Personal Impressions
Subtitle: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth-Century America
Publisher: David R Godine
Published: December 1, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9781567922684
Subjects: Publishing; History; History - U.S.; History: American; United States - 19th Century; Nonfiction / General
Description: "Printing was the most widespread, and competitive business of nineteenth-century America. Every city had not only its big presses for printing catalogues, books, and newspapers, but also countless smaller presses for printing small jobs - the pamphlets, posters, handbills, stationery, cards, and tickets that gave the century so much of its color. Several of the names we now count as giants of the publishing industry: Scribner, Doubleday, George Houghton of Houghton Mifflin, and Donald Brace of Harcourt Brace started out not as publishers but as small-job printers, running their own shops and working humble, everyday, manually operated presses. This complete, definitive, and richly illustrated survey of small nineteenth-century printing presses, written by a former curator at the Smithsonian Institution, is the first history of these lovely, useful, and prodigiously varied machines. There was, in those days, a small printing press for every purpose. And there were innumerable boys and men eager to make their fortunes by investing in one, printing for a local clientele, and, with luck, building a printing or publishing empire. What the desktop computer is to today, these small iron workhorses were to the nineteenth century, and this book, which catalogues, describes, and illustrates over a hundred small printing presses and their makers, giving machine specifications as well as patent information, is a mine of previously undocumented printing history. No one seriously interested in the story of American printing can afford to be without it."--Publisher's description.