The Performance of the Wooden Printing Press

The Performance of the Wooden Printing PressAuthor(s): Michael PollakSource: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Apr., 1972), pp. 218-264Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4306163 .

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THE PERFORMANCE OF THE WOODEN PRINTING PRESS*

MICHAEL POLLAK

ABSTRACT

The speed at which printing was done during the wooden-press era (circa 1436-circa 1820) is of importance from both the economic and the bibliographic points of view. How many usable printed sheets could be turned out in a day depended upon the nature of the work, the level of quality being sought, the industry and craftsmanship of the pressmen, and certain other considerations, notably the design and construction of the press itself. This study contends that: (1) numerous advances were made in printing machinery and methods during the wooden-press period with concomitant increases in productivity, a position with which some historians of printing do not agree; (2) the technique of printing a complete folio side during one pass of a sheet of paper through the press, thus speeding up the printing process, was probably developed much earlier than is now generally believed; and (3) most of the claims concerning production rates which were published while wooden presses were still in common use should be regarded with a great deal of skepticism-because the individual writer's familiarity with everyday printing procedures may have been peripheral, his terminology was vague or obscure, or the conditions to which his statistics applied were not described. It is suggested that as much pertinent background material as possible be gathered about a specific printing plant and its methods of operation, and that certain guidelines furnished in this study be taken into account, before attempting to estimate the productivity of that plant.

From the time of Gutenberg until the introduction of power-driven presses nearly four centuries later, the transfer of ink from type to paper was accomplished through the medium of slow, backbreaking labor. When we consider that printing was carried on in dozens of countries during this period and that hundreds of thousands of men spent their lives in one aspect or another of the trade, it becomes difficult to understand why so little is known today about

the way the work was actually done. "And here," as the London printer Sam- uel Palmer wrote in the early 1730s, "the reader will find just cause of wonder, that this Art, which has been stiled the nurse and preserver of arts and sciences, should (if I may use the expression) be so forgetful of itself, as not to leave us the least sketch of its own history" [ 1, p. 3 ].

There is an element of truth in Pal- mer's observation, in the sense that our knowledge of early printing is decidedly limited, but he goes much too far when he insists that not even "the least sketch" of the history of the "Art" has been handed down to us. Printing has, in fact, left an assortment of records of its origins and early development. While this body of information is certainly not as complete as we could wish, there is obviously more of it than Palmer con- cedes. The problem really is that the

* I should like to extend my thanks to those members of the academic community and the printing industry who have so kindly shared their professional knowledge with me concerning several matters in this study, and especially to: Curt F. Biuhler, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Roger Levenson, University of California and Tamalpais Press, Berkeley, California; Max Plaut, Museum of Natural History, Chicago; Marvin Stone, Dallas Public Library, Dallas, Texas; Decherd Turner, Jr., Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas Texas; Leon Voet, Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp; and James M. Wells, Newberry Library, Chicago.

218



PERFORMANCE OF WOODEN PRINTING PRESS 219

available material is spotty in its cover- age of the subject and tends to be expressed in language which is imprecise or obscure. This is especially true insofar as the technology of printing is concerned, with the result that the occa- sional contemporary references to the physical characteristics and production capabilities of early printing equipment which do exist cannot always be evalu- ated properly.'

This study will examine one phase of early printing practice and technology, namely, the amount of production which could be realized with the wooden handpress in the normal course of operation of a print shop. The matter is of signi- ficance from the economic point of view in that the selling price of a book was directly related to the speed at which it could be produced. The statistics of press speeds also become important in certain bibliographical investigations, such as Winship's work on the Aldine Pliny of 1508 [2], Bald's analysis of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 [3], and Hinman's study of the printing of the First Folio of Shake- speare [4]. An insight into one facet of the relationship between printing speeds and bibliographical research may be derived from Hinman's remarks apropos the production of books in seventeenth- century England. "Few things were of greater importance to a Jacobean printer," Hinman explains, "than making efficient use of his resources-above all, of his presses. Presswork capacity,

because it was so strictly limited, was the real bottleneck of English printing at this time. Except for the King's Printer, none of the master printers of the Stationers' Company (some twenty- two in 1623) was allowed more than two presses, a number of them being permitted only one. Hence presses were kept busy, and we may be sure that Jaggard [the printer of the First Folio of Shakespeare] saw to it that his two presses were kept fully occupied during the printing of the Folio" [4, p. 40]. Since the business pressures exerted upon Jaggard and his fellow printers compelled them to turn out their work as rapidly as their limited press facili- ties would permit, the speeds at which the equipment could be run had great bearing upon the setting of deadlines, the degree of attention paid to the correction of textual and typographic errors, the amount of tolerance which could be extended to an author or editor for emendations of the text, the determination of the size of the edition, and kindred factors of concern to the bibliograplhical analyst. The practice, so common in Jaggard's time, of having two or more printers share in the printing of a book may be attributed, in part, to the limited output which could be expected from a single shop.

In order to arrive at any reasonable approximations of the speeds at which wooden-press printing was done, it will be necessary to discuss the press and its operation, to review some of the early documentation pertaining to printing speeds, and to consider the differing interpretations which have been placed upon much of this material. It will also be desirable to question the validity of the widely held theory which makes a sharp distinction between the so-called one-pull presses which inaugurated the

1 The problem of developing a technical nomen- clature in scholarly Latin appropriate to the re- quirements of the new craft was challenging, to say the least. "The struggles of the fifteenth century Latinist to express the technicalities of printing," comments Alfred W. Pollard sympathetically in his Essay on Colophons, "are always interesting." He employs the adjective "gaflant" to describe one such attempt.



220 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

era of printing and the two-pull presses which eventually superseded them.

A number of writers have concluded that press production speeds remained very much the same from the time the basic design of the wooden handpress was fixed until the machine was finally replaced by the metal press. Wroth states that "it is probably reasonable to regard this [a speed of 190-200 printed sides of paper per hour] as the normal rate of the wooden press throughout the entire period of its history" rS, p. 311, note]. De Vinne says that "the daily performance of the typographic hand press on plain work has been, almost from its earliest employment, about fifteen hundred impressions" [6, p. 26]. It is also not unusual to en- counter claims that there were virtually no advances in press design or construction during the long history of the wooden press. Miss Handover remarks, in connection with printing processes circa 1791, that "the hand press had scarcely changed since the days of Gut- enburg" [7, p, 146]; and Sears asserts that "it is worth noting that from Gutenberg's fifteenth-century press to those of Roulstone and Bradford [circa 1800] there was little change. That means that for nearly four hundred years nobody developed anything new in the art of printing" [8, p. 20].

These contentions cannot be valid, for if little of consequence had been learned about the design, construction, and operation of wooden handpresses during the four centuries in which they were used, it would follow that the last of these machines to be built, such as the Ramage presses of 1800 or there- abouts, were no better than the presses of the incunable period, and that they could not, consequently, be depended upon to produce more work than their

most remote predecessors. Even a superficial review of the old records relating to the history of printing will demonstrate that the technology of the craft did make considerable progress over the centuries.

THE WOODEN HANDPRESS

Of the major technical problems be- setting Gutenberg as he attempted to work out a practical system of printing with movable types, perhaps the least troublesome was the matter of design- ing and building the press itself. A device with which he was familar- probably one of the presses used in the binding of books or in the making of paper, wine, or textiles-provided the inspiration for the construction of Gutenberg's first printing machine; and this, in turn, served as the prototype from which all subsequent screw-type handpresses were derived.

It has become customary for bibli- ographers and specialists in the field of printing history to refer to the kind of machines used by Gutenberg and the first generation of printers as "one- pull" wooden presses, and to associate the term "two-pull" with the presses which by the middle of the incunable era were replacing the original machines.

The rationale for this difference in terminology is the belief that between three and five decades after Gutenberg had built his first press there occurred a well-defined change in the design of the apparatus which made it possible- for the first time-to print two full- sized folio pages (or their equivalent in quarto or octavo pages) on one side of a sheet of paper during each pass of the sheet through the press by pulling the lever twice, thus bringing the platen down two times, once for the




printing of each folio page. It is asserted that previously the lever could be pulled only once per pass of the sheet through the machine, forcing the platen to de- scend one time, so that a single folio page could be printed. This commonly held theory implies that there was a major reconstruction of the old press, resulting in the creation of a greatly advanced machine built around a mechanism of the windlass family, a device known to us as the rounce. The pressman was thereby enabled to move the type form sequentially from the inking position to two separate positions beneath the platen by turning a handle controlling the drum of the windlass. It is accepted today that because of the nature of its construction a "one-pull" press could not print the second folio page on one side of a sheet of paper until the form of type comprising the first page had been removed and replaced by the form for the other page. In fact, one of the techniques available for the dating of very early books in- volves the examination of the printed pages in the hope that it will be possible to ascertain whether they were produced on "one-pull" or "two-pull" presses.

It will be demonstrated later in this study that it was perfectly feasible, and quite simple, to print two folio pages in one pass of a sheet of paper through a "one-pull" press. The inference should not necessarily be drawn that "one-pull" presses were used exclusively or even extensively, in this manner but, rather, that the men who worked these primitive machines could scarcely have failed to realize how easily they could be adapted to the printing of two folio pages in each cycle of their operation. Consequently, "one-pull" presses may well have been printing two folio pages

per pass of the sheet through the press long before the coming of the "two- pull" machines.

Gutenberg probably built his first operational printing press circa 1436 [9, p. 1]. It was, undoubtedly, of the "one-pull" design. When, according to the generally accepted understanding of "one-pull" press procedures, it was desired to print two folio pages on one side of a sheet of paper (these pages to be designated here as I and 4) and two folio pages on the other side (2 and 3), the work was presumably done in this fashion: page 1 was printed in its allo- cated position on one side. After the completion of the press run for page 1, the paper was turned over, the form containing the type for page 1 was replaced by the form for page 2, and page 2 was printed backing up page 1. The form for page 2 was then with- drawn, and the page 3 form was put in its place. Page 3 was printed on the same side of the sheet as page 2, its form was replaced by that for page 4, the paper was turned over again, and page 4 was printed on the same side as page 1. The type in each form was dis- tributed immediately after being used and was then reset for inclusion in the next form. This procedure was followed if there was enough type available for the composition of less than two complete pages. Variations in the method were possible when the printer had sufficient type on hand to set two or more pages of the copy before going to press. If he owned enough type tq compose all the pages of a sheet before starting the press run, the sequence of the printing of the pages would not have mattered. In the printing of a book, the order of the printing of the pages would also have been affected by the number of pages in the partic-




ular gathering being processed and by the number of presses assigned to the project. In any case, the "one-pull" machine could, supposedly, print only one folio page for each pass through the press.

The procedure for printing with the "two-pull" wooden handpress was as follows: the sheet was placed on the tympan, the frisket was folded down over the tympan, and the tympan and frisket were then folded down as one unit over the inked form lying on the bed of the press. A handle was turned which actuated the roller of the windlass, winding around it a length of belt- ing which moved the form horizontally, so that one folio page lay directly beneath the platen. The lever was pulled, printing the first half of the side of the sheet, and was then returned to its original position. The form was cranked in still further, just enough to position the second half of the paper under the platen, and the lever was pulled a second time and again returned. The handle was now turned in the reverse direction, this time to bring the form back to the inking position.2 One side of the sheet was thus printed, there having been two pulls (= two descents of the platen) to complete the two folio pages on the one side. After the completion of the press run for the one side, the other side was processed in a like manner. Such a machine, as has been noted, is called a "two-pull" press. Ex-

cept for a limited number of models built during the last years of the eighteenth century, all wooden presses- whether "one-pull" or "two-pull"- could print only one full folio page for each pull of the lever. The comparatively sophisticated metal handpress of the nineteenth century was also a "one-pull" press, but it, of course, printed two folio pages for each pull of the lever.

On occasion books were printed on wooden presses with only one pull per side. The condition which had to be met to make this procedure possible was that the platen of the press be as large as (or larger than) the entire image area on one side of the sheet (including the white spaces between pages). It would not then have mattered whether the press was of the "one-pull" or the "two-pull" design. Biihler notes that the overall dimensions of the image areas in the two small-sized folio pages on each side of each sheet in Caxton's Fayttes of Armes (including the inter- vening blank spaces) were not as large as the dimensions of the platen of at least one of Caxton's presses, and suggests that the book "could easily have been printed with but one pull of the lever" per side [10, pp. 174-75]. It may be accepted, however, that nearly every book issued during the wooden press era was printed with two pulls of the lever per sheet side.

For several decades after Gutenberg started to print, the only presses in use, according to the generally held belief, were of the "one-pull" variety, until, that is, the development of the faster "two-pull" presses made the old machines obsolete. It is assumed that the individual printer did not necessarily discard his old presses immediately upon learning of the improvements built

2 It is possible that in the earlier versions of the "two-pull" press the form may have been pushed, or pulled, in one direction only and then cranked in the other direction. This would have been the case if only one belt were being used in the windlass mechanism. A drum equipped with two belts, one being wound around the drum as the other was unwinding, would make it possible to move the bed in either direction-that is, to its positions beneath the platen and back to the inking position.




into the new ones; more likely, the speed with which the changeover to "two-pull" presses was made in a given plant depended upon the financial position of its owner, his receptivity to new ideas, and his readiness to invest in new equipment. The transition throughout the industry from the "one-pull" to the "two-pull" press is therefore believed to have gone on for a number of years. The British Museum Catalogue notes that "it was only in the course of the seventies [the 1470s] that sufficient skill was attained to print two pages at a time [on a 'two-pull' press, that is]" [11, pt. 1, p. xii]. It also points out that Peter Schoeffer, that aggressive printer who had once been Gutenberg's right-hand man, and who was thor- oughly conversant with the technological characteristics of the earliest presses, "was printing only one small folio page at a time" in June 1471 [11, pt. 1, p. xiii]. By September 1474, however, Schoeffer was using a "two-pull" press [11, pt. 1, p. xiii]. Febvre and Martin think that the "two-pull" press was introduced around 1470 [12, pp. 90-91], but Winship suggests that it came into use about thirty years after the time Gutenberg was printing the 42-line Bible-which is to say, by the middle of the 1480s [13, p. 29].

It seems to me that there is a much higher degree of probability that what is called the "two-pull" wooden handpress did not spring into being out of the blue but was, instead, the outgrowth of a series of innovations in the construction and operation of the "one- pull" press. In its most primitive state the "one-pull" press was little more than a device for pressing a block of wood downward against another block, which was stationary. The printer locked a form of type into a frame (the

chase), inked the type, positioned a dampened sheet of paper on top of it, and placed all of this on the stationary block (the bed). He then screwed down the top. block (the platen), thus printing the page. Drooping from one side of the form was that half of the sheet, wet and limp, which was not receiving an impression during this pass through the press.

