THIS WEEK

With Frank Romano 

Hi!  This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Welcome Back!  Now this is not in anyway ego; this is what I do.  This is my only hobby, perhaps my only vice and that is collecting books about printing.  And so on my recent trip, I shipped back eight cartons of stuff. 

“Diana Ross, eat your heart out.” 

It’s easier than shipping it back to my house, and by the way, some of this stuff is gonna stay here in any case.  But as I travel through England and various places and in Scandinavia and the Baltic, I found some interesting things. 

Here is a book called The Novelty of Newspapers.  Talking about how Victorian fiction was affected by news.  You see, once there was news and they started reporting on murders and thefts and poverty and whatever, it inspired Victorian writers to write novels about those things.  And the book traces some of the major writers and the stories of the period and the publications of the day and how they influenced certain kinds of novels. 

The Story of Libraries.  One of the great subjects dear to my heart.  What happens to a library in the future?  What will be in a library?  Will there be books or just files and files and you access them on computers?  This talks about from the very beginning before there was the great Alexandrian Library and Pergamon which was also an equally large library. 

“I had a library card for both.” 

Korean Printing.  From – its origins to 1910.  Supposedly, that’s where printing really began, then went to China.  Some people say it started in China, but the book makes the case that Korea was doing it before.  

This was interesting, Publishing, Politics, & Culture.  This book talks about the king’s printers in the reigns of King James I and II.  I’m sorry, King James I and King James V.  What was interesting was the King James Bible.  Most people don’t know the politics and intrigue surrounding the King James Bible.  It was the Bible that influenced the English language perhaps more than Chaucer and Caxton, who essentially printed the first books in the English language. 

What you had with the King James Version was the eloquence of the English language and there was phenomenal intrigue in terms of who was going to print it and how it was going to get printed. 

These two books I found in a rare book shop in Copenhagen.  This is called, Playing Cards, this one is Playing and Other Cards and they were printing playing cards before there was printing.  Before Guttenberg printed a single piece of paper, they printed playing cards.  They were round in some cases; they were printed from wooden blocks.  The word printing existed in their vocabulary.  So 50 to 100 years before Guttenberg, we were printing things, we just didn’t think of it that way. 

This was a – it’s called Printing Places.  It’s a story of where printing was, what places – where did you put the plant, where was it organized.  And it was from around 1500, the book covers. 

This is a fascinating book.  It’s called Burning Books and it talks about books over the years, over the generations have been burned, destroyed, taken out of print.  I mean there are things in the Vatican Library they still will not release because, oh god!  It might affect the way we think about religion. 

What’s going to happen in the electronic age?  Are you going to delete, as Amazon did on the Kendall?  Are you going delete your files instead of burning them, so we have another word, “deleting books?”  Is that going to be the term that we’ll use? 

Printing on the Iron Handpress.  You’ve heard of the Iron Chef, this is the Iron Handpress.  I have a number of books on that, I’ve not seen this one, I’ve heard about it, but never found one.  I found this in – somewhere in Stockholm.  You could imagine the weight of carrying all this stuff around with me and then shipping it all back. 

“I do love a good workout.” 

After 1800, Lord Stanhope started to make presses out of metal.  I saw one of the first of his presses in the UK just outside of London, in Gunner’s B Park, I think it’s called.  It’s not a long walk from the Tube Stop and they have one of the last, I think, existing Stanhope Presses at the Museum of Printing we have tons of them.  Well, tons in more ways than one, if you will. 

This one is heavy.  I have never seen this one before, The Stationers’ Company’s Craft Lectures.  And what it is is the material used to teach courses on printing for the Station Houses.  Now the Stationers’ Company was the enterprise in England that did much of the printing.  And these are the lectures from 1928 to 1931.  I found them on a little street in London off of the main drag.  It was down at the bottom, misfiled.  But as soon as I saw “Stationers’” then my – ah, my eyes lit up at that point.  But you can see, even with what is essentially a curriculum, they still printed it with red, initial caps, beautifully done in letter press, of course. 

These two books are old books.  They’re not about printing.  They are:  Addison

And Steele.  I don’t know if any of your remember Addison and Steele

“They used to come over for canasta.” 

They were the first essayists and they had publications.  They were not newspapers and they were not magazines.  They were journals.  And in there they would write essays, or other people would write essays about topics about the time.  And then again, they’re not titled what it’s about; you sort of have to read the whole thing to figure it out.  They’re all dated.  They’re all in the 1700’s.  The reason I bought these two books, and one is a collections of Addison’s essays, and the other is a collections of Steele’s essays, is that one of the best courses I ever too in high school, and of course it wasn’t’ apparent at the time because who really cares about what you do in high school, was a class on writing essays.  And they used Addison and Steele’s essays as examples and we had to sort of follow their ideas and their approach and their outlines and whatever.  I always found that that helped me in good stead as a writer.  Writing an essay – I’m good at essays, I can write something short.  Writing a book is hard, except that I figured it out.  A book is nothing more than a collection of essays, you just happen to call them chapters. 

Once I figured that out it was pretty easy to go from there.  But in any case, much of the material in these essays, you would have to know what was happening in London at that time to really understand the thrust of what they’re doing.  But they’re beautifully written and that’s why I think they’re special.  And great.  I also like the fact that they’re great examples of great printing. 

So, those are the kinds of things I collected.  But the ones that I collected that I like the most and I found these – there was an Antiquarian Book show in London.  It just happened to be there at the time I was there and I found a copy of the London Gazette from 1780.  I have another one from 1814.  This is the same publication, by the way, many years later.  And then I found one called the London Chronicle.  And again, the reason they’re this size; they’re actually twice this size.  That was the size of the bed of the press.  And that was about the size you could print.  So most of them were four pages and they were all numbered, by the way.  The London Gazette, this is issue number 12,103.  And I think I – in a very early video, I showed you the one I have framed of the London Gazette from 1682, which I think was one of the first that they did.  So, I’m trying to find some of them at different points in history to sort of have a collection of them. 

So those are the kinds of things I