Printers

Daniel Berkeley Updike: Printer as Rubricator

rumble101 — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:18:02 +0000

“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

rumble101 — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:04:37 +0000

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

rumble101 — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 09:55:02 +0000

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

rumble101 — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 09:33:34 +0000

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

rumble101 — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:53:31 +0000

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

rumble101 — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:38:48 +0000

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

rumble101 — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 20:18:42 +0000

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.

Aristocrats: Some Fading, Some Rising

rumble101 — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 20:00:08 +0000

Berkeley Updike grew up hothouse style. Updikes, once Old Money, were now merely Old. Social standing remained, however, and on the East Side of Providence it was enough. Updike might lack money, but he moved easily among people who had a great deal of it. Nonetheless, he needed work, as those of his set rarely did, and nothing in his life suggested a trade. Updike felt no calling of any kind. Afflicted with part-time work at Houghton Mifflin’s Riverside Press, he simply drifted into printing.[1]

Printers in the second half of the nineteenth century were wage workers who learned their trade from an early age through the ancient on-the-job apprenticeship system. Journeymen printers earned piecework pay and in an urbanizing culture they inhabited a world of shop-floors, union halls, and saloons. You could find all three on Providence’s Westminster Street (right). Largely because of their literacy—a job requirement—printers considered themselves a labor “aristocracy.”[2]

Berkeley Updike, by contrast, really was an aristocrat. He was fully grown, not ten or twelve, when he first walked onto a shopfloor. He had lived his life apart from city streets. Downcity Providence journeymen knew the Union Hall meeting rooms of Typographical Local No. 33 and, after that, Doyle’s Saloon at Broad and Dorrance. Updike, on the other hand, moved among the Providence Athenaeum, St. John’s Episcopal, and Harold Brown’s house.

1. There is no comprehensive biography of Updike. George Parker Winship’s Daniel Berkeley Updike and the Merrymount Press is splendid, but it’s sixty years old. Updike didn’t leave a manuscript archive. So, nobody writes about him. Let that be a lesson to you.
2. See Walker Rumble, The Swifts: Printers in the Age of Typesetting Races (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 1-20.

This is essay number 8 of “Updike,” a printing history series.

J. A. and R. A. Reid, Printers

rumble101 — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:45:05 +0000

Berkeley Updike bequeathed a meager archive. Strange, for a guy whose career played out in paper. Lacking correspondence, it might occur to us to visit Updike’s Providence, in order to see how printing usually got done. Isn’t it likely that Updike developed some kind of printing expectation, good or bad, around local shops? Nope.

There was a thriving printing culture in late-nineteenth-century Providence, but even its finest flower seems beyond Updike’s notice. Providence in the 1880s was far from a provincial backwater. Well before most newspapers, the Providence Journal set its type on a dozen of Ottmar Mergenthaler’s new Linotype slugcasters. Boston might lead New England’s book publishers, but Providence printers weren’t bad. It made little difference to Updike, and his inattention included the firm of J. A. and R. A. Reid, the city’s best.

J. A. and R. A. Reid launched their business in 1874, handling the range of standard, ephemeral job work. Reid’s featured “the best and latest faces of job type, and a great variety of letter for fine book work, catalogues, newspapers, small poster work, railroad time tables, and the diversified orders which come to a well-equipped printing office in these days.”[1] Then, after 1884, the Reids expanded a publishing program. Beginning with a book titled Picturesque Washington (1888) the firm produced “nearly 100 independent publications.”[2] For the next decade, Reid’s was Rhode Island’s most significant book printer/publisher. Alongside the richly illustrated Picturesque Washington (left), the Reids developed a literature of the recent Civil War. It featured biographies of generals Philip H. Sheridan (top, left) and Ambrose E. Burnside as well as Samuel S. Cox’s Union-Disunion-Reunion, an account of federal reconstruction (above, right).

1. Committee, Printers and Printing in Providence, 1762-1907 (Providence: Typographical Union No. 33, 1907), 196.
2. Printers and Printing in Providence, 195.

This is essay number 9 of “Updike,” a printing history series.

Union Printing in Providence

rumble101 — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:05:45 +0000

Stylistically, the books of J.A. and R.A. Reid define late-nineteenth-century industrial printing. Updike and other print reformers condemned such printing, but Reid’s output, the best in Providence, was conventionally competent. The Reid brothers were, of course, master printers, which is to say they were owner-operators within a trade they had joined as apprentices. James Reid (below) began at the Bristol Phoenix and at the Providence firm of A. Crawford Greene. Robert Reid (left) apprenticed at Hammond, Angell & Company, in Providence. In time and as usual, both young men became union-affiliated journeymen. Each was initiated into Providence’s Local No. 33 of the International Typographical Union after standard traveling—“tramping”—odysseys. Before starting their business, James composed type in Hartford and New York City; Robert spent a decade in Chicago and Philadelphia.[1] Both Reid brothers, in other words, were journeymen before they were proprietors. Moreover, they were union men, at least originally. It was a timeless printing culture, fully represented on and around Westminster Street in Providence. As distant from Berkeley Updike as the Anarkali Bazaar.

1. Committee, Printers and Printing in Providence, 1762-1907 (Providence: Typographical Union No. 33, 1907), 195.

This is essay number 10 of “Updike,” a printing history series.