Before another impression could be made, the form had to be inked again. If the work was to be of reasonable quality, the inking (beating) had to be done carefully, for merely smearing the ink haphazardly over the form would have resulted in an unevenly inked image. The printer would have found it very difficult to do the inking with the form still in place on the stationary bed. He would have had to raise the platen at least one foot to be able to remove the sheet which had just been printed without slurring the image on it and to allow enough clearance for the introduction of the ink balls; but such a process would have been awkward at best. However, because of the limited reach of the human arm and the ob- structions presented by the upright components of the press (the cheeks), the lever could be pulled far enough to produce only about one-quarter of a revolution of the screw. To raise the platen one foot or more would have been impossible unless: (1) the head of the screw contained several holes drilled into it transversely to accommodate a removable lever (as in certain models of the capstan) so that the screw could be rotated by working the lever sequentially from one opening to the next; or (2) a wheel had been mounted on top of the screw, or a short spoke had been driven through it. In either case, the operation would have been very slow,




requiring several revolutions of the screw for each descent of the platen and the same number of revolutions for its return following each impression. Since the lever was permanently attached to the screw (except, possibly, in the very first versions of the printing press and, as we definitely know, in certain very large presses of the late eighteenth century [ 14, pp. 44-45] ), the platen could be moved one foot verti- cally only if the threads of the screw were very steeply inclined. The force with which the impression could then be made would thereby be reduced drastically. The pressman would have to pull the lever inward and. at the same time, very sharply downward to print a page, and push it outward and just as sharply upward to return the lever to the nonprint position. Actually, such a procedure could not have been carried through, for it would have required that the threads of the screw be cut to the scale of one complete spiral per four feet of shaft, a configuiration entirely incompatible with the screw's mechanical function. A more practical, and self-evident, alternative would have been to remove the chase completely from the bed immediately after each impression. The form could then have been inked much more conveniently, following which the chase could have been returned to its place on the bed.

It has been suggested that the chase was originally a shallow rectangular pan, but we have no tangible evidence to substantiate this possibility. In any case, as McKerrow points out, the problems arising from the use of a pan- type chase would have caused the device to be quickly banished from the press- room [15, pp. 53-54]. For nearly the entire incunable period, if not for all of it, the chase was apparently what it

has been ever since-a bottomless frame. Crammed with thousands of individual type characters, the form which was locked into the chase represented hours of labor on the part of the compositor and the corrector. To move this in and out of the press as many times as there were to be copies of the edition was to invite catastrophe in the form of a cascade of type all over the floor of the shop. Moreover, that half of the sheet which was not being printed during the particular run of the press, and which extended beyond one side of the chase, might be damaged by the moving of the chase to and from its allotted positions, while the printed portion of the same sheet would be subjected to the risk of slurring. It was therefore absolutely imperative to de- vise a safe and convenient method for shuttling the chase back and forth and for protecting the newly printed image, as well as the limp, dragging portion of the paper not being inked and printed during the particular run.

The solution to the problem was in- escapably obvious. To insure the secu- rity of the type in the form and to support the entire sheet, the printer had merely to slip a slab of wood (or a sheet of metal) beneath the chase and the dragging half of the sheet, and to fasten the chase to the slab. By manually sliding this slab and its load of type and paper to and from a set position beneath the platen he would, in effect. have created a crude, but practical, carriage.

The next step would be to fasten two chases of type, representing two conjugate folio pages, side by side on the slab of wood, or to lock the type for both pages in a larger chase. The slab could now be slid inward to a pre- determined position under the platen,




and the lever pulled, bringing down the platen. The slab could then be slid in still farther to a second preset position, and the lever could be pulled again, forcing the platen down a second time. In this manner two folio pages could be printed on a "one-pull" press, which supposedly, could not print more than a single page each time the sheet of paper was passed through it.

If the work were done carefully, and if the chases were anchored securely to the sliding slab, it would not be possible to determine by the inspection of conjugate pages, or of corresponding pages in different copies of an edition of a book, whether a "one-pull" or a "two- pull" press had been used in the printing, for the relative positions of the type blocks and the angles of the corresponding lines in all these pages would match properly. The fact is that what is called a "two-pull" press is essentially a "one-pull" press equipped with a sliding platform. Since the solution for nullifying the major disadvantage of the "one-pull" press was so glaringly obvious, so necessary, and so simple to put into effect, it may be that the "two- pull" press-not yet equipped with a windlass mechanism but with a manually operated sliding slab, possibly guided on some kind of rail arrangement-came into use very quickly after the introduction of the original Guten- berg machine. The subsequent addition of a device of the windlass class for moving the form to its various positions did not herald the invention of a revolu- tionary new press but was rather a valuable modification of a machine which was already a "two-pull" press. The bibliographer may thus be in error if he assumes that the printing of a given work was necessarily done on a "two-pull" press (and therefore at a

comparatively late date in the fifteenth century) merely because the type blocks and the lines of conjugate pages, or the lines of corresponding pages in different copies of an edition of an incunable work, are in the same relative positions. For that matter, even if the type blocks and the lines of such pages are not always in the same relative positions, this does not necessarily prove that a "one-pull" press was employed in the printing. It is perfectly possible to print books containing such discrep- ancies with a "two-pull" press, and this would be the case if, for example, a number of sheets had been printed with the lines of one page askew, the discrepancy had been corrected, and the printing had proceeded. A bibliographer examining two copies of an edition produced in this manner, one from each of the two groups, might thus be misled into concluding that the printing had been done on a "one-pull" press.

It would therefore appear that in the several decades during which it is thought to have dominated the printing field, the so-called one-pull press must have experienced quite a few improvements in design and construction. De Vinne contends that "the Bibles of Gutenberg were certainly printed on a press which quickly gave and quickly released its pressure, and which had the attachments of a movable bed, tympan and frisket, and contrivances for neatly inking the types and for keeping the paper in position" [6, p. 527]. However, Peddie disputes this claim by attributing the invention of the tympan and frisket to the Nuremberg crafts- man Danner, in 1550. He also credits Danner with the replacement of the wooden screw by the more efficient metal screw in the same year [16, p. 41. Peddie may be correct in saying that




Danner was responsible for putting the metal screw on the wooden handpress, but the tympan and frisket were introduced long before 1550. Clapham suggests that the tympan came into use about 1450 [17, p. 389], and by 1550 at the latest "it had developed into an inner and an outer frame, between which was a blanket or other soft material replacing the original loose backing" [ 17, p. 398] . The earliest existing repre- sentation of a printing press, in a Dance of Death printed at Lyons in 1499 [9, facing p. 1], shows the outline of two hinges attached to a frame. If this frame is not a tympan, what else can it be? Several other pre-1550 woodcuts also depict hinges attached to frames. In a drawing in Johann Stumpf's Swiss Chronicle, printed at Zurich by Chris- topher Froschouer in 1548, a pressman is seen placing a sheet of paper on a tympan to which a fully recognizable frisket is attached [9, p. 6].

Both versions of the wooden handpress, the "one-pull" and the "two- pull," printed only one folio page (= two quarto, or four octavo, pages) whenever the lever was pulled. As has been noted previously, every wooden handpress, with the exception of a few models built toward the end of the eighteenth century, was so constructed that its platen could print an image covering only about half the area of the largest sheet the particular machine was designed to accommodate. The reason for restricting the size of the platen was that it would have taken more brute force to print a full folio side with only one impression of a platen sufficiently enlarged for that purpose than could have been supplied by the pressman or withstood by the wooden machine. The dimensions of the platen of the common English press were

stated by Moxon in 1683/84 as nine by fourteen inches [18, p. 77].3 Clapham says that the platen of the early wooden press was "small, only large enough to print half the forme at once, since with the simple screw-mechan.ism even the strongest pressman could get only enough pressure for about 240 square inches" [17, p. 398]. The maximum sheet size was thus limited to an area large enough to accommodate some 480 square inches of print plus a suitable amount of white space for use as margins. However, a platen approaching 240 square inches in area was a rarity during the first century or two after Gutenberg, although in later years (judging from the statistics provided in Gaskell's census of wooden presses now in existence [19]) platens of this size must have been fairly common. As it was, even though the platen was generally limited to printing half of a full two-page folio image throughout the entire history of the wooden press, the

3 Information extracted from the British Mu- seum Catalogue [11, pt. 1, pp. 18-391 indicates that Peter Schoeffer had at least one press equipped with a platen larger than nine by fourteen inches. Four separate books, in each of which the type area on the pages was approximately 264 by 369 millimeters, or about 10.4 by 14.1 inches, came out of his plant: the first in June 1460 (during his partnership with Fust), the second in August 1472, the third in November 1473, and the fourth in January 1475. The British Museum Catalogue, which lists editions issued until the end of 1501, does not attribute any other books containing folio images as large as this to Schoeffer. The platen size of at least one of Schoeffer's presses was thus 10.4 by 14.1 inches, probably larger. If he started printing on "two-pull" equipment during 1474, it is possible that his large-platen machinery was of the "one-pull" design, and that the biggest platens on his "two-pull" presses in the next quarter-century were smaller than the biggest plantens on his "one- pull" machines. However, these data are so tenuous that no firm conclusion should be drawn about the comparative sizes of platens on "one-pull" presses and "two-pull" presses, even if we are inclined to accept the conventional "one-pull/two-pull" theory in toto.




operation of the machine still imposed a grueling physical burden upon the man who pulled the lever. Moxon had this in mind when he noted that "the Pressman are Jocosely call'd Horses: Because of the hard Labour they go through all day long" [18, p. 3291. How demanding the work was, and how much damage it did to the physique of the pressman were graphically described by Edwin Scrantom, on the basis of his personal experience, in a newspaper article published in 1871:

The old press [the "two-pull" wooden handpress] required great and continued muscular strength, so much so that many who worked at the press continually, as I have seen, have become deformed, the right shoulder becoming enlarged, and the wall of the chest being driven against the left shoulder depressed it, and so the body in walking became sidewise, the right arm and shoulder being in advance of the rest of the body. All pressmen, too, had a discrepancy in their feet, for the right foot, always placed on the "step" when the "pull" was made, that foot always became enlarged beyond the other, and the writer is a living example of this discrepancy. [20, p. 45]

The development of a movable bed which could be quickly shuttled back and forth-whether by direct manual action or by the use of a windlass mechanism-did, in any event, represent a breakthrough in press design and made it possible to build what we call the "two-pull" machine. This device was much faster than the "one-pull" press. Although the platen still had to come down once to print each folio page, the process was greatly accelerated by the action of the movable carriage because the inking of the form was more easily done and the sheets required only about half as much handling as had previously been necessary. Even if the machines had been identical in all other respects, the addition of a sliding slab to the "one-pull" press would in itself

have increased the output of the pressman to a marked degree.

The replacement of the wooden screw by a screw made of metal constituted still another major step forward in wooden press technology. Because the coefficient of friction of the metal screw was lower than that of the wooden screw, the more so since the metal screw could be lubricated effectively, the use of the metal screw lightened the pressman's burden considerably and, we may surmise, had a salutary effect upon his productivity. (Moxon stresses the importance "Of Oyling the Iron Work of the Press" with "Sallad Oyl" [ 18, p. 263 ].) Moreover, because the threads of the screw were subjected to great strain each time the lever was pulled by the pressman, they had to be fairly bulky when made of wood. Con- sequently, the pitch of wooden screw threads (that is, the interval between corresponding points on contiguous threads) was comparatively large. How- ever, once the screw was made of metal, it became feasible to reduce the dimensions of the threads, giving the press designer the option of cutting more turns of threads per unit length of shaft. The changeover from a coarse pitch to a somewhat finer pitch decreased the vertical distance which the screw and platen traveled each time the lever was actuated, but increased the force which could be applied to the platen, thus making it possible to build presses with bigger platens. Another radical innova- tion is worth noting: single threading was eliminated and, instead, a number of parallel threads were spiralled around the shaft, greatly improving the overall performance of the screw. The advantages of multi-threading proved to be so pronounced that by Moxon's time screws were generally




quadruple-threaded, although triple- threaded screws were sometimes found on smaller presses [ 18, p. 70]. This was not, however, the universal rule. The late eighteenth-century wooden press owned by the New York Times, a machine with a much larger platen than those normally uised in Moxon's day, has, as I have seen, a triple-threaded screw.

The advent of other refinements in the "two-pull" press and the development of additional trade skllls further enhanced the productivity of the machine, so that its output could well have been several times that of the device Gutenberg knew. Clapham concludes "that, for a given standard of work, all the improvements tending towards quicker press-work . . . had raised the productivity of the press by a factor of three, or at the most four" in the interval between the printing of the Gutenberg Bible and the latter part of the sixteenth century [17, p. 404].

It seems to me that production rates in the latter portion of the "two-pull" wooden handpress era were appreciably higher than in the early years of the machine's history. While many of the mechanical and procedural improvements made in the machine and in the tools and methods relating to para- press functions were perhaps indi- vidually of no great consequence in increasing the speed at which paper could be printed, their cumulative effect was quite substantial.

Most of the outstanding technical advances in the "two-pull" press were introduced in the first part of its long history. The metal screw, as we have noted, may not have taken the place of the wooden screw until 1550, but the tympan and frisket were apparently in use long before that time. The Blaeu

press, which arrived on the scene in Holland around 1620 and which Moxon considered superior to the English presses of the 1680s, had a somewhat more advanced hose arrangement than the earlier machines and a more de- pendable and convenient mechanism for cranking the form into position under the platen. It was not radically better than its predecessors, but it did represent enough of a step forward to arouse the enthusiastic admiration of Moxon. With the passage of time, more improvements were made. As various parts of the wooden press were replaced, or reinforced, by metal, the press became correspondingly sturdier and easier to operate. When the design and dimensions of a press were such as to make it advantageous, the straight line of the lever was bent into a curve, so that the pressman could swing the bar more readily. Changes were made in the diameter of the screw and in the pitch of the threads as needed. The Ramage press, in use during the closing years of the wooden-press era, incorporated a mechanism which forced the platen to return automatically to the nonprinting position after each impression. Previously, the return of the platen had been brought about rather haphazardly, in effect by rebound action.4 The sum total of these, and other, improvements tended to make life easier for the pressman. De Vinne notes that "all the old cuts of presses represent the pressman tugging at the

4 The Ramage press was, nevertheless, slower in operation than many other wooden presses. Adam Ramage enlarged the diameter of the screw and decreased the pitch of the threads of his machine, sacrificing speed in order to increase the pressure exerted by the platen on the form. His purpose in making these changes was to improve the quality of the reproduction of the thin-serifed types which had recently been developed, and to permit the use of larger platens.




bar with a force which seems out of all proportion to the size of the form" [6, p. 530]. Even the most advanced models of the wooden press, such as those of which Scrantom complained, called for severe physical exertion on the part of the pressman, but working with the earlier models had been still more demanding. The decline in the amount of backbreaking "tugging at the bar" necessary to print each sheet constituted in itself a significant factor in increasing press speeds.

