Daniel Berkeley Updike: Printer as Rubricator

“Updike’s aptitudes were of a rarer sort, not so easy to recognize without careful consideration. Throughout his career, his outstanding achievement was the uninterrupted production of printed matter that met the desires as well as the requirements of ordinary readers more completely as well as more satisfactorily than anyone else had ever done.”[1]

“I am often asked,” Updike said, “if it is not uninteresting to undertake the printing of catalogues and similar material.” Updike said that it wasn’t, that “such work is often both interesting and difficult.” Most people, however, think a celebrated novel is a rewarding printing project, and that what is boring to read is tedious to print. But prosaic copy—inventory lists, committee dockets—may offer a dozen typographical or text alignment troubles. “The problem is what interests all but beginners,” Updike said.[2]

1. George Parker Winship, Daniel Berkeley Updike and the Merrymount Press (Rochester, NY: The Printing House of Leo Hart, 1947), 14.
2. Daniel Berkeley Updike, “Notes of the Press and Its Work,” in Updike: American Printer and His Merrymount Press (New York: American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1947), 34.

 This is essay number 1 of “Updike,” a printing history series.

Updike: Graphic Design

By 1890, printing was an industry. Theodore L. De Vinne & Co., in New York, resembled a village printshop the way Carnegie Steel was its village smithy. Also, there were new kinds of printers. Daniel Berkeley Updike, for example, was first a “graphic designer” and only then a printer. Type composition, of course, dated to Gutenberg, and lately some typesetting specialists were “layout men.” In 1893, Updike turned a typographical studio into Merrymount Press, and an ad designer became a printer. It was a new career path. Updike knew nothing of press operation and little about setting type. He thought he knew how a book should look. 

 This is essay number 2 of “Updike,” a printing history series.

Updike: Disgust, Design, and Sacrament

 

Berkeley Updike thought most printing was tasteless and unintelligent. Others did, too. Updike, though, seemed not merely critical, but disgusted. I think it’s because his ideas came from his religious faith. His first printed piece was On the Dedications of American Churches. Subsequently he produced two books of major significance, both of them for the Episcopal church. The 1896 Altar Book (left) established his reputation, and in 1928 the standard Book of Common Prayer became his masterwork. The books were credentials, sanctuary and shopfloor. They also frame Updike’s youth and prime. Both are triumphs of craft, aesthetically pleasing. As important, they are correctly printed, done right. That’s because Updike was first and foremost a liturgical printer. In mastering a theology of print, he also took charge of correct worship. So, should his work please God, it necessarily must suit the customer. Not the other way around. Merrymount’s standard Book of Common Prayer (1928, right), was the best thing Updike ever did.

 This is essay number 3 of “Updike,” a printing history series.

On the Dedications of American Churches

Berkeley Updike grew up with Harold Brown, spending a great deal of time in his friend’s commodious house on Providence’s Benefit Street. Harold’s father was John Carter Brown, a wealthy bibliophile who would found an important library on an elite campus, both carrying the name. The Brown home was a haven. George Parker Winship called the boys “inseparable.” They shared a “sensitive unfitness for the vigorous comradeship of school-fellows and the playing fields.”[1] Also, young Updike’s ears stuck straight out (which, in time, required surgery).[2] So, church and library, furtive retreats, replaced playing fields. As kids collect baseball cards, the boys listed saints, and they coupled saintly names with Episcopal churches. In time, they accounted for all of them, which impressed local Providence diocese officials. Church leaders subsidized a book.[3] It was On the Dedications of American Churches (right).

1. George Parker Winship, Daniel Berkeley Updike and the Merrymount Press (Rochester, NY: The Printing House of Leo Hart, 1947), 7.
2. From editorial commentary by Peter Beilenson in Updike: American Printer and His Merrymount Press (New York: The American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1947), 153.
3. Winship, Updike, 7.

This is essay number 4 of “Updike,” a printing history series.

High Church Rectitude

 

In 1892, Berkeley Updike and Harold Brown published On the Dedications of American Churches. It was printed at the Houghton, Mifflin publishing company’s Riverside Press. Updike had worked at Houghton for a dozen years, first as errand boy and later in advertising design. Dedications of Churches is a miscellany of textual information, annotation, charts, and tables. From boyhood and as young men, Updike and Brown were appalled by the liturgical lapses and tasteless errors within the Church. They pointed these out to a grateful communion and in the process displayed a High Church, Anglo-Catholic rectitude. Updike adhered to it all his life.[1]

1. Updike loved Latin discourse (see colophon, left). It’s a propensity he shared with Henry Adams, who at around this time was peppering the Education with quotations in the Greek and without translation.

 This is essay number 5 of “Updike,” a printing history series.

Doubtful Novelties

Berkeley Updike and Harold Brown thought Episcopalians named and dedicated their churches inappropriately and in a slipshod manner. Nomenclature became thoughtless and frivolous, and things got worse with spreading evangelical congregations. According to Updike and Brown, “the names of our Lord, and of the Apostles and Saints of the New Testament”—traditional sources—were “quite sufficient.”[1] Names such as “Heavenly Rest” or “House of Prayer” were as “meaningless” as “Precious Blood” or “Bread of Life.” These were “fanciful names.” If we demand variety, “let us have at least no doubtful novelties.” Coarseness, said the lads, “has spread among us, and has led to the invention of names which savour of the sentimental, and which are not at all in accordance with ancient precedent.”[2]

1. [Daniel Berkeley Updike and Harold Brown], On the Dedications of American Churches (Cambridge: A. S. Wheeler, 1891), 11.
2. Updike and Brown, Dedications of Churches, 12.

 This is essay number 6 of “Updike,” a printing history series.

Fading Gentry: Riverside Press, 1880-1892

In 1880, Berkeley Updike began working for Boston’s Houghton, Mifflin publishing company. He was twenty years old, mostly homeschooled, and aimless. He turned down a bank job. Sometimes he minded the store at the Providence Athenaeum (right), an ancient East Side subscription library, haven more than job. Eventually, a relative. pulling strings, got Updike a summer job at Houghton. Updike as an errand boy, and he hated it. Then Henry Houghton made him an advertising assistant, which bored him less. Gradually, ad layouts introduced Updike to type and design. By delivery horsecar, he ferried ad copy across the Charles River to Cambridge and guided those ads through Houghton’s Riverside Press.

Updike moonlighted at Riverside (left). He (and Harold Brown) had a manuscript project in hand—the compilation that became On the Dedications of American Churches. As in-house authors have done before and since, Updike used his daily printshop visits to shepherd his own book through Riverside. Houghton noticed the spent time, and he reassigned him more or less permanently to the shopfloor. This “apprenticeship”—maybe a year, mostly browsing—was all the printshop training Updike ever got.[1] Still, and remarkably, Updike emerged from Riverside with authority, not yet in printing but in the Episcopal liturgy.

 1. George Parker Winship, Daniel Berkeley Updike and the Merrymount Press (Rochester, NY: The Printing House of Leo Hart, 1947), 8.

 This is essay number 7 of “Updike,” a printing history series.