Nineteenth Century Printing Practices And The Iron Handpress

Examines of printing techniques from the late-seventeenth-century through the nineteenth-century. Using selected readings from printers' manuals - beginning with Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, 1683, and culminating with John Southward's Practical Printing, 1900.

Printing on the Iron Handpress is the most comprehensive book ever published on the subject. Precise techniques for printing on the handpress are presented here in lucid, step-by-step procedures that Rummonds perfected over a period of almost twenty-five years at his celebrated Plain Wrapper Press and Ex Ophidia. In tandem with more than 400 detailed diagrams by George Laws, Rummonds describes every procedure a printer needs to know from setting up a handpress studio to preparing books for the binder. Printing historians, as well as amateur and professional printers, will be intrigued by the wealth of additional information on historical printing practices that Rummonds intersperses throughout his text.

"As bibliographers or book historians, we perform our work by changing the function of the objects we study. We rarely pick up an Aldine edition to read one of the classical texts it contains. . . . Print culture, under this notion, is not a medium for writing or thought but a historical object of study; our bibliographical field, our own concoction, becomes the true referent of the objects we define as its foundation."—From the Introduction What is a book in the study of print culture? For the scholar of material texts, it is not only a singular copy carrying the unique traces of printing and preservation efforts, or an edition, repeated and repeatable, or a vehicle for ideas to be abstracted from the physical copy. But when the bibliographer situates a book copy within the methods of book history, Joseph A. Dane contends, it is the known set of assumptions which govern the discipline that bibliographic arguments privilege, repeat, or challenge. "Book history," he writes, "is us." In Blind Impressions, Dane reexamines the field of material book history by questioning its most basic assumptions and definitions. How is print defined? What are the limits of printing history? What constitutes evidence? His concluding section takes form as a series of short studies in theme and variation, considering such matters as two-color printing, the composing stick used by hand-press printers, the bibliographical status of book fragments, and the function of scholarly illustration in the Digital Age. Meticulously detailed, deeply learned, and often contrarian, Blind Impressions is a bracing critique of the way scholars define and solve problems.

For centuries, street literature was the main cheap reading material of the working classes: broadsides, chapbooks, songsters, prints, engravings, and other forms of print produced specifically to suit their taste and cheap enough for even the poor to buy. Starting in the sixteenth century, but at its chaotic and flamboyant peak in the nineteenth, street literature was on sale everywhere – in urban streets and alleyways, at country fairs and markets, at major sporting events and holiday gatherings, and under the gallows at public executions. For this very reason, it was often despised and denigrated by the educated classes, but remained enduringly popular with the ordinary people. Anything and everything was grist to the printers’ mill, if it would sell. A penny could buy you a celebrity scandal, a report of a gruesome murder, the last dying speech of a condemned criminal, wonder tales, riddles and conundrums, a moral tale of religious danger and redemption, a comic tale of drunken husbands and shrewish wives, a temperance tract or an ode to beer, a satire on dandies, an alphabet or “reed-a-ma-daisy” (reading made easy) to teach your children, an illustrated chapbook of nursery rhymes, or the adventures of Robin Hood and Jack the Giant Killer. Street literature long held its own by catering directly for the ordinary people, at a price they could afford, but, by the end of the Victorian era, it was in terminal decline and was rapidly being replaced by a host of new printed materials in the shape of cheap newspapers and magazines, penny dreadful novels, music hall songbooks, and so on, all aimed squarely at the burgeoning mass market. Fascinating today for the unique light it shines on the lives of the ordinary people of the age, street literature has long been neglected as a historical resource, and this collection of essays is the first general book on the trade for over forty years.

A large-scale reference work covering the journalism industry in 19th-Century Britain.

Puzzling the Reader establishes the place of charms and riddles in nineteenth-century British literature by exploring the literary and political work riddles performed at cultural thresholds: courtship, initiation, death rituals, moments of greeting, and intercultural relations. Furthermore, Puzzling the Reader investigates the new narrative genre that riddles uncover by transforming traditional narrative techniques. Far from disappearing from view, the oral tradition of the riddles rises into view alongside the literary narratives of William Blake, John Keats, and Charles Dickens. The folk tradition of the riddle is imported into print media and reaches its zenith in the nineteenth century. Through analyses of riddles in weekly literature and satire magazines, parlor game books, and popular collected riddles, such as Queen Victoria's «Windsor Enigma», this volume examines the literary and political roles riddles play as they migrate into mass print culture. Three crucial texts illustrate this argument: Blake's «Jerusalem», Keats's «The Eve of St. Agnes», and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. Each is a work of formal experimentation and each typifies the full range of word play in the period. From Blake to Keats to Dickens, nineteenth-century British literature charts a «history» of the literary riddle.

With the advent of new digital communication technologies, the end of print culture once again appears to be as inevitable to some recent commentators as it did to Marshall McLuhan. This book charts the elements involved in such claims through a method that examines the iconography of materials, marks and processes of print, and in this sense acknowledges McLuhan's notion of the medium as the bearer of meaning.