A comparison of representations of sixteenth-century wooden presses with those of the eighteenth century will show that the earlier machines were markedly more ponderous and awkward than the later ones. The lighter and more compact equipment of the later years could be worked with much less difficulty. A small number of wooden handpresses still survive as museum pieces and bear mute witness to the fact that the later machines were less bulky, less primitive, and more convenient to operate than the earlier presses.

The first of the all-metal handpresses appeared somewhat before the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the course of several decades the wooden press became obsolete. The metal press, as it will be shown later in this study, was a far superior and much faster piece of equipment than the wooden press.

The equipment of the early printer did not facilitate the production of good work or rapid work. The machines were primitive, even when they were constructed properly; but the trouble was that many wooden presses were not constructed properly. They were made, as a rule, by local carpenters and cabi- netmakers, with the result that the

equipment often left much to be desired; and this naturally had an adverse effect upon the performance capabilities of the machines. In the latter part of the wooden-press era there were men who specialized in the making of wooden presses, but it is worth noting that in the middle of the eighteenth century John Baskerville preferred to build his own machinery because he felt that he could make better equipment than he could buy. However, Baskerville was a perfectionist. Those printers of his era who bought their machines from professional press builders usually got better equipment than they could have expected from ordinary carpenters. In 1683, some 200 years after the introduction of the "two- pull" wooden press, Moxon was writing in glowing terms that it was "a Ma- chine invented upon mature consideration of Mechanick Powers, deducted from Geometrick Principles" [18, p. 252]; yet, when it came to the presses themselves, Moxon protested that their construction was vastly inferior to their design. He even went so far as to con- demn the common English handpress as a "make-shift slovenly contrivance" [18, p. 45]. More than half a century later, on the other side of the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin was also having harsh thoughts about the quality of printing equipment. He did not approve of the workmanship which went into the machines or of the manner in which the ribs were made, and he was also distressed by the fact that his presses were "leaking power at the joints." In a letter to William Strahan, in 1753, Franklin's inventive genius manifested itself: he proposed a sensible improve- ment in the design of the ribs of the press which would have had a beneficial effect upon the smoothness of the travel




of the carriage to and from its position beneath the platen [9, p. 11]. In 1791 printers were still berating the makers of presses, Boulard finding it necessary at that time to caution the prospective buyer of a new wooden press to insist upon a rigid guarantee from the seller that the machine was sans defaut. Boulard's low opinion of the quality of the machines being put on the market even this late in the history of the wooden press is emphasized by his statement that he would personally prefer, prix pour prix, to invest his money in a used press which he knew to be func- tioning satisfactorily than to gamble on the performance of a brand-new machine [ 14, p. 431]. Nevertheless, both Franklin and Boulard could buy presses which were not only of better design but also of better construction than those which had been available to earlier printers.

The wooden-press printer, even if he was fortunate enough to own a properly Guilt machine, had other problems to face. His materials were not always of reasonable grade and were, at times, difficult to find. Inking was done by means of "ink balls," a set of these con- sisting of two spheres of leather, each of which had been stuffed with wool and mounted on a handle. Ink was distri- buted over the surface of the balls by twirling them against each other, and was then applied to the form between impressions-often not too evenly. The ink was frequently of poor quality, and the paper, even when of the finest content, was not of uniform thickness from sheet to sheet or, for that matter, within the sheet itself. In spite of all these handicaps, superior printing was often done when men were well versed in their craft and were willing to take extraordinary pains in its execution.

Although the maximum productivity

rate of the wooden handpress was se- verely limited by the nature of its design and construction, its actual output depended, in the final analysis, upon the efficiency and industry displayed by the team of two men who operated it. It depended also upon a number of other factors, such as the size of the sheet, the size of the form and the nature of the type layout within it, the presence or absence of woodcuts, and-most important of all-the level of quality which the pressmen were striving to attain. There were, moreover, certain essential operations over and above the inking and pulling which were the responsibility of the pressmen and which affected the speed of production: a masking sheet was cut and fitted into position; packing (blanketing)was prepared for the purpose of evening the pressure on the type and was then put within the inner tympan; the form was placed on the bed and made ready; perhaps a proof had to be pulled, neces- sitating time-consuming corrections; the hard-to-handle sheet of dampened paper was put on the tympan in such a way that the points jutting up from the tympan pierced the sheet and made the pinholes, without which it would not have been possible to acquire proper registration when the perfecting work was done later; and so forth. It should also be noted that when the other side of the sheet was eventually printed (perfected), the limp, soggy paper had to be positioned very carefully so that the points on the tympan would go through the pinholes which had been made during the first run of the sheet through the press. When the wet sheets came off the press they had to be hung up to dry and perhaps be smoothed out.5

5 If the sheets were to be perfected, they would probably be left damp after the printing of the first




All this took time in excess of the actual "running" time.

The working conditions which prevailed for several centuries in the printing industry were appalling when judged by modern standards. However normal they may have seemed to the people of the times, both employers and employees, they nevertheless had an adverse effect upon plant productivity. A society may accustom itself to very long working days, but a man's output cannot be maintained at its optimal level for too many hours on end. Nor can he work properly if he is too hot or too cold, or if the lighting and ventilation are in- adequate. Yet the early printer was routinely subjected to discomforts of this nature which inevitably impaired his working efficiency and cut back the performance of his equipment.

How many impressions were produced on the press depended, moreover, upon the proficiency of the master printer and the character of the work he was able to obtain for his shop. A competent manager saw to it that his craftsmen performed their assignments conscientiously, that the apprentices were kept busy at productive tasks, and that the work flowed in an orderly manner from one phase of the operation to the next. He arranged matters so that the typesetters were not held up by in- adequacies in the supply of characters with which to do the composition, and the pressmen did not have to stand by idly because their equipment was in need of repair or there were delays in the arrival of paper, ink, or locked-up forms of type. Presumably, the manager could not normally adjust the volume or the nature of incoming business to fit in ideally with the production capabilities

of his plant. The contrary was more likely to be true-the plant had to adapt itself time and again to the exigencies of the market. As a rule, a shop could produce a greater bulk of printed matter each day when it was geared to the making of books rather than the printing of ephemera. The printing of a book implies the creation and adoption of a certain technical routine, repeated page after page, thus speeding up the work. Commercial printing, on the other hand, calls for special attention to the individual job, a condition which tends to slow production rates.

By its very nature, printing is a pe- culiarly accident- and error-prone craft; and every printer, as Roger Levenson once observed, has those days of despair when it seems that his trade is little more than a series of potential disasters looking for a place to happen. The wooden-handpress printer had days when nothing seemed to go well, and the meager output of such days must not be ignored when we try to estimate average production rates. A press might come close to achieving its maximum theoretical productivity on a "good" day; on a "bad" day the output might be zero-literally.

What all this amounts to is that we cannot evaluate the performance of the wooden handpress or, in fact, any piece of production machinery as if it were operating in a vacuum. If we are to speak realistically of wooden handpress production rates, we must specify whether we are restricting ourselves to the mere counting of the number of pulls made each hour the press was actually printing, or whether we are also taking into account the variables which have been noted here-plus the multitude of on-press and off-press tasks which must be performed as essential adjuncts to the operation of the press

side and would be put back on the press for the run of the second side while still wet.




if anything at all is ever to get printed. What really matters is how many usable sheets could be expected in an average day of press operation over an extended period of time, under the conditions typically existing in a given shop.

Essentially, each cycle of the operation of the press consisted of inking the form, placing a sheet of paper on the machine, positioning the form under the platen, pulling the lever, returning it, moving the form to its second position, pulling the lever again, returning it, running the form back to the inking position, and removing the printed sheet from the press. The repetition of this cycle constituted what may be called the actual running time (ART) of the press. Those other on-press or para- press activities which were essential to the actual printing but were not physi- cally part of it-dampening the paper, changing the forms and making them ready, affixing points to the tympan, cutting masks for the frisket, adjusting blanketing, pulling proofs, making corrections, hanging up the printed sheets to dry, preparing ink balls, and so forth -made up the para-press time (PPT) of the process. The nonproductive time (NPT) included those intervals during which the machine lay idle because there was no work for it; it had broken down; the compositors could not keep up with the pressmen; ink or paper was not available; a key individual was absent; the workers were taking time out to drink beer, chat with each other, or engage (on company time) in one of the numerous fraternal activities of their chapel; or some other disruption of the normal flow of work was taking place. The NPT might even be counter-productive, if we include within its scope the time and materials expended to print sheets which had to be done over

again because they contained textual or other errors or were of poor quality. Consequently, any investigation of press speeds must start with a definition of terms: are we interested in ART alone, in ART + PPT, or in the total working time (TWT), which equals ART + PPT + NPT?

Of the three elements composing TWT, NPT is the one we are least able to calculate or estimate. From a practical standpoint, it is misleading to speak of the average daily production of a press as if there were no downtime or mistakes; but since we cannot ascertain the NPT in any particular plant at any given time, we are reduced merely to mentioning that the condition was present in every printing plant that ever existed, and that we should at least keep it in mind and make some allowance for it as we try to analyze the daily productivity of any printer, printing press, or printing establishment.

An analogy may be drawn here in connection with the operation of today's power-driven machines. An offset press being operated at the ART rate of 7,000 impressions per hour cannot possibly deliver 56,000 printed sides in an eight-hour day (TWT production). If the average run is, let us say, 1,000 copies, if one particular size and weight of paper is being used all day long, and if the work is to be of moderate quality, a good pressman may end his shift with a TWT output of 20,000-25,000 impressions. Although he is running his press at the rate of 7,000 impressions per hour, he will be doing well to show an effective hourly rate of 3,000. If he encounters any serious difficulties with any of the NPT factors mentioned previously-as he may-his output for the day will be affected accordingly.

If we were able to examine the rec-




ords of a plant operating a known number of presses, and could count the printed sides it produced in a given period, the shop's average daily output per press would, of course, be simple to compute. Such a daily TWT figure would not necessarily be representative of the output of other shops of the same period, in view of the adjustments which would have to be made to account for differences in efficiency, quality of presswork, sheet and form size, and so forth; but it would at least be a first step in our statistical quest.

While we do have some data of this nature concerning the activites of several wooden-press establishments, one or more essential facts are always lack- ing. In the printing of the Eliot Indian Bible during the years 1660-63, the vital unknown factor is that we cannot determine how much other work was produced in the plant during the period in which the Bible was being printed. In the case of the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, the unknown, or doubtful, elements include the edition size and the exact number of press days devoted to the printing of the work.

I doubt whether most printing shops of the wooden-press era were able to keep their machines in the ART stage for as much as two-thirds of the available TWT. The edition runs were usually small, so that there had to be many changes of forms, requiring substantial expenditures of time for proofing, correcting, and makeready. When we take this factor into account, together with the PPT and NPT items previously described, it seems reasonable to propose as a rule of thumb that presses engaged in ordinary commercial or book production were not actively turning out usable printed sheets for at least one-third of the working day.

This projected ART-to-TWT ratio is, admittedly, open to serious criticism (and so would any other ratio be which might be adopted). I estimate that the thousand or more small commercial and/or publishing establishments which I have visited in the course of my work during the past twenty-odd years do not, on the whole, keep their machines actively delivering usable printed sheets for as many as one-third of the press hours available to them. The dangers of trying to compare the operation of a modern printing plant equipped with power presses running at thousands of impressions an hour with that of a wooden press shop creaking out printed matter at a snail's pace are quite obvious. Nevertheless, it seems improbable that the early printer could ordinarily arrange his flow of work so efficiently as to keep his machines actively printing for as much as two-thirds of the day.

For the purposes of this study, the relationship ART = /3 TWT (exceed- ingly generous as it seems to be in its appraisal of ART) will serve as a rough guide for apportioning the available working time of the wooden press between the intervals during which it was actually running and the intervals during which it was not. This relationship may not be applicable to an individual press in a specific shop but will be considered valid for the total available production time of all the presses in that plant. Thus, if one press was reserved exclusively for proofing and correcting, the ART of this machine would be zero, while the ART of the other presses in the shop would be greater than 2/3

TWT. This paper will proceed from the premise that for the operation of an entire plant the ART was generally equal to two-thirds of the available TWT of all its machines. Consequently, when




the claim is made that the output of a certain plant was, let us say, 2,400 printed sides per press for a working day of twelve hours ( = 200 sides per hour per press), the average ART rate would have had to be half again as great, equivalent to 3,600 printed sides daily ( = 300 sides per hour per press). Conversely, if we are told that a press was printing, while actually running, at the rate of 300 sides per hour (ART), its average production rate over a twelve-hour day would have come to only 200 sides per hour per press ( 2,400 sides per day per press).

In his Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, dated 1683-84, the earliest substantial work written on the subject of printing technology, Joseph Moxon states that pressmen usually alternated their positions at "pulling" and "beating" at regular intervals. "Sometimes," he writes, "they agree to change every three Tokens, which is three Hours work, and sometimes every six Tokens; that they may both Pull and Beat a like number of Tokens in one day" [18, p. .292].6 Two men, apparently, will then print a token an hour, the token being, in Moxon's definition, ten quires [18, p. 344].

The American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking [21], published in 1894, defines a token as half a ream of paper printed on one side, and a ream as twenty quires of paper. In Moxon's

time a quire was made up of twenty- four, and a ream of 480, sheets. Moxon's token is thus 240 sheets printed on one side ( =480 folio pages on a "two-pull" press - 480 pulls). Some writers, however, consider a token to be 250 sheets printed on one side.

August Klapper, whose printing experience includes the operation of an old common English wooden handpress at the reconstructed eighteenth-century printing office in Colonial Williamsburg, agrees that "two experienced pressmen, working at full speed, could turn out a 'token' or 240 printed sheets (with two pulls and on one side only) per hour," but immediately explains that "such a speed could not long be maintained; the practical output was closer to 200 sheets per hour" [22, p. 21 1. These Moxon and Klapper estimates are ART figures, and are subject to adjustment, for they do not take into consideration any of the PPT and NPT factors without which press production statistics have little meaning. The Moxon ART rate of 240 sides an hour works out to an overall (TWT) rate of 160 sides per hour, while the Klapper ART speed of 200 an hour means an average output of only 133 for each hour of the working day. It should be emphasized that these estimates do not refer to presswork of high quality, or to multicolor work, but to ordinary commercial-grade wooden- handpress printing in one color.

THE DE LIGNAMINE STATEMENT, 1474

The earliest sources which mention the art of printing -the colophons to the Fust and Schoeffer Psalter of 1457 and the Catholicon of 1460, for example -do not concern themselves with such mundane matters as press production rates. The letter of Cardinal Bussi to Pope Paul II, printed by Sweynheim

f6 If the men alternated positions every six tokens and completed "a like number of Tokens" at each of these positions, all within the confines of one working day, their daily output was twelve tokens, implying an ART rate of eighteen tokens a day. It will be shown later in this study that in 1809 the pressmen in New York City were supposed to be producing about forty-eight tokens a week, or eight a day. Moxon's language should not be taken too literally here but should be interpreted as meaning that on a day-after-day basis the men split the work equally.




and Pannartz in 1468 in the Postilla super totam Bibliam of Nicholaus de Lyra, proudly declares that books could now be bought for one-fifth the prices they would have fetched as manuscripts in the preprinting era just a few years earlier. The sole morsel of information affecting this study which can be derived from the cardinal's statement is that the press was much faster than the pen-and this we already know.

