Tramp Printers

Beginning with the invention of movable type in the 15th century, itinerant artisans roamed the highways and byways of the world, working where and when they pleased. It all ended five centuries later, when computer typesetting replaced humans. Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Horace Greely (along with legions of much less famous printers) plied their trade and enjoyed adventures as tramp printers until it all suddenly vanished in the mid 1970s. A sociological study, as seen through the eyes of tramp printers themselves. Footloose and carefree, these adventurers enjoyed 500 years of freedom, working where and when they pleased. A vanished breed, today they live on through recollections, anecdotes, and memories of how it used to be, when printers worked with "real type."

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.

"Carrying a union journeyman’s card, a few basic tools, and little else, these 'itinerant' or 'tourist' typographers criss-crossed the continent for more than a century, train-hopping from newspaper to newspaper, following the railroad tracks.... The tramps helped each other over the hard places and spread the craft of printing along the way. And by standing strong in solidarity, journeymen printers fought for the eight-hour day — and won." -- Publisher website.

"She finds that a significant number of printers independently developed similar responses to the deskilling of their craft and the threat of unemployment. Demonstrating a widespread consistency in themes and expressive forms in the printers' occupational narratives, Holtzberg-Call shows that what once served as the printers' rhetoric of tradition is now their rhetoric of displacement. Initiation rites, long apprenticeships, a complex and peculiar jargon, and a gallery of legendary figures once bound hot-metal printers into a specialized, highly regarded occupational folk community. The hot-metal printers' lore has survived in an exemplary form that functions as a source of reconciliation with the demise of their craft." "Holtzberg-Call analyzes how and why the printers traditionalize and idealize their work experience, drawing parallels between the shift from mechanical to computer typesetting and an equally disconcerting transition in the nineteenth century, when Linotype deposed handset type. She also shares her knowledge of the many aspects of hot-metal printing culture, from the life of the tramp printer to the meanings of various printing terms to the operation of a Linotype machine. One gains a sense of the conditions in the old type shops, where long hours, excessive heat, and poorly ventilated fumes from solvent, ink, and molten lead were the crucible in which camaraderie, pride, and fulfillment were forged.".