But I hope this is not to be the end, and that when
people like again to make things for use and not merely for profit, the
workman will have again the reward that is more than wages.
I know that in the old-fashioned country printing-office we had this,
and we enjoyed our trade as the decorative art it also is. Questions of
taste constantly arose in the arrangement of a title-page, the display
of a placard or a handbill, the use of this type or that. They did
not go far, these questions, but they employed the critical faculty
and the æsthetic instinct, and they allied us, however slightly and
unconsciously, with the creators of the beautiful.
But now, it must be confessed, printing has shared the fate of all
other handicrafts. Thanks to united labor, it is better paid in each
of its subdivisions than it once was as a whole. In my time, the hire
of a first-rate country printer, who usually worked by the week, was
a dollar a day; but of course this was not so little in 1852 as it
would be in 1892. My childish remembrance is of the journeymen working
two hours after supper, every night, so as to make out a day of twelve
hours; but at the time I write of the day of ten hours was the law and
the rule, and nobody worked longer, except when the President’s Message
was to be put in type, or on some other august occasion.
The pay is not only increased in proportion to the cost of living, but
it is really greater, and the conditions are all very much better.
But I believe no apprentice now learns the whole trade, and each of
our printers, forty years ago, would have known how to do everything
in the kind of office he hoped to own. He would have had to make a
good many things which the printer now buys, and first among them the
rollers, which are used for inking the type on the press. These were
of a composition of glue and molasses, and were of an india-rubbery
elasticity and consistency, as long as they were in good condition. But
with use and time they became hard, the ink smeared on them, and they
failed to impart it evenly to the type; they had to be thrown away, or
melted over again. This was done on the office stove, in a large bucket
which they were cut up into, with fresh glue and molasses added. It
seems in the retrospect to have been rather a simple affair, and I do
not now see why casting a roller should have involved so much absolute
failure, and rarely have given a satisfactory result. The mould was a
large copper cylinder, and the wooden core of the roller was fixed in
place by an iron cap and foot-piece. The mixture boiled away, as it
now seems to me, for days, and far into the sleepy nights, when as a
child I was proud of sitting up with it very late. Then at some weird
hour, my father or my brother poured it into the mould, and we went
home and left the rest with fate. The next morning the whole office
crowded round to see the roller drawn from the mould, and it usually
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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