A Hebrew writer expressed his awe at the prodigious amount of work pour- ing forth from the press by describing printing as "the art of writing with many pens," but with a poet's disdain of things statistical neglected to dis- close how many pens he had in mind and how many words could be inscribed with them in the course of a working day.

To the best of my knowledge, the first specific press speed figure now available refers to the year 1458 and was supplied by John Philip de Ligna- mine in a supplement which he wrote to the Chronica summorum pontificum im- peratorumque of Riccobaldus Ferrari- ensis, a work which de Ligamine published at Rome in 1474 [23, p. 527, item R-187]. Oswald reproduces the pertinent excerpt in the original Latin, and also reprints this old translation: "Jacobus, surnamed Gutenberg, a native of Strasbourg,7 and a certain other whose name was Fust, having attained skill in making impressions of letters upon parchment by means of metal types, became known at Mainz, a city of Germany, as the printers each of three hundred leaves [trecentas cartas] a day. John also, styled Mentelin, at Stras- bourg, a city of the same country, a

skillful worker in the same art, comes into notice as the printer of just as many leaves a day" [24, p. 11].

What is being recorded here is, of course, the total daily output (TWT production) and implies an ART rate of 450 cartas. The stage of development of the press at this date is conjectural. I should think that it had a sliding bed, which was probably manually propelled.

The overriding problem we face in interpreting de Lignamine's statement is that of determining exactly what he meant by trecentas cartas. In the translation quoted by Oswald, the word cartas is taken to mean leaves. To Mc- Murtrie, however, cartas are sheets, not leaves; and he provides this translation of part of the passage in question: "Jacob, surnamed Gutenberg, a native of Strasbourg, and another man whose name was Fust, being skilled in printing letters on parchment with metal types, are known each of them to be turning out 300 sheets a day at Mainz, a city of Germany" [25, pp. 161-62].

De Vinne furnishes still another translatioii: "Jacob Gutenberg of Stras- burg, and another called Fust, very skillful in the art of printing with characters of metal on parchment, each printed three hundred leaves daily at Mentz" [6, p. 432, note]. However, it will be shown later in this study that although De Vinne's translation speaks of leaves, De Vinne understands this to mean sheets.

In modern bibliographical terminology, a leaf of a book is a unit of two consecutive pages, a recto and a verso, which are back to back to each other. A sheet, on the other had, consists of two leaves if it is printed in folio ( = four pages), four leaves if it is printed in quarto (= eight pages), and so forth. In the case of the printing of ephemera

7 Gutenberg's first name was actually Johann, or a variant; and he was born at Mainz, not Stras- bourg.




-job printing work, that is-a sheet is merely an individual piece of paper, regardless of what, if anything, is printed on it, or where the printing is positioned. And, of course, it is not at all uncommon for the words sheet and leaf to be used interchangeably.

What, then, did de Lignamine mean by cartas-sheets or leaves? Was he speaking of the printing of books or ephemera? The question may also be asked: is trecentas cartas to be taken literally, or is it no more than a figure of speech used by de Lignamine to con- trast the enormous productivity of the printer with the skimpy output of the scribe?

The consensus seems to be that by cartas, whether we translate the word as sheets or leaves, de Lignamine meant individual pieces of paper. De Vinne [6, pp. 530-31], Peddie [16, p. 4], and the authorities at the British Museum [26, p. 13, item 10] agree with Mc- Murtrie that when de Lignamine wrote that Gutenberg could print trecentas cartas a day, he was speaking of 300 sheets of paper.

In any event, on the "one-pull" press de Lignamine was probably thinking about it was not possible, according to the presently held view, to print a full side ( = two folio pages) without changing forms, unless the entire image to be printed on that one side was no larger than the platen area, a condition not normally associated with the printing of books. As a rule, each sheet of paper had to go through the press four times in order to print four folio pages on it-if, that is, we accept the thesis that in 1458 it was not possible to print more than one folio page per pass of the sheet through the press.

We must conclude that no less than five different interpretations of the

meaning of de Lignamine's figure of trecentas cartas are possible. Any one of the following conditions could have passed through his mind as he wrote the words trecentas cartas: (1) Only one page is to be printed on a sheet: trecentas cartas 300 pages. (2) Two pages are to be printed on a sheet, one on each side of the sheet: trecentas cartas = 600 pages. (3) Two pages are to be printed on a sheet, both on the same side of the sheet: trecentas cartas - 600 pages. (4) Three pages are to

be printed on a sheet: trecentas cartas 900 pages.8 (5) Four pages are to be

printed on a sheet: trecentas cartas 1,200 pages. In each case, of course, the image to

be printed could be no larger than the platen itself. In each case, too, the number of pulls would be the same as the number of folio pages printed, whether the machine was a "one-pull" or a "two- pull" press.

All five of these conditions would be encountered routinely in the printing of books, with condition 5 being the most commonly occurring situation of all in book production.

Trecentas cartas, it thus appears, may represent 300, 600, 900, or 1,200 descents of the platen. Which are we to choose?

Peddie approaches the problem in this manner: "When it is said that the first press at Mainz produced 300 sheets per day of 14 hours, we suppose this meant 300 fully printed folios, or 600 pulls" [ 16, p. 4]. By "300 fully printed folios" Peddie must therefore mean 300

8 It is unlikely that de Lignamine could have been thinking of condition 4 when he wrote the figure trecantas cartas, although this condition does, of course, occur from time to time in book printing. It is included here only as a theoretical possibility.




sheets of paper having 600 pages printed in folio on one side (condition 3).

The de Lignamine statement was discussed by me briefly as part of a study of production costs in fifteenth- century printing [27, pp. 324-25]. At that time I interpreted the chronicler's statement to refer to the printing of only one side of the paper. It appeared to me then (and it still does) that de Lig- namine was trying to impress upon the reader the great advances which had been made by 1458 in the wonderful new craft of printing, so that he would not have failed to let the reader know that by 300 cartas a day he really meant 300 cartas printed on both sides, had that been what was actually being produced. The reader was well aware of the fact that broadsides, indulgences, and the like were being printed at the time, generally on one side only. I believe that de Lignamine would, therefore, have specified that he was referring to an even greater miracle-the printing of trecentas cartas on two sides of the sheet-if the conditions had warranted doing so. As I see it, the de Lignamine statement should be construed to indicate that the 300 sheets were being printed on one side only (condition 3), thus yielding 600 folio pages as the production for one day. However, it is not at all impossible that de Lignamine's enthusiasm was being aroused by a les- ser achievement, and that he was actually thinking in terms of only 300 folio pages a day (condition 1).

De Vinne believes that the figure of trecentas cartas is low: "That the performance of the press even on ordinary black work was slow, is indicated by the great number of presses used by the early printers, and is proved by the plain statement of Philip de Lignamine,

who said that the printers of Mentz printed three hundred sheets a day. This seems a small performance" [6, pp. 530-31]. As has been noted above, the translation provided by De Vinne of the de Lignamine passage uses the word leaves, but De Vinne understands this to mean sheets. That he considers the daily quota to have been equivalent to the printing of 300 sheets on two sides (= 1,200 folio pages = condition 5) may be deduced from a footnote in which he says: "It must also be remembered that on the early printing press two pressmen were required for the work-one to beat or to ink, and one to pull or to print. The ordinary task of the hand-pressman of New-York in 1840 was rated at 1500 impressions [per day], but these impressions were made by one man (working an inking machine) and one pull on forms of large size [on a metal handpress]. Consider- ing the surface printed, the performance of one hand-pressman in 1840 was about eight times more than that of one pressman in 1458" [6, p. 531, note].

The inclusion of the words more than in the last sentence of De Vinne's footnote creates a minor difficulty. Rigidly interpreted, the sentence means that the New York pressman produced nine times as much printed surface area per day as one predecessor in 1458; loosely interpreted, the sentence implies a production ratio of eight to one. These ratios must be reduced substantially if we wish to apply them to page production rather than surface area production. However, I cannot see how we can reasonably propose a ratio of less than about five to one when we realize that the pages coming out of the shops of both Gutenberg and Mentelin were themselves fairly large.

The 1,500 impressions which the




New York pressman of 1840 produced in a day on his metal press yielded 3,000 folio pages, since each impression on a metal press resulted in two folio pages. If two of Gutenberg's men, working on one press, had printed 300 sheets a day with two pages on each side, making a total of 1,200 pages, their output would have amounted to 600 folio pages per man, or one-fifth of the 3,000 pages of the New Yorker-even though, presumably, the New Yorker worked fewer hours during the day. De Vinne's estimate of the performance ratio, adjusted to this five-to-one page count, would thus attribute a condition 5 output to the 1,458 pressmen.

Ruppel does not accept any of these figures which have been derived here from the de Ligna.mine statement: "As can be proved by results of research, two pressmen in the time of Gutenberg could hardly print more than ten pages an hour; that means 120 pages for a twelve-hour working day" [28, p. 4]. The context from which this sentence is drawn indicates without question that the word pages is being used in its correct technical sense. Ruppel's estimate is thus a mere 10 percent of the condition. 5 figure of 1,200 pages a day which De Vinne reads into the de Lignamine passage (and considers "a small performance") and is also only 40 percent of the lowest possible figure, 300 pages a day (condition 1), which can be deduced from the testimonv advanced by de Lignamine. Fuhrmann suggests that Gutenberg . probably printed eight to ten pages an hour early in his career but was able to increase this to sixteen an hour as he and his men gained experience [29, p. 37].

The problem of interpreting de Lignamine's meaning may be compli-

cated still more by noting that he fails to tell us how many hours there were in the working day. (Peddie, it will be recalled, speaks of a working day of fourteen hours, while Ruppel prefers a figure of twelve hours.) Moreover, there is good reason to believe that de Lignamine's trecentas cartas refer to the output of the entire plant of either Gutenberg or Mentelin, not to the production of only one press. Ruppel says that Gutenberg's six presses printed a total of somewhat more than 700 folio pages a day [28, p. 4]. It could be argued that if the de Lignamine statement is taken to indicate a plant-wide output of 300 sheets a day printed in folio on one side (condition 3), then de Lignamine was actually figuring on 600 pages per day as the overall production of Guten- berg's shop, which is not too far off from the 700-page estimate provided by Ruppel. And, of course, the question must be asked: was de Lignamine as- signing a daily press rate of trecentas cartas to the creation of a masterpiece of printing like the Gutenberg Bible, which demanded extraordinary care in its production, or was he speaking of run-of-the-mill printing? Since Mente- lin's work was of a much lower level of quality than Gutenberg's, it is unlikely that the ART speed per press was the same in both shops-unless, of course, Gutenberg was able to operate his presses far more efficiently than Mentelin. However, Gutenberg's superior printing was undoubtedly achieved at some expense in press speed; and the press run of each page must have been preceded by that inordinate amount of PPT effort (especially in the make-ready of the form) which fine letter-press printing always requires. Accordingly, Gutenberg's daily TWT production




would surely have been smaller-on a per press basis-than Mentelin's. Gu- tenberg would therefore have had to own more presses than Mentelin to equal the latter's daily output. Tre- centas cartas, it follows, would thus refer to the overall production of each plant rather than to the output of individual presses.

The British Museum Catalogue is not completely satisfied with the de Lignamine statement insofar as it con- cerns Mentelin. The 1963 lithographic reprint of the original edition reproduces the entire first printing and also the corrections and addenda which were subsequently entered by hand in the margins of the working copy of the Catalogue by the Museum's incunab- ulists. "According to J. P. de Lig- amine's Chronica Summorum Pontif- icum (Rome 1474, leaf 12lb)," both printings of the Catalogue read, "Men- telin was printing 300 sheets a day as early as 1458." However, the 1963 reprint of the Catalogue challenges the credibility of this statement, for in a margin adjoining the sentence just quoted there appears this notation: "This entry under the year 1458 [the de Lignamine statement] mentions Gutenberg and Fust (sic) as performing this feat, and adds that Mentelin 'is acknowledged to have printed as many in a day.' But this is not satis- factory evidence of Mentelin's achieve- ments in this particular year" [ 11, pt. 1, p. 50].

Hirsch calls de Lignamine "the first important publisher" but believes that he probably did not print books himself [30, p. 19]. The British Museum Cata- logue says that de Lignamine was "the first native printer in Italy," and then adds that "though he had printers and press in his own house, [he] always

speaks of himself as ordering or pro- curing books to be printed in a way that suggests that he did not soil his own hands with printers' ink" [11, pt. 4, p. xi]. However, whether de Lig- namine did or did not work as a pressman personally is not overly significant for the purposes of this study, for he was responsible for the issuance of at least thirty incunable editions, nearly half of which predate the Riccobaldus chronicle [23, pp. 683-84]. I should think that even if de Lignamine's activities were restricted to publishing, he would contsantly be in and out of the shops which did his work, and would quickly develop a realistic understanding of the cost factors involved in the printing of books-or be forced out of business. On the other hand, the de Lignamine statement was published in 1474, sixteen years after the time for which he gives us the trecentas cantas figure, so that his information may not have been gotten at first hand, or even at second hand-that is, from individuals who had personally visited the shops of Gutenberg and Mentelin.

In view of the confusion which sur- rounds the meaning of the de Lignamine trecentas cartas as applied to printing in 1458, it would therefore appear pru- dent to write off his statement as a mere diverting historical curiosity, and to refrain from trying to extract from it more than the very little it actually holds in the way of con.crete fact regarding the productivity of the early press.

THE CROMBERGER-PABLOS DOCUMENTS,

1539

The next source I know of which deals with the matter of press speeds is the contract entered into by the master printer Juan Cromberger and his employee, the compositor Juan




Pablos, on June 12, 1539 in Seville. Cromberger, who had been doing business in Mexico City since 1525 through an agent, Diego de Mendieta [31, p. 96, note], was asked by the Archbishop Juan de Zumarraga to print a cate- chism in the Nahuatl Indian language, and decided that it would be more practical to do this in Mexico City than in Spain [32, p. 12]. He may also have seen the archbishop's interest in securing printed matter for religious purposes as an opportunity for opening a branch office of his Seville publishing house in Mexico City. In any case, the agreement he reached with Pablos, together with two ancillary documents of the same date, arranged for the establishment in Mexico City of what may have been the first printing plant in the Americas. The venture was financed by Cromberger, and the shop was to be operated by Pablos, his wife Geronima Gutie'rrez, the journeyman Gil Barbero, and a slave whose name is given in the contract only as Pedro but whose market value is appraised therein as 100 gold ducats.

When I read a synopsis of the terms of the contract some years ago, I was surprised to learn that in one of its clauses Juan Pablos promised to print 3,000 sheets a day on the single press which Cromberger was providing for the Mexican enterprise. It occurred to me at the time that this lofty figure was no more than a typographical error or a slip on the part of the translator.

I was pleased to discover later on that I was not alone in questioning the accuracy of the report that Pablos's daily quota on one press was 3,000 sheets. Thomas W. M'Donald devoted an entire issue of Obelisk, a publication which he personally composed and then printed on a nineteenth-century metal

handpress, to the Cromberger-Pablos documents [33], explaining that they had been transcribed by Jose Gestoso y Perez in 1904 from the originals in the archives at Seville and then analyzed by Jose Toribio Medina in La imprenta en Mexico, published at Santiago de Chile, 1907-12.

M'Donald was not satisfied with the transcription or the analysis. "I first questioned Gestoso and Medina," he wrote, "when I read that the printer promised to print three thousand sheets a day. That no handpressman or pair of pressmen could pull so many impressions on a single handpress, I was, and am, certain." M'Donald pursued the matter by trying to translate the material himself. He made, he tells us, "an abortive effort at deciphering reduced halftone reproductions of the original documents" but finally decided "that only an expert could verify my belief that Gestoso had misread, or erred in transcribing, the original." In due course, M'Donald found his expert and concluded: "Gabriel Saldivar, paleographer, proved me wrong (three thousand, not hundred, is what the document says)." The italics are M'Donald's; and he is obviously still firmly convinced that Pablos could not possibly have printed 3,000 sheets a day on one press.

In the contract, as translated by M'Donald, Pablos agrees: "I am obligated to administer the press with care and that when there is anything still to be done I continue to work & not stop & for that purpose I shall provide all the necessary arrangements & industry and I shall seek the necessary people to help me and I shall put into it all necessary diligence & effort in order that the said press may not stop and may always work properly and harmo-




niously as it works in Seville in the house of you the said Juan Cromberger doing the task of three thousand sheets daily as is done in your said house." A portion of this passage is given by M'Donald in the original Spanish: "en la casa de vos el dho Juan coronverguer haziendo de tarea de tres mille pliegos cada dia como se faze en la dha vuestra casa." The impression is thus conveyed that Pablos was not being asked to do the impossible, but that 3,000 sheets a day was a normal rate.

Thompson describes the contractual figure of 3,000 sheets a day as "a fantastically high number for a single press," but does not probe more deeply into the matter [32, pp. 12-13]. Iguiniz also has misgivings about the figure. He says that the contract calls for "tres mil diariamente" [34, p. 11], and then he places a question mark within a pair of parentheses immediately after these three words to indicate his skepticism about the claim. However, Jose Torre Revello simply remarks that Pablos was to print "3,000 pliegos diarios 'como se hace en la dicha vuestra casa,'" but makes no comment about the validity of the figure [31, p. 97].

Pablos and his entourage arrived in Mexico City during September 1539 after a long sea voyage and an ardous overland journey [32, p. 13]. It is quite possible that Pablos was at the time the only trained compositor, and that Gil Barbero was the only experienced pressman, in the entire Western Hemisphere. Whether Pedro had any skill in one or the other of these two branches of the printing craft is not known, but we may surmise that he helped Barbero at the press and, con- ceivably, Pablos at the cases. Geronima presumably kept house for her husband and the helpers whom the contract

stipulated that he hire, and may also have done some work in the shop.

Could Juan Pablos have printed as many as tres mille pliegos, even of the lowest quality, per working day on the one press he had?

If we interpret tres mille pliegos as 3,000 sheets printed on both sides (= 6,000 sides 12,000 folio pages or equivalent = 12,000 pulls), the answer is emphatically in the negative, for 6,000 sides means twenty-five tokens. The day would have had to contain twenty-five ART hours, if we apply Moxon's token- an-hour rate, and thirty hours on the basis of the Klapper average of 200 sides an hour. Consequently, TWT values of about 37?Y2 or 45 hours, respectively, should be projected. More- over, Pablos would have had to compose, correct, -and distribute type for the equivalent of twelve folio pages a day-also an impossible task.

Could the tres mile pliegos of the Cromberger-Pablos contract have meant that Pablos was to print 3,000 sheets on one side only (= 3,000 sides = 6,000 folio pages)? The Moxon and Klapper rates would then call for daily ART totals of 12?2 and 15 hours, and TWT figures of 18?4 and 22?2 hours.

It therefore seems impossible that Pablos could have printed 3,000 sheets on one side each day with only one press and two pressmen. If he was the sole compositor, the typesetting, correcting, and distributing of six folio pages a day (more correctly, twelve quarto pages, since Pablos's output was basically in the quarto format) would have created on overwhelming burden to add to his numerous other responsi- bilities; and it does not appear reasonable to say that he could have done all this work without additional help. In fact, the contract with Cromberger




obligated him to "seek the necessary people to help" him in the shop.

Haebler says that an early print shop possessing only one press was staffed by at least four or five men, and that in the one-press plant which Johann Luschner operated at Montserrat between 1498 and 1500, there were, in addition to Luschner himself, six full-time employees; when it became necessary to cast new type, more help was hired [35, pp. 77-78]. Chaix states that, on the average, each press required the services of five men, so that the thirty-four machines in use at Geneva during 1563 provided employment for about 170 workers, including pressmen and compositors. There were, in addition, a number of typefounders, ink makers, and correctors [36, p. 34]. It would thus appear that if Pablos was to achieve the maximum productivity possible in a single-press shop, he would have had to start recruiting and train- ing new employees immediately upon his arrival at Mexico City. He might have arranged to print his tres mille pliegos per day on one side if he had a back-up crew to work the press and another compositor to assist him. Had such help been available, and had the pressmen averaged as many as 240 sides per hour as their ART rate, the 3,000 sides could have been printed in 1212 hours of ART operation, requiring at least half that many hours of PPT and NPT, or a TWT of 183/4 (or more) hours a day. Moreover, much of the work would have been done under conditions not conducive to optimal productivity: Pablos could not have been present at all times to supervise the men; lighting would have created a serious problem during the many hours of darkness; there would have been delays in reading proofs, unless a qual-

ified corrector was available at all hours of the night (Gil Barbero, sad to say, was illiterate); and so forth. The NPT in the Pablos shop could thus have become forbiddingly high.

It seems more likely that Pablos would have preferred to build a second press in Mexico City, or have one shipped to him from Europe, and to hire and train additional personnel as needed in order to reach his quota of 3,000 sides a day. It appears to me that until Pablos could acquire extra help and, probably, a second press, he could not have produced that much work day in and day out.

It will be recalled, however, that in committing himself to the printing of tres mille pliegos each day, Pablos simultaneously acknowledged that this was the normal daily output for a press in Cromberger's plant. Even if we con- cede that Pablos could not attain this quota in Mexico City, should we look askance at the statement in the contract that Cromberger was doing so quite routinely in Seville?

My own inclination is to be skeptical about Cromberger's ability to print 3,000 sides a day on each of his presses even though the conditions for accom- plishing this in Seville were more auspicious than those prevailing in Mexico City. Moxon's ART estimate of 240 sides an hour is the highest which has ever been seriously advanced by a writer with personal experience in the use of wooden presses. Moxon's figures have been employed in comput- ing the theoretical limit to Pablos's production. Cromberger may have been able to reduce the PPT and NPT factors to some degree, but he could not have done this sufficiently to leave enough ART in the day for producing 3,000 sides.




From beginning to end, the Cromber- ger-Pablos contract is heavily weighted in favor of Cromberger. The image of Pablos which emerges from the document is that of a suppliant so anxious to please the man who controls the purse strings that he is prepared to submit to any demand, no matter how unreasonable it might be. The production statistics written into the agreement by Cromberger's legal representative seem as inflated as the overly optimistic quotas generated in certain contracts of our own time, especially those dealing with employment in the field of sales promotion. For my part, I cannot believe that the production figures of the Cromberger-Pablos contract deserve to be taken seriously. They seem to be an expression of hope rather than a recognition of reality.

THE PRINTERS' STRIKE AT LYONS, 1571

By the first half of the sixteenth century, the printing industry had become a vital factor in the economy of the city of Lyons, as well as a source of intermittent strife within the community. Conflicts of interest arose re- peatedly between the master printers and their employees. The workers wanted shorter hours, higher pay, and better working conditions. The employers resisted these demands, insisting that their implementation would inflate production costs beyond reason and make it difficult to compete successfully with the printers of other European centers. On more than one occasion the employers even threatened to move their shops to cities where labor was more tractable. In fact, it was not uncommon for a Lyonese publisher to have a book printed cheaply in Geneva or elsewhere but to retain the prestige associated with a Lyonese imprint by

declaring in the title page or the colophon that work had been issued at Lyons. Another publisher might ap- proach the problem somewhat more adroitly by importing all the prin.ted sheets of an edition except the one on which the title page or the colophon was to appear. This sheet he would print at Lyons, trying thereby to attach some semblance of legitimacy to his claim that the book was of Lyonese origin. From time to time the authorities attempted to mediate between the op- posing factions in the hope of restoring order and encouraging the master printers and publishers to have their work done at home rather than abroad. As a tangible consequence of this gov- ernmental intervention there exists today in the archives at Lyons a body of documentation which provides a great deal of information concerning the tra- vails of the printing industry in that city during the sixteenth century.

The printing craftsmen of Lyons went out on strike in 1539 and again in 1571. In his discussion. of these stop- pages, Marius Audin quotes from a memorial submitted by the workers to the authorities in 1571: "While the workers of Paris complain quite justi- fiably about having to produce 2,650 sheets [sides] a day, the workers of Lyons, on their feet [debout] from two in the morning to about eight or nine in the evening, in winter as well as in summer, are compelled to produce 3,3 50 sides, incredible as this may appear to be" [37, p. 183].9

The figures of 2,650 and 3,350 sides

9 "Alors que les compagnons de Paris se plaig- nent justement d'etre sujets i rendre pour tout le jour 2650 feuilles, [ceux de Lyon] debout despuis deux heures apres minuit jusques environ 8 ou 9 heures du soir, tant I'hiver que 1'ete, [sont] astre- ints i rendre 3350 feuilles, ce qui depasse toute creance."




are, of course, to be taken as referring to TWT.

There is an element of ambiguity in the word debout, for it can be under- stood to mean standing or on their feet, or awake or out of bed. We are thus not sure whether the strikers are assert- ing that they have to get out of bed at two in the morning or that they have to be at work at that time, which is not quite the same thing. Audin presents some documented evidence which suggests that the truth may lie between these two alternatives, and that there was, at any rate, something or someone afoot in the printing world of Lyons around two in the morning. On July 26, 1583, according to a record cited by Audin, a printer named Claude Cordier declared before a notary at Lyons that he, Cordier, had been going to work at the print shop of Jacques Rossin one Monday "around two in the morning, which is the same hour at which printers go to work," when he was assaulted on the street and hit with a rock [37, p. 184].1o If Cordier was following his normal schedule that un- happy morning, and if, as he says, printers actually went to work "around two," and if, in addition, they could not quit until eight or nine in the evening, then their working day was eighteen to nineteen hours long. If they were permitted an hour or two for meals and rest, a team of two men would have had to complete about 200 usuable sides per hour in order to produce 3,350 sides each day.

The claim that 3,350 sides were

printed in a day is accepted by Audin, but reluctantly. "In any case," he writes, "200 sides an hour represents a maximum figure which, it seems to me, would be difficult to achieve. But 200 sides an hour means that the pressmen had to spend seventeen hours each day at their machinery" [37, p. 184]. However, if we apply the rule adopted earlier in this study that at least one- third of the day went into PPT and NPT, then the ART rate would have had to be about 300 printed sides per hour, which seems excessive.

There is another, and very compel- ling, reason for rejecting the figures provided by the striking craftsmen of Lyons. Working a wooden handpress was hard physical labor, but thousands of men were able to do it every day. However, the question arises: when, after so many hours of strenuous exertion, did the pressmen of Lyons find time for sleep? The working-hour claims presented in their memorial make it appear that they would have been lucky to get as many as four hours of rest a night. Such a regimen-a working day of eighteen or nineteen hours of arduous labor broken by only an hour or two for meals, followed by less than four hours of sleep-is impossible to endure on an indefinite basis. This would be true today; it was even truer in the sixteenth century, when working conditions in printing plants were of the sweatshop variety, diets were limited, and the general level of health was not as high as in our time.

The schedule described by the Ly- onese workers could be followed for short periods only, but not as a steady routine. No group of human beings could survive very long with so little sleep. It is quite possible that printers were occasionally at work for eighteen

10 The words of the deposition are: "Ung jour de lundy allant travailler de son estat d'imprimeur et comme franc archier, en la maison de Iacques Rossin, me impr [maistre imprimeur], environ les deux heures du matin qu'est la mesme heure que les compagnons de l'arte de l'imprimerie vont travailler...."




or nineteen hours a day and got no more than three or four hours of sleep, but this would have happened only when the pressure of work was un- usually great. The imagination boggles at the thought of accepting eighteen to nineteen hours at work as the routine daily stint for hard physical labor over extended periods for a large body of men of all ages and conditions of health.

However, even if the strikers were trying to arouse sympathy for their cause by creating the false impression that they were customarily required to produce 3,350 sides a day, thereby being compelled to work such extraordinarily long shifts, should we question the hourly production rates-that is, about 200 sides on a TWT basis, and 300 on an ART basis-which their figures imply?

There are indications that by the latter part of the sixteenth century it may have been possible, in view of the improvements which had been gradually accumulating in printing equipment and techniques, to turn out 200 sides per hour on a "two-pull" wooden handpress (but not for seventeen hours a day!); but this could have happened sporad- ically only, in situations where the quality of the presswork was rather low, the pressmen were industrious, the runs were fairly long, the equipment was reasonably good, and the flow of the work through the shop was handled efficiently-where, in other words, the best possible use was made of the ART opportunities, while the PPT and NPT factors were kept to a minimum. I must confess, however, that I am not really satisfied that the technological and procedural practices in effect by the late sixteenth century-or, for that matter, at any time in the wooden-press era- made it possible for printers to produce

this much work all day long on a day-in, day-out basis even when the PPT and the NPT were low. I am forced to acknowledge with great misgivings, the possibility that a TWT production rate of 200 sides per hour may occasionally have been attained-simply because too many of the records which begin to appear in the closing decades of the sixteenth century insist that printers could and did print that many sides. The quota presented in the Cromberger- Pablos contract of 1539 lacks corrob- oration from other sources of the same period and is, as I have tried to show, greatly exaggerated. It would not sur- prise me if the production figures found in many of the later records are equally exaggerated, but there are among these documents several which appear to be reporting the facts more reliably. A number of these sources will now be examined-rather critically, I should add, for they constitute a mixed bag insofar as their plausibility is concerned.

SELECTED RECORD: WOODEN-

PRESS SPEEDS

It is a truism that statistics are not always gotten together with complete objectivity, and the source data we have regarding press speeds are especially vulnerable to charges of undue parti- ality when they deal with employer- employee relationships, or are trans- mitted by a writer who is imbued with the urge to impress the reader with the glories of the "art preservative" or to publicize the technological achieve- ments of his compatriots. In some instances the qualifications of the man who proposed a specific production figure for the presses of his time should be challenged, or at least regarded with suspicion, for the simple reason that his understanding of printing methods and




practices may have been more limited than he was prepared to admit. The terminology employed in the original language of a document may itself be vague or incorrect; in the translation, paraphrase, or summation available to us, it may be absolutely worthless or even misleading. In addition, the figures usually do not reveal anything about the level of the quality of the work, the length of the press runs, the nature of the type layout in the form, the kind of press being used, the efficiency of the shop manager, and so on.

FRANKFURT: 1563 AND 1573

According to Febvre and Martin, the pressmen of Frankfurt were required, in 1563, to print between 3,050 and 3,375 sides a day [12, p. 199]; ten years later the Printers' Ordinance of the same city instituted a quota of 3,600 sides for a working day of fifteen hours, which included rest periods [38, p. 325]. If, in 1573, the pressmen were granted re- spites totaling two hours a day, they were producing 2 77 sides (= 3,600/13) per press per hour. But this is an average based on TWT, and it implies, by the reasoning adopted here, an absurdly high ART rate of 416 sides per hour.

PARIS: 1571

The memorial which the Lyonese printers presented to the authorities during the strike of 1571 gives the daily quota of the pressmen of Paris as 2,650 feuilles (sides, presumably), and the inference which the writer of the document obviously wishes us to draw is that the Parisians worked fewer hours than their hard-driven confreres in Lyons. The latter were reputedly busy at their presses some seventeen hours a day, during which they had to print 3,350 sides, a TWT average of about 200 sides

per hour (= an ART average of 300 sides). We are not told whether the Parisians were required to work as rapidly as the Lyonese, but I think we are supposed to assume that they did and would therefore have been at their presses only a bit more than thirteen hours a day. The gist of the complaint is, after all, that the Lyonese had to work too many hours. It would have strengthened their case to be able to show that the men in Paris worked fewer hours than they. It follows that the ART rate of the Parisians should then be taken to be not very different from that of the Lyonese-an improbably high 300 sides per hour.

FRANCE: 1579

A brief description of the operation of a printing press appears in Loys Le Roy's De la vicissitude ou variete des choses en lunivers, first issued at Paris in 1579. Le Roy asserts that two men were able to print 1,250 or 1,300 feuilles a day on one press when a second machine was used for proofing, correcting, and "reiterating"[ 39, p. 42]. The following passage is taken from a translation of the Le Roy work made by Robert Ashley in 1594:

. . .and taking the barre in his hand, he [the pressman] pulleth as hard as he can vntill the leafe be imprinted on one side, on which they [the pressman and the inker] bestow halfe the day; and the other halfe, on the other side; yielding in a day twelve hundred and fiftie sheetes, or thirteen hundred imprinted. But before they do this, they [the same crew?] make two or three proofes, which are reuiewed: and on this correction continew the rest. Two men are requisite about the presse, one to take, to gather, and order the sheetes, or leaues; thother to beate on the fourme which is on the presse, and to distribute or braye the ynke on the stone or blocke: which could not serue the turn by reason of the great trauaile required therein, if they did not drawe the presse one




after the other, and by turnes. Two presses also are needfull; thone for the ordinary worke; and thother to make the proofes, and reiterations. [40, pp. 169-701

Ashley uses leafe and sheete interchangeably, but the text appears to indicate that Le Roy was claiming a production capability of 2,500-2,600 sides a day. Hinman reads the passage this way but questions Le Roy's accuracy "Le Roy's account of the daily output of a single press in a sixteenth- century French shop (1,250 to 1,300 perfected sheets when a second press was used for proofing) can-not be regarded as exact," and "the figures given seem more likely to represent maximum than average production" [4, p. 41 and note on same page].

The last two words of the passage are "and reiterations." In the original French they read & retirations. Had these words been omitted, Le Roy's meaning would be clearer. We could then say that if two presses were "needfull; thone for the ordinary worke; and thother to make the proofes," it would follow that the average daily production per press was half of 2,500-2,600 sides, assuming that the machine used for "proofes" was reserved all day long in support of only one other press. If, however, the proofing press could be used to back up more than one producing press, the average daily TWT production per press would be increased accordingly. (Actually, I doubt that Le Roy meant that all the NPT factors, as defined in this study, should be included, but think that he was providing his estimate of daily production on the assumption that no serious downtime problems were occurring. Hence the use here of the term TWT is not intended to include more than a moderate amount of NPT.) However, if Le Roy's

output of 2,500-2,600 sides occupied all the available time of two presses, the average TWT and ART rates, fig- ured on a per-press basis, would have been 1,250-1,300 sides and 1,875-1,950 sides, respectively. What these figures would break down to as hourly rates is conjectural, since Le Roy does not say how long the working day was; but a twelve-hour working period would indicate an hourly TWT rate of between 104 and 108 sides, and an ART speed of about 15.6-63 sides. If the working day were longer, which is quite possible, the hourly rates would be correspondingly smaller.

Unfortunately, the reference to "reiterations" confuses the matter. Retira- tion is a technical term in French printing which has the same meaning as the English word perfecting-to wit, the printing of the second side of a sheet of paper. Moxon uses the word reteration several times but spells it in the form reiteration in only one instance [18, pp. 264, 297, 306-7, 350, 354]. Moxon, it should be added, provides this definition in the dictionary section of his Mechanick Exercises: "Retera- tion. The Second Form, or the Form Printed on the backside of the White Paper" [18, p. 350]. He later defines "White Paper" in this manner: "White- Paper. Although the first Form be Printed off, yet Press-men erronically call that Heap White-Paper, till the Reteration be Printed" [18, p. 354].

In both its original version and the Ashley translation, the meaning of the Le Roy passage is therefore far from clear. We are first told that two men working one press can print one side of 1,250-1,300 sheets in half of one day and then print the second side in the other half of the day. Later we are told that a companion press is needed to do




the proofing and, in addition to print the second side of the sheet, an operation which, we had supposed, had already been completed. We have no way of knowing whether the second press is manned by its own crew or is merely a standby machine which is to be used by the operators of one or more other presses for proofing and correcting- and reiterating.

The value of Le Roy's testimony is thus blurred by the lack of consistency in his prose. We may deduce, at best, that he claims 2,600 sides as the maximum output, probably on an ART + PPT basis (with a moderate amount of NPT thrown in), for the operation of more than one press-but no more than two presses-over the course of a working day of unspecified length.

ANTWERP: SECOND HALF OF THE

SIXTEENTH CENTURY

The records of the Plantin-Moretus Museum at Antwerp indicate that an output of about 2,500 sides per press per working day was attained for one- color printing in the shop of Christopher Plantin during the second half of the sixteenth century. According to Dr. Leon Voet, curator of the museum, the Plantinian archives show that:

The two pressmen at each press were .

expected to produce each day 1,250 sheets, printed on both sides. In twelve working hours . . . this meant an average of 3 to 4 sheets rsides, that is] a minute. It must be remembered that this daily average had to include all the attendant activities, which could take up quite a lot of time: wetting the paper, preparing ink, getting ink balls ready, locking up and unlocking the formes, and washing the formes in lye. To keep their earnings up to the daily average, the pressmen had to work at a feverish pace, straining nerve and sinew in veritable stakhanovite fashion-even if the term had not been thought of then. Good press-

men were even able to exceed the norm and thereby earn welcome extra stuivers. [411

In the Plantin shop, then, the production rate, based on ART + PPT, was 2,500 sides a day, or somewhat more than 200 sides per hour. We must infer from this passage, as it is written, that 2,500 sides a day were printed as a matter of routine, in spite of the ter- rible toll such a pace must have extracted from the men who were caught up in it. However, the daily average per press over an extended period could not have been as high as 2,500 sides, for some NPT must have existed. It does not seem possible that the crew at each press in Plantin's shop could have de- livered that many printed sides, without fail, every single day. We must conclude that the average daily TWT rate was a good deal lower than 2,500 sides. Other- wise, we would be implying that Plantin operated a printing plant in that never- never land where presses always work perfectly, everybody is at his job at every moment, and everything is always in its place at the right time-where, in essence, the fantasy of achieving per- fection in production has come true.

The fact that the Plantin firm sur- vived as a profitable commercial venture for some three centuries may indicate that it was operated efficiently, and probably more efficiently than the vast majority of its competitors in the trade. It is, accordingly, questionable whether most printing plants were able to attain the levels of production achieved by the Plantin establishment.

Nevertheless, on those days when a Plantin press did produce the 2,500 sides which the records say it did, it would have had to be printing at an ART rate somewhat in excess of 300 sides an hour. Perhaps this speed could




be attained, improbable as it seems; but I doubt that in a typical month the Plantin shop-or any other shop of the wooden-press era-could print 2,500 sides as a sustained daily average for each of the presses it had in operation.

GERMANY: 1608

The most extreme estimate of wooden-press printing speeds emanating from a reputable source of which I know dates back to 1608, when it was advanced by the Italian historian Johannes Boterus (Giovanni Botero) [42]. The pertinent passage was quoted by Ber- nard Mallinkrot, dean of Munster, in 1604, in a translation into the Latin which Gaspard Ensius had made from Boterus's Italian [43, p. 19]. It asserted, in a matter-of-fact way, that there was scarcely a press, especially in the printing establishments of Ger- many, which did not produce at least 3,600 sheets (sides, no doubt) in a day; that some produced 4,000; and that still other produced more than 4,000.

The scholarly reputations of Boterus, Ensius, and Mallinkrot were impressive. Yet Boterus, who was not himself a printer, had apparently run into a stray set of fanciful statistics regarding press productivity which he had accepted at face value. Ensius and Mallinkrot, in turn, saw nothing wrong with these figures, possibly because an aura of re- spectability had now been bestowed upon them by Boterus-or, more likely, because scholars in the seventeenth century were not normally in the habit of thinking in terms of the statistics of manufacturing productivity.

On the other hand, Samuel Palmer, who was unquestionably a printer of considerable experience, saw fit to quote the same passage in his history of print-

ing, published in 1732. Palmer had owned and managed a good-sized print shop in London.1" Is it conceivable, then, that he was so ignorant of the production capabilities of the equipment with which he made his living that he would permit Boterus's overblown figures to appear in his book without challenging their accuracy? Or is it possible that Boterus's schedules were funda- mentally correct, and that by quoting them Palmer was, in effect, tacitly en- dorsing them?

It will be shown later in this study, on the basis of evidence deduced from Joel Munsell's account of the printing of the Philadelphia Gazette circa 1800, that the Boterus figures are utterly ab- surd, so that any allegation that Palmer could knowingly have supported them must be rejected. There are, however, two alternative explanations of how these figures came to be cited in the Palmer history.

To begin with, the context within which the Boterus passage is quoted in the Palmer book makes it clear that the statistics occur only incidentally, as part of a larger excerpt, and have nothing to do with the thrust of the argument being developed at that point by Palmer. Pal- mer was citing one authority after another in order to demonstrate that printing had been invented in Germany rather than Holland. Boterus had asserted that printing had originated in Germany, but that he, Boterus, would not come to a decision as to the name of the inventor. To this statement he had

11 The young Ben Franklin was employed as a compositor by Samuel Palmer for most of the year 1725. Franklin notes in his Autobiography that on arrving in London on December 24, 1724, he had "immediately got into work at Palmer's, then a famous printing-house in Bartholomew Close, and here I continued near a year."




appended the statistical data which we are now examining. Palmer's overriding purpose was to prove that Johann Fust, not Gutenberg, had been the first printer in Europe. The fact that a respected scholar like Boterus would not posi- tively credit any particular individual with the invention diminished Guten- berg's standing and did not, in any event, rule out Palmer's candidate for the honor. Palmer therefore quoted the entire Boterus excerpt from Mallinkrot, using exactly the same words which Mallinkrot had quoted from Ensius- managing, in the process, to garble Johannes Boterus's name by rendering it as John Ruterus. Palmer even repro- duced the Boterus excerpt in Ensius's Latin and in an English translation, apparently paying not the slightest attention to the latter portion of . the passage, in which the production figures were contained [1, pp. 25-26].

The first explanation, then, is that the context in which the Boterus excerpt appears in the Palmer book indicates that Palmer was so intent upon proving that Fust had invented printing that he may have carelessly overlooked the ridiculously high printing schedules projected by Boterus. The low scholarly level of the Palmer book supports the charge which was forcefully advanced in the Dictionary of National Biography that the book's author was "a bad historian, ignorant, careless, and inaccurate" [44, 43:155], and lends weight to the supposition that the Boterus passage may have been included by Palmer after little more than a superficial reading of its contents. I think, however, that the alternative explanation is much more likely to be correct. This is, quite simply, that Palmer did not personally insert the Boterus statement in the text

-and that, in fact, he may not even have written the book which bears his name.

Palmer died in 1732, before he could finish his history. The task of completing and editing the work fell into the hands of the notorious "Formosan im- postor," the confidence man and literary charlatan who went by the name of George Psalmanazar. In accepting the responsibility for preparing the work for publication, Psalmanazar expressed the hope that he would find the materials left by Palmer "in so good an order, that there will be little to do but print after his [Palmer's] manuscript" [1, p. 311]. However, in his memoirs, which were published in 1764, Psalmanazar claimed that he had actually written the entire Palmer book by himself [44, 43:155; 66:441].

It is possible that Psalmanazar found the Boterus passage among Palmer's notes. Had Palmer lived long enough to complete his book, he might not have permitted the excerpt to go unchal- lenged. Whatever else he pretended to be, Psalmanazar was not a printer; and it is understandable that he could have accepted the production figures in the unedited Boterus passage without reali- zing how inaccurate they really were. That they were printed still another time does not, of course, add to their credibility.

It may be appropriate to suggest at this point that the responsibility for many of our misconceptions concerning the development of early printing technology must be charged to the laxity of certain scholars who, by neglecting to question the veracity and competence of their sources of information (for the simple reason that it had not occurred to them to do so), set up a train of er-




rors which has persisted to our day. Boterus may have heard in passing that individual handpresses could print 3,600, 4,000, or more sheets a day. See- ing no reason to doubt this, he recorded it in his book, thereby providing Ensius and Mallinkrot (as well as Palmer and/ or Psalmanazar) with an authority to whom they could now refer in perfectly good faith. Nobody, apparently, paused long enough to consider that an output of, say, 4,000 finished sides a day would indicate (in the terminology being used in this study) an ART rate equivalent to 6,000 sides a day and, therefore, an actual printing speed of perhaps 400- 500 sides an hour maintained over a working day of twelve to fifteen hours, not counting recesses for meals and rest.

HOLLAND AND FRANCE: 1615

The French littgrateur and economist Antoyne de Montchretien complained, in a treatise on political economy published in 1615, that by demanding only 2,500 printed sides a day from their pressmen the French master printers could not compete with the Dutch, whose quota was 4,000 sides [45, pp. 90-91].

