationery, but items such as medicine, chocolate, whalebone, pickled sturgeon, and Spanish snuff), and you can see that Franklin had cornered the market in almost every aspect of profitable Colonial printing. Soon Franklin was “indisputably the dominant printer in Philadelphia and the wealthiest in all the colonies.”

  In 1742, after duking it out with Franklin for almost fifteen years, Andrew Bradford’s health took a turn for the worse. He died on November 24, at the age of fifty-six, leaving the remaining shards of his Philadelphia printing empire to be divvied up among his living heirs.

  Franklin remained in the business for only another six years before he’d made enough money to retire extravagantly. They say the first million dollars is the hardest to make, and that saying is not a new one. Well, the “million” part is. “My business was now continually augmenting,” Franklin wrote, “and my circumstances growing daily easier, my newspaper having become very profitable . . . I experienced too the truth of the observation ‘that after getting the first hundred pound, it is more easy to get the second.’”

  With that kind of disposable income, Franklin invested in other Colonial printers. “In 1733[,] I sent one of my journeymen to Charleston, South Carolina . . . I furnished him with a press and letters, on an agreement of partnership, by which I was to receive one-third of the profits of the business, paying one-third of the expense.”

  With similar partners and associates in more than two dozen locations, including New York, New Haven, Lancaster, Newport, Annapolis, Williamsburg, Boston, and the Caribbean island of Antigua, Franklin created an actual news network that stretched out over the American colonies and beyond. The result was, as Green and Stallybrass have explained, “these partners and protégés all imitated Franklin’s business strategies, creating a sophisticated intercolonial communications network, one of the most dynamic in the world, with Franklin at the center.”

  Franklin’s network was the eighteenth-century version of an information superhighway. It was ideally placed to collect and spread this information. Unlike London printers, who had the economic luxury of focusing only on printed products if they chose, Colonial scarcity required printers to diversify. This meant they were often involved in multiple businesses in the community, such as a coffeehouse and general store, or Franklin’s post office. (Thus the trend of bookstores with cafés, bemoaned by some bibliophiles today, is actually part of a long-standing tradition!) Among all these social and business connections, the local print shop would often become
a gathering place for that community. Their newspapers became, as one contemporary described it, “vehicles of discussion, in which the principles of government, the interests of nations, the spirit and tendency of public measures, and the public and private characters of individuals, are all arraigned, tried, and decided.”

  Rather than a collection of loose colonies, these networks facilitated the idea that Americans were becoming a unified group. Now when something happened in New York, it carried weight in South Carolina. When Bostonians protested unfair taxation by dumping tea into their harbor, and England responded by sending in the army, Americans knew that “what was happening in Massachusetts could happen to them.” Printing networks created a feeling that the colonies were all in this together. They were the crackling nervous system of the emerging body politic.

  In the May 9, 1754, edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin included a woodcut illustration of a snake segmented into eight parts. Below was printed the phrase “Join, or Die.” This iconic image originally had nothing to do with American Independence. It was a call for unity during the French and Indian War to aid England in its struggle against France. Eleven years later, that same cartoon would be repurposed by William Goddard in the Constitutional Courant “as a symbol of colonial opposition to the Stamp Act in particular and British authority in general.” Goddard was one of the printers in Franklin’s network, and this network was ready to take action to defend itself when threatened.

  The 1765 Stamp Act, a tax on paper goods in the American colonies to help pay for the French and Indian War, features prominently in the history of utterly stupid economic decisions. In theory, it seemed practical. A stamp act had been enforced in England in 1712, and no one revolted. Yet, when it was America’s turn, Parliament hadn’t considered the problem of chronic scarcity of materials. Many in the trade were barely scraping by as it was. Paper was the most expensive aspect of printing, and could annually exceed the cost of opening up a print shop. Now the British had slapped a tax on the single biggest monetary risk of printers’ precarious livelihood, and they were pissed off. By virtue of their career choice, they had a ready-made platform for venting their righteous indignation.

  Newspapers across the colonies united in what can arguably be called the first American propaganda campaign. How did principles such as taxation without representation become so villainized in the public consciousness? Follow the money. In the middle of those debates were the printers, protesting the price-gouging Stamp Act, equating it to the ramblings of tyrannical English overlords.

  In the pre-Revolutionary furor that swept the colonies, the number of publications doubled. Printers who stayed true to England to win conservative government contracts faced potential disaster when angry mobs came banging on their doors. In one memorable case, a mob stole large quantities of metal type from James Rivington’s Loyalist paper, the New-York Gazetteer, and melted it down to form bullets. Rivington fled New York soon after his house was torched by another mob, and then returned in 1777 to run the Tory Royal Gazette, while acting (or continuing to act?) as an agent for George Washington’s Culper Spy Ring.

  Franklin himself was initially slow to endorse American independence over reconciliation with the British Empire. Living in London at the time as the unofficial ambassador of the American colonies, he was somewhat out of touch with the changing resolve of his countrymen. Notwithstanding, the appropriated “Join, or Die” woodcut came to be viewed in England as one of the most radical publications from America, and “Europeans often credited [Franklin] with starting the American Revolution.” It was as if Franklin’s massive printing network went all Skynet on the eighteenth century and became self-aware. Where Franklin preached patience and rapprochement, newspapers such as the Courant cried, Viva la revolución! Printing had stepped past its master, marching the American colonies toward liberty and independence.

  Franklin did eventually come around. In an essay reprinted in Goddard’s newspaper, he sided with the anger of his fellow Americans over issues such as taxation without representation and the unjust reparations for damage done to the English economy. He publicly compared the situation—and this is real—to a Frenchman who holds a fireplace poker over a flame and then asks if he can insert said poker into the asshole of an Englishman. When the Englishman refuses, the Frenchman becomes irate and demands “payment for the trouble and expense of heating the iron.” According to Franklin, that’s what England was doing: attempting to anally penetrate Americans against their will (there is a word for that), and when the Americans resisted, England demanded reimbursement for the cost of the attempted assault.

  Hit first in the money bags, printers followed their ideals and stepped beyond their supposed role as “mere mechanics” to fan the flames of revolution. Franklin’s printing network was one crucial stage upon which the struggle for American independence played out. From this dais, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” became more than words—they became a foundation. What was once a question of cash soon became a quest for rights self-evident.

  7

  ANGELIC VISIONS AND DEADLY TERRORS

  IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND, AN ENGRAVER was “the photographer of his day,” hired to create reproducible prints for the public. As these prints became more fashionable, an entire industry sprang up around translating an artist’s canvas into metal and ink. This kind of work required tremendous skill. One English engraver, for example, gained notoriety for how realistically he could reproduce cat hair. On the edges of this industry stood William Blake: poet, artist, and professional etcher. He didn’t want his creations outsourced to another engraver, no matter how faithfully the man might carve cat hair into metal plates. Blake wanted to paint, engrave, and print that cat hair—or, more specifically, that Tyger hair—himself.

  Amid the dark fumes and hissing acid, surrounded with turpentine, aqua fortis, wax, charcoal, and copper, William Blake must have resembled a mad scientist when he achieved his breakthrough. Sometime in early 1787, after years of experimenting with nitric acid to burn images into copper plates, Blake discovered a novel way to illustrate his poems. He and his younger brother Robert had been trying to crack the riddle of “relief etching,” a graphic technique that would allow illustrated books to be printed quicker and more cheaply than traditional methods. For years, Blake had searched for the answer, feeling he “must create a [new] system or be enslaved by another man’s.”

  The “system” most likely used if a publisher wanted to add a high-quality illustration in 1787 was intaglio printing. This meant hiring a professional engraver to cut the desired image into a copper plate using metal tools, or to etch the design chemically, using a complex process requiring wax, needles, and nitric acid. Both these methods were time-consuming and expensive, and required an entirely different printing press from the rest of the book. Like supermodels, it took a small army of talented professionals to make them look that good.

  But Blake wanted total control, from conception through to the printing. No other compositors, inkers and pullers, editors, or publishers—just one simple line running from the artist to his work to the public at large.

  After years of dissatisfaction, William and Robert Blake sat up one night talking in their London home and stumbled upon an elegantly simple solution. Instead of covering a copper plate in wax, using a needle to scratch out the intended design and “biting” the lines with acid, what if they painted directly onto the copper plate itself and then bathed the plate in acid to burn away the surrounding copper? This would create a plate whose design stood up off the surface of the metal in relief, like a modern-day rubber stamp. This method could potentially become a much faster and less expensive way to print any illustration an artist could imagine.

  Relief printing was in fact an older form of graphic illustration—older than the printing press itself. In the early 1400s, woodcuts were used to illustrate everything from saintly icons (for praying) to sinful cards (for playing). Yet this type of printi
ng required cutting away the wooden sides of the line you wanted to print, and thus produced a somewhat unrefined look. One scholar compares woodcuts to homemade gin: “cheap, crude, and effective.”

  Blake’s proposed relief etching would dramatically reduce the cost of creating illustrations while still allowing the artist complete control over the brushstrokes. “Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works,” Blake lamented. All he and Robert needed to do was find a viscous ink that would dry upon application, adhere strongly to metal, and resist all forms of nitric acid. No problem! Well, as long as you ignore the fact that such an ink did not exist, no problem!

  Despite being William’s junior in the world of print, Robert Blake actually came to his older brother’s rescue and taught him a secret recipe for creating just such an ink. It consisted of precise ratios of turpentine, asphaltum (black petroleum), and linseed oil. High-fives all around! The next morning, William’s wife ran out to the market with their last shillings and purchased the required ingredients—and it worked, just as Robert said it would.

  If the story of Blake’s relief etching ended there, it might be remembered as a mildly interesting anecdote about two brothers who invented something cool in the history of print. But there is more information you should know: Robert Blake was dead at the time. He had died earlier in the year, sometime before February 11, 1787.

  Absent that key detail—that Robert’s body was cold and buried in a London cemetery when he taught his brother the secret of relief etching—changes the nature of the story a bit. As it should. William Blake was an incredible poet, artist, and printer, but he was also considered mad, or at least delusional, by those who knew him best. Chatting the night away with the disembodied spirits of Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wallace, the biblical prophet Isaiah—this was all totally and monotonously normal for Blake. After all, why create new printing techniques by trial and error when you can simply learn about them from dead people?