The Printer in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg: An Account of His Life & Times, & of His CraftRouse, Parke
History
The Printer in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg: An Account of His Life & Times, & of His Craft
Rouse, Parke
Printing -- Virginia -- Williamsburg -- History -- 18th century
So pronounced was the decline in Williamsburg’s fortunes that from the
year of the government’s removal until forty-four years later, in 1824,
Williamsburg had no newspaper. Old copies of the three _Gazettes_ were
treasured reminders of the town’s past glory. The name, _Virginia
Gazette_, and some of the tradition of Parks’s skill were remembered,
but little was done to perpetuate them until the late Dr. W. A. R.
Goodwin in 1926 invited Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to restore
Williamsburg. As a by-product of that movement, the proud masthead of
William Parks’s original _Virginia Gazette_ was revived in 1930 by the
late Joseph A. Osborne and his family. Likewise, in the realm of paper
manufacture, typography, book production, and bookbinding, Colonial
Williamsburg has revived the workmanship of William Parks and his
confreres. In such publications as _The Williamsburg Art of Cookery, or,
Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion_, published in 1938, and _A Brief &
True Report concerning Williamsburg in Virginia_, first published in
1935, Colonial Williamsburg emulated type, paper, format, and binding of
similar volumes from Parks’s press. And at its Printing Office, it has
sought to recapture the manner and mood of a colonial printing shop as a
part of its program to teach twentieth-century Americans more about the
lives and ideas of their pre-Revolutionary ancestors.
_TECHNIQUES OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PRINTING_
In considering the craft of printing, it is important to remember that
the western world has enjoyed the invention of movable type only since
the middle of the fifteenth century. For several centuries thereafter,
the new development was regarded with suspicion by church and state,
which, as we have seen, feared the freedom of thought that would ensue
if reading matter were readily available. Even in the eighteenth
century, an era of enlightenment, printing was suspect.
An equally difficult obstacle facing the colonial printer was the cost
of his press, his type, his paper, and his equipment. Eighteenth-century
industry was largely home operated, based on the capital and ingenuity
of one family. Yet the cost of equipping even the modest one- or
two-press shops of eighteenth-century America was a burden for most
people of the working class. In his famous _Autobiography_, Benjamin
Franklin gives a vivid picture of the immense labor and thought that lay
between a printer’s apprenticeship and ownership. To reach the level of
success that Franklin and Parks achieved required not only skill but
unusual industry and shrewdness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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