Montchretien had fled to England after killing a man in a duel in France. He had become interested in economics while in exile and had then spent a little time in Holland before returning home. His book on the French economy ex- amines the condition of various indus- tries of his time and contains the statement that "the Dutch who have a very sensitive nose for ferreting out any scent of profit have scarcely permitted this trade [printing] to languish, but, having instituted it in several of their principal cities, employ in these cities all kinds of poor people from the coun-

try at very low wages, and require from these workers 1,500 more [printed sides] per day than the French, who pull only 2,500." This discrepancy in production quotas, Montchretien continues, makes it possible for the Dutch to cut book prices by nearly half, thereby placing the Fren.ch publishers at a serious competitive disadvantage. Montchretien's cost accounting is rather weak, for it blithely ignores the cost of paper, ink, typesetting, transportation, and so forth, but, of course, he has an axe to grind-he wants to protect French industry either by prohibiting imports or by taxing them heavily.

The passage just cited is somewhat ambiguous. Montchretien's words are: "Aussi les Flamans qui ont le nez tres delicat a flairer toute odeur de gain n'ont gueres laisse ceste pratique en arriere, mais, I'ayant suscitee en plusieurs princi- pales villes, y employent toutes sortes de pauvres gens du pays a tres petit prix, et obligent les compagnons a quinze cens par jour plus que les Fran- qois, qui n'en tirent que vingt et cinq cens."

Montchretien does not provide a noun after each number. Febvre and Martin apparently see no difficulty here, and understand Montchretien to mean that the Dutch quota was 4,000 printed sides a day, while the French was 2,500 [12, p. 199].

I think that Febvre and Martin are correct, although one could wish that Montchretien's language had been more precise. It is interesting that when the book was republished in 1889, as one of a series of works by the early econo- mists and social reformers of France, the editor of the Montchretien treatise, Th. Funck-Brentano, did not think of the passage in question in terms of press



2 52 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

speeds, and found it necessary to add this footnote: "Le passage est assez dif- ficile 'a comprendre. Le cens ou sentz hollandais vaut deux centimes et demi; les compagnons franqais gagnaient, en faisant le meme travail, quinze sentz de moins que les compagnons flamands aides dans leur besogne par 'toutes sortes de pauvres gens a tres petits prix' [45, pp. 90-91, note]. Here, then, we have an economist reading cens as coins worth 2 2 centimes apiece rather than hundreds, thereby completely altering the sense of the passage.

Even if we accept the Febvre and Martin version of the Montchre'tien statement (as I think we should), the Dutch figure must be discounted. It is grossly exaggerated, obviously in the interest of furthering the protectionist ideology which Montchretien was es- pousing. However, the quota of 2,500 sides a day for French presswork is in line with others being cited in this study. I doubt that any NPT factors could been taken into account in the Mont- chretien figure for production in France, and the output he attributes to the Dutch does not merit serious consideration.

FRANCE: 1622

In 1622, I:tienne Binet, using the nom de plume Rene Fransois, wrote that two men, working on one press, were ordinarily able to produce 2,400 printed sides a day [46, pp. 289-99]. If I understand Binet correctly, this figure of 2,400 sides is to be taken primarily as an ART + PPT rate but may also include a modicum of NPT. He is assuming, I believe, that the men and their machine are able to work all day long, and that they are not being seriously

hampered by any of the NPT factors previously noted in this study.

ENGLAND: 1625 AND 1630

McKenzie and Ross quote the Cam- bridge printer Cantrell Legge, circa 1625, as saying that "the Ordenary worke of a presse" was "3 reames a day" [47, p. 22]. But here too, as in so many other instances, the primary problem is to decide what the original source's real meaning is. Was Legge speaking of three "reames" printed on only one side (= 1,500 sides per day), or was he speaking of three "reames" printed on two sides (= 3,000 sides per day)? And, to what extent are PPT factors being considered?

Hinman refers to "an entry in the Stationers Court Book C, dated 12 Jan- uary 1630 (legal year), where we read that 'Wm. Gay did agree to work with Mr. Purslowe one yeare to the 8th. of January next at 8s. per weeke & to worke XXXc per day.' However, Hin- man considers a rate of 3 ,000 sides a day excessive and immediately adds: "Yet we may well doubt whether presswork at this rate was ever consistently achieved; and I think we can be fairly sure that it was at any rate not achieved during the printing of the First Folio [4, p. 42]. Hinman suggests "a general average production, day in and day out, of only about 2,400 impressions-or rather of about 1,200 impressions from each of two formes: of about 1,200 perfected sheets" [4, p. 44].

FRANCE: 1650

On August 27, 1650, according to Mellottee, the master printers of Troyes acceded to the demands of their employees for a shorter working day and pe- titioned the authorities "to reduce the




working day of the said employees so that they will henceforth be required to produce only 2,500 'feuilles' [sides] of books printed completely in black, and 2,200 sides of those books which are printed in red and black, provided that they do not take unfair advantage of the above-mentioned concession and that they work henceforth with greater care and with more interest than they have displayed in the past" [48, pp. 294, 363].12

Mellottee cites a contract of January 8, 1640, at Troyes, between Nicolas Le Coeur and the master printer Jacques Oudot in which Le Coeur's working hours are given as from five in the morning to seven in the evening (which surely was interrupted by recesses for meals and rest), but Mellottee says that the average daily stint at Troyes consisted of fourteen to fifteen hours [48, p. 294]. The decision of the master printers to agree to a reduction of the working hours suggests that they were thinking in terms of twelve to thirteen or thirteen to fourteen hours a day. The production goal of 2,500 sides set forth by the employers may have been no more than a target figure to be aimed at rather than a practical quota which could actually be

attained routinely-or it may have been a perfectly realistic figure. It is, of course, of about the same size as several other quotas extracted from the literature of the period, and probably ex- cludes any NPT considerations.

ENGLAND: 1683

Reference has been made several times to the statement in 1683/84 in Moxon's Mechanick Exercises that two pressmen could print, on the average, one token of 240 sides per hour. In the Dictionary appended to his book, Moxon provides a definition of the word hours insofar as it applies to piecework rates in the printing trade. Luckombe [49, p. 499], in 1771, and Stower [50, p. 527], in 1808, endorse Moxon's inter- pretation of the word; in fact, each of them pays Moxon the dubious compli- ment of reprinting his definition of hours verbatim, without acknowledging the source. Here, with credit to Moxon, is the definition: "Hours. Press-men reckon their Work by Hours, accounting every Token to an Hours Work: And though it be the same effectually with Tokens, yet they make their prizes of different Work by the Hour; and it passes current for a Token. If two men Work at the Press ten Quires is an Hour; if one man, five Quires is an Hour" [18, p. 344].

Moxon's definitions of tokens and hours are disturbing, for they explain hours in terms of tokens, and tokens in terms of hours. Is it possible that when Moxon's pressmen computed their earnings they referred to each unit of 240 sides of paper which they had completed as an hour or a token, regardless of how long it had actually taken to print that unit? If they did, and if 2,400 sides had been printed in a working day, then ten

12 This passage is quoted by MeUott&e in the original French two times, once on page 294 and again on page 363. The passage, as printed on page 363, suffers from a typographical error, thirteen words being missing. The excerpt on page 363 makes sense even without the absent words and is misleading. The passage is reprinted here as it appears on page 294, brackets being inserted around the portion which is omitted in the printing of the citation on page 363: ". . . de riduire la journee desdits compagnons i ne faire a l'avenir que deux mile cinq cents [feuilles des livres qui seront imprimes tout noir, 'a deux mile deux cents] des livres qui seront imprimis rouge et noir, pourvu toutefois qu'ils n'abusent pas de la susdite decharge et qu'ils travailleront dorenavant avec plus de soin et de curiosite qu'ils n'ont fait depuis assez longtemps."



2 54 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

tokens-or ten hours-were presumed to have been worked, even though it may have taken fewer than ten-or more than ten-hours by the clock to print this quantity of paper. Similarly, may not the words day and week have been spoken of as synonyms for multi- ples of 240? If, then, the actual number of clocked hours in a 'normal working day was twelve, and if eight units, each of 240 sides, had been printed in that time, the pressmen would have worked an eight-hour day in terms of wages earned.

I am not suggesting that Moxon is necessarily defining an hour as the time it took to print 240 sides rather than as sixty minutes by the clock, but I think we should not completely rule out the possibility that he was, so that a pressman's hour may have been mea- sured by the number of sheets he printed, not by the movement of the hands of a clock. If, then, an hour is viewed as a unit for pricing piecework rather than measuring the time which has elapsed, all calculations of press production speeds based on the ART rate of 240 sides an hour which we have assigned to Moxon will require reexam- ination, and the standard of a token of 240 printed sides per clock-hour so extensively employed by writers in the field of wooden-press technology, on the basis of their understanding of Moxon, will also have to be subjected to critical review.

The last sentence of Moxon's definition of Hours bolsters the argument that the hour was a wage-rate figure, not a clocked unit of time. He says that "if two men Work at the Press ten Quires [240 sides] is an Hour; if one Man, five Quires [120 sides] is an Hour." Now it seems unlikely that one man working alone can produce in two hours

by the clock as many printed sides as two men working together as a team will print in exactly half that time. The production records of the Cambridge University Press, circa 1700, which will be discussed later in this study, indicate that a man working a wooden press by himself will print fewer than half as many sides as two men are able to print in the same unit of time. Yet Moxon defines the hour on the basis of the number of sides printed, so that regardless of how long it takes, a press has completed one pay-hour per man for each five quires of printed sides which it delivers. Accordingly, a token (= an hour) is five quires of printed sides ( 120 sides) per man, or ten quires (- 240 sides) when the press is operated by a crew of two men. Hansard, writing in 1825, says that "250 is a token; each token, in ordinary work, is reckoned an hour, and it is equally correct to say, technically, that a forme is so many token, or so many hours" [51, p. 608]. If, accordingly, a token and an hour are the same thing, then elapsed time does not enter the picture at all; the concept of a "token an hour" makes no sense; and Moxon was not saying that two men could normally be expected to print 240 sides-or, for that matter, any other number of sides-in sixty minutes of press operation.

OXFORD: LATE 1600s

Some light is thrown upon the seman- tics of the relationship between Moxon's hours and tokens by Madan's account of his investigation of fragmentary records from the late seventeenth century dealing with the Sheldonian Press at Oxford. These documents contain a few tidbits of information regarding press speeds. While the material is difficult to assess, it does have some value.




Madan presents one record, circa 1680, to show that the wage rate was "2d. an hour." These are Madan's words. They are followed, without inter- ruption, by those of the document itself: "to a pressman who works off in that time 250 copies upon one side, which is called a token" [52, p. 347].

Here, then, we have a statement of the same period as Moxon's which puts the token at 2 50 sides and also indicates -but only if Madan's prefixing of "2d. an hour" has been fitted in properly with the old quotation which it precedes -that a token could be printed in the time span of one hour.

Another item of interest which may be gleaned from the Sheldonian records is that wage rates varied greatly. MIadan informs us that "the extremes are 3s. a sheet and 13s. 6d. a sheet" but does not specify how many copies are being printed. What is indicated, however, is that the wage rate for the most difficult kind of presswork may have been as much as 4X2 times that paid for the simplest kind of work [52, p. 344]. The variations in the speed of printing may also have been of the same order.

CAMBRIDGE: 1699-1701

McKenzie's examination of the records of the Cambridge University Press yields interesting statistical data concerning press speeds at that center for the production of books during the years 1699-1701 [53, pp. 132-34]. In seventy-one weeks (= 426 working days) of press time, the output was 901,180 sides, or 2,115 printed sides per press per day, with two men working at a press (full-press). With only one man working a press (half-press), the production was 319,750 sides in fifty-seven weeks ( = 342 working days), or 935 sides per press per day.

The variations in the daily production rates are substantial: they range from 1,292 to 3,450 sides per day at full-press, and from 334 to 2,034 sides at half-press. McKenzie notes that "since there are scarcely any [wage] claims for work incidental to the main task of printing off the sheets, all normal make-ready, the making and cutting of friskets, and certainly the cleaning and knocking up of balls, must have been done in the pressmen's own time" [53, p. 134]. I do not know on what evidence this statement is based, and wonder whether other individuals-perhaps the boys who were employed in the shop-did not lend a hand with some of the PPT chores. If they did, they obviously helped increase the daily output of each press.

McKenzie says that the "rates of production must have been much the same" for London and Cambridge [53, p. 139]. The production statistics at Cambridge should therefore be taken as typical of the period covered by them for much, or most, of the printing done in England.

Even if the Cambridge average of 2,115 sides per day is accepted as valid, it is in need of adjustment. For example, it may have been lower in cases where the pressmen had to do all the PPT work themselves. It should also be remembered that English presswork circa 1700 was of notoriously poor quality on the whole, so that the daily output of a press would have been markedly lower if more attention had been paid to improving the quality of the work.

FRANCE: CIRCA 1782

In 1779 the dramatist Beaumarchais purchased a large quantity of printing equipment from the widow of John




Baskerville for the purpose of publishing the works of Voltaire, a venture in which he eventually lost a substantial sum of money. The machinery was set up as the Imprimerie du Fort de Kehl, in France, and a former architect by the name of Letellier was put in charge. The Beaumarchais establishment was visited in the early 1780s by 1:tienne Anisson-Duperon, the last director of the Imprimerie Royale. The memoran- dum which he made of this visit was examined by John Dreyfus, who provides us with this comment: "Letellier boasted that his pressmen took as many as 2,000 sheets daily; but Anisson wrote that in his experience the best and fastest pressman could only pull 1,000 to 1,200 sheets daily on full formes, if the work was to be done at all decently" [54, p. 47]. These figures appear to be predicated on ART + PPT factors, with, perhaps, some incidental allow- ances for NPT.

Presumably, Letellier and Anisson are speaking of the printing of both sides of the sheets. If so, Letellier's 4,000 sides would represent the maximum daily output per press at Kehl, while Anisson's 2,000-2,400 sides would represent the average daily production for each of the presses being operated by the best and fastest craftsmen in the employ of the Imprimerie Royale. We may infer, therefore, that Letellier was acknowledging a somewhat lower daily rate than 4,000 sides as the average for his shop, and that Anisson's normal output was actually less than 2,000-2,400 sides. Since the technical qualifications, reputation, experience, and position of Anisson were far superior to those of Letellier, and since Letellier's figure is extraordinarily high, it appears wiser to accept Anisson's

statement as the more plausible of the two, remembering that neither assertion probably takes much cognizance of NPT.

FRANCE: 1791

M. S. Boulard, "printer and book- seller," was the author and publisher of a handbook on printing issued in Paris during 1791 under the title Le manuel de l'imprimeur [14]. The book was described by McMurtrie in a paper which appeared in 1923. The subtitle of Boulard's work reads, in translation: "A work useful to all who wish to become familiar with the equipment, prices, and management of this interesting art; and to anyone who wishes to establish a printfng office" [55, p. 3]. (All translations from Boulard in this section were made by McMurtrie, mainly from chapter 10 of Boulard's book-more precisely, from the first chapter 10 in the work, a typographic error having endowed the volume with two chapters bearing the number X.)

Boulard says that "two employees, working industriously on one press, will turn out daily three thousand impressions, which gives fifteen hundred backed-up sheets" [55, p. 6].

It seems to me that Boulard is overly prone to accentuate the positive, as it were, in the matter of operating a printing plant, and to minimize the negative. He acknowledges this quite candidly with reference to a few of the assump- tions he makes, one being "that there be a constant supply of work, and that no costly accident occur" [55, p. 9]. He does not, however, place enough stress throughout his cost analyses on the importance of those factors which tend to keep production rates below the optimal levels which are theoretically




attainable, but only if all goes perfectly. The two-press shop which he proposes to the reader as a promising business venture is assigned the hypothetical project of printing "five octavo volumes of 464 pages each; in all 7,500 volumes, 1,500 copies of each volume" in a period of three months. He presupposes twenty-four working days to the month and the printing each day of two sheets on both sides-6,000 sides a day. This enables him to produce, in theory, 144 sheets in three months [55, pp. 7-81. He is, therefore, assuring the reader who may be planning to go into the printing business that each press should be expected to print 3,000 sides (two full forms, each of 1,500 copies) every day over a three-month interval containing seventy-two working days.

If Boulard, while operating his own printing establishment, actually calcu- lated his costs and arranged his production schedules along the lines projected in his manual, he would promptly have run the business into bankruptcy. My personal experience in the management of a printing plant-admittedly under circumstances differing vastly from those of Boulard's day-leads me to the conclusion that Boulard's accounting figures for the operation of a printing business in the eighteenth century were not truly indicative of the costs. His contention that 3,000 sides could be printed on each press each day -and consistently-seems very unrealistic, even if the pressmen were extraordinarily industrious and the standards of quality were as low as those Boulard was apparently willing to accept in his own shop for the printing of his own book. He is postulating the existence of a print shop in which production efficiency-at least insofar as speed is

concerned-approaches the ideal. I should add, however, that McMurtrie is impressed much more favorably than I by Boulard's computations, for he describes them as comprising "a logical and fairly complete analysis of the expense involved in producing printing during the latter years of the eighteenth century" [55, p. 9].

PHILADELPHIA: CIRCA 1800

Joel Munsell, writing in 1868, recalled the bygone days of the wooden press, pointing out to his contemporaries that although the machines had become obsolete, they had in their time been capable of performing in outstanding fashion:

Still, the rapidity with which impressions were taken upon these [wooden] presses, requiring two pulls to a sheet, on each side, may be almost incredible to modern pressmen, who have wrought only at the iron hand-presses, with all the improvements with which we are supposed to have invested them. For instance, the Philadelphia Gazette [published from 1794 to 1802] was a daily paper with an edition of two thousand copies. The first side being printed, the second, requiring two thousand impressions or four thousand pulls, was worked off on one press in four hours. It was done in this way. Four pressmen were employed: one beat the form, another pulled the press, a third stood behind the press to fly the sheet, while the fourth remained idle. They changed places every half-hour, and threw off a token in thirty minutes with great exactness, completing the edition in four hours. . . . The changing of forms was expedited by their mutual assis- tance. Ten tokens was accounted a day's work; but ambitious workmen accomplished twelve or fourteen, and it was no uncommon thing for a pressman to pull a token in thirty minutes and fly his sheets, on a light form. [ 56, pp. 108-91

Roger Levenson, whose experience in the operation of handpresses has been extensive, considers Munsell's figures




badly exaggerated. "To those of us who have manipulated the [metal] handpress," he writes, "such data suggest something unreal at best" [57, p. 9].

By ascribing a TWT speed of 500 sides an hour to the printing of the Philadelphia Gazette, Munsell is, in fact, suggesting that the normal rate of production in shops where the pressmen were less athletically inclined was considerably lower. He is, after all, depict- ing a unique situation: four men are working at one press, apparently as a very skilled team; only one form is being printed, and that for a long run; and the quality of the printing is low, of a degree suitable for newspaper work. Munsell is describing a set of circumstances which presuppose a PPT factor on the minimal side and an NPT factor of zero. Moreover, it is likely that even if these favorable conditions could have been extended, such a rapid rate could not have been maintained for much longer than the four hours the men were actually working.

If four men could print 500 sides an hour under these extraordinary conditions, how many could two men produce when ordinary conditions prevailed? Obviously, a great many less.

Munsell says that "ten tokens was accounted a day's work" but that this number was often exceeded. I should think that his own description of the record-breaking pace demanded from four men for the printing of the Gazette would cast doubts upon the ability of two men to print ten, or more, tokens a day ordinarily, and especially on a day- after-day basis. The feat of the pressmen at the Philadelphia Gazette should, by its very uniqueness, put an end to all lingering suspicions that perhaps, in spite of everything, the lofty figures pro-

posed by such seventeenth-century writers as Boterus and Montchretien might be correct.

PHILADELPHIA: 1802; NEW YORK: 1809

On February 22, 1802, the Philadel- phia Typographical Society, an organization of printing trade employees, for- warded a demand for a new wage scale to their employers. "We cherish a hope," the workers wrote, "that the time is not far distant, when the employer and the employed will vie with each other, the one in allowing a competent salary, the other, in deserving it" [58, p. 865]. The demands included a weekly minimum wage for pressmen of eight dollars, with piecework computed at 300 per token for sheets below medium size (nineteen by twenty-four inches) and 37?2? for larger sheets.

Seven years later, on August 25, 1809, the secretary of the New York Typo- graphical Society wrote a letter to the employers of the printers in his associ- ation, stating that "the customary price per token for working super-royal paper [20X2 x 27'2 inches] is 37?2 cents, and 48 tokens (which is supposed to be the number you work per week) at that price would be $18" [58, p. 864].

Both documents refer to wooden- press work.

The New York letter speaks of forty- eight tokens, "which is supposed to be the number you work per week." The word "supposed" gives us reason to pause and wonder whether its use con- notes something not apparent to us. I think, however, that we may assume that the letter does indicate that forty- eight tokens were normally attainable in practice, if the employers had that much work for the pressmen to do. A




rate of forty-eight tokens a week comes to eight a day (= 1,920 or 2,000 sides, depending upon whether the token was counted as 240 or 250 sides).

The wage rate for printing on super- royal paper is the same in both documents, 37 /Y2 per token. The minimum weekly wage of eight dollars demanded by the Philadelphians would thus be earned when somewhat more than twenty-one tokens of large-size sheets had been completed. The weekly wage figure is apparently intended to represent a guarantee by the employers to provide enough work each week to en- able their workers to earn at least eight dollars on a piecework basis or, under any conditions, to pay them that sum as a minimum wage. The press rate of eight tokens a day would appear to be the accepted figure and probably includes normal PPT and NPT factors, insofar as they could be anticipated.

NORTH CAROLINA: CIRCA 1815

Paschal reprints a brief quotation from Whitaker's Reminiscences, published in 1905: "Ninety years ago [that is, circa 1815] my father was a printer boy in the Register office. That paper was worked on a Ramage press.... The Ramage press was so constructed that two pulls were required to the side, and a paper a minute was the average speed of the press" [59, p. 48].

If "a paper a minute" refers to the printing of both sides, as it probably does, the speed is 120 sides per hour. Whether this is to be taken as an ART rate or an ART + PPT rate cannot be determined from the contents. It does not seem probable, however, that it includes any NPT allowance. It is, in any case, a modest rate compared with some

which have been encountered in this study.

SPEEDS OF WOODEN AND

METAL PRESSES

It has frequently been stated that the number of sides which could be printed in a day on the metal handpress of the nineteenth century was approximately the same as the daily output normally obtained from the older wooden press. In other words, if a form were being run, first on one machine and then on another, the time for printing a given number of sheets would be about the same for each machine, providing, of course, that such factors as paper size, quality of work, and so forth were to remain unchanged.

I have read this claim time and again in the literature of printing history and cannot understand on what basis it can be justified.

To begin with, the wooden press required two separate turns of the handle and two individual pulls of the lever to print one full folio side; the metal press printed the entire side with only one turn of the handle and one pull of the lever.

It will be recalled that in the late eighteenth century there existed "one- pull" wooden presses capable of printing a full folio side in a single pass of the sheet through the machine. ltienne Anisson-Duperron le fils, director of the Imprimerie Royale, describing his suc- cess in building such a press in a paper read before the Royal Academy on March 3, 1783, claimed that his "one- pull" wooden machine more than dou- bled the output (on an ART basis, apparently) of the "two-pull" press of the time [60, p. 6]. A commission which was appointed by the Academy to in-




vestigate the merits of Anisson's new machine reported on May 17, 1783, that the device was not only decidedly superior to the ordinary "two-pull" wooden press in common use, but that it also reduced the necessary effort by half [60, p. 16]. The foreword to a technical study of the Anisson press, published under the auspices of the French government in 1785, states that "the experiments performed in the presence of the Commissioners named by the Royal Academy of Sciences, and discussed in the report made to the Acad- emy on May 17, 1783, have proved that this press is one-fourth faster than the others" [60, p. 17]. The point here is, of course, that if a wooden press which could print a full folio side with only one pull of the lever was 25 percent faster than a "two-pull" wooden press, what reason can there be for supposing that a "one-pull" metal press could not do at least as well? Boulard, incidentally, refers to the new version of the "one-pull" wooden press in his handbook for the printer, suggesting that it is not the wise choice for a small print shop which is to be equipped with only one press. The "one-pull" wooden press which can print an entire side with a single drop of the platen is somewhat faster than the "two-pull" press, he con- cedes, but if a plant is to have only one machine it is preferable that this be of the "two-pull" design because, in his words, "je crois que cela est plus commode pour certaines choses" [ 14, p. 44]. Unfortunately, Boulard does not elaborate.

The mechanical action of the metal press was greatly superior to that char- acterizing the wooden screw-type machine. A very high percentage of the energy which a man put into pulling the lever of a wooden press was dis-

sipated as friction. The linkage systems built into the various models of the metal press were far more efficient means for transmitting the muscular power applied at the end of a lever to the printing surface of the form than any kind of torsion screw arrangement ever devised for any handpress. One need only pull the lever of a metal press like the Albion, or even of a metal machine employing a stiffer action, to note how little effort is called for in con- trast with the strenuous exertions described by Moxon and Scrantom or portrayed in the old engravings.

The overall construction of the metal press was also far superior to that of the wooden press. The metal machines were built by press manufacturers, while most wooden handpresses were put together by local carpenters. The metal presses were sturdy devices, constructed to fairly close tolerances; the wooden presses were bulky and creaky, subject to all the problems of contraction and expansion normally associated with wooden mechanisms as temperature and humidity fluctuate. Moreover, quicker makeready was accomplished on many models of the metal press, inasmuch as the platen could be adjusted by comparatively sophisticated means to lie exactly parallel to the surface of the type, while the depth of descent of the platen could also be regulated.

The seamless inking roller came into use about 1810, replacing the much slower ink balls which had been employed to ink, or beat, the form since the days of Gutenberg. The advent of the roller gave the iron-press operator still another advantage over the wooden- machine printer, an advantage which was translated into even greater speed of production.

In the section of his textbook on




printing which deals with handpress operation, Jacobi says that "an ordinary [metal] press, with two men working at it, one rolling and the other pulling, is capable of producing only about two hundred and fifty impressions per hour, even when in full swing, and after all the making-ready has been finished" [61, pp. 190-91]. This is, of course, a pure ART-rate figure.

Jacobi is quoted in The Library as stating that "the old wooden presses, with two men to each, could only turn out about 1,000 sides a day" [62, p. 43]. McKerrow thinks this estimate is too low, but asserts that if it is intended to include (in the terms of the present study) both ART and PPT factors, then, "Mr. Jacobi's 500 impressions [on each side of the sheet] for a day's work may not be so much below the mark as would appear" [63, pp. 143-44]. In any case, we may safely deduce that Jacobi was convinced that the wooden press was a much slower machine than the metal press.

Jacobi sets 250 sides as the maximum, or near-maximum, hourly ART rate for the metal press. How, then, can it be claimed that the workers in the Plantin shop were able to print 2,500 sides in a twelve-hour day on their much slower wooden machines when such a quota would demand an ART rate exceeding 300 sides per hour, which is more than even metal presses could produce?

The question cannot be answered satisfactorily without first disproving one or more of the premises which it presupposes. The underlying problem continues to be that too many of our primary sources of information are un- reliable, that we are not able to understand exactly what the more credible among them actually mean, and that the figures they project usually refer to

shop conditions concerning which we have no specific knowledge.

SUMMATION

It would appear that during the period of nearly four centuries in which all printing was done on wooden handpresses, there was an erratically paced, but definite, progression in the design and construction of the equipment. The very first presses printed only one-half of a side of a sheet of paper per pass of the sheet through the press, but it is likely that a crude sliding slab, manually pushed and pulled to and from the printing and inking positions, was incorporated in the press almost from the beginning of the printing era, and that it became practical to print a full side of a sheet in one pass of the paper through the machine at an earlier date than has generally been supposed.

The improvements which were made in the equipment and the development of greater technical skills enabled pressmen to work more efficiently and to increase the speeds at which they could print. The daily output of presses in the latter years of the wooden press must then have been higher than in the earlier years.

With very few exceptions, the sur- viving records of wooden-press production rates are of little practical value to us. The accuracy of many of these sources is highly questionable, and the semantic problems involved in trying to decipher their true meaning are usually beyond solution.

It is unrealistic to project average production rate figures on a TWT basis for printing during the wooden-press era, and it is extremely difficult to make a reasonable guess about the amount of work which any particular shop was




able to turn out-unless we first know something about the quality of the work coming out of that shop, how efficiently the shop was managed, sheet size, the layout and size of the type block in the form, working hours, and so forth. The bibliographical analyst would do well to collect as much data of this nature as possible concerning a given plant and a given piece of printing before attempting to estimate the daily production rates which applied.

A very broad estimate of wooden- press speeds-based only on ART + PPT factors-mmight range from a few hundred sides a day to as many as 2,000-2,500. The larger figures in this range could probably not have been attained before the middle of the sixteenth century. However, if the NPT component is considered-as it must

be-the average output rate would inevitably be much lower, even in the best-run shops. I doubt whether most printers in the period 1550-1820 could hope to get as many as 1,500 sides per day on a regular basis for each of their presses. For work of better than average quality the daily output would have been even smaller.

The explanation of how it was possible for such vast quantities of printing to have been produced during the wooden-handpress era must be sought in the factors of time, manpower, and the number of machines in use. In effect, the frustrating slowness of the presses was offset by the application of the muscle and brain power of great num- bers of men working with great num- bers of machines over a very long span of time.

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The Performance of the Wooden Printing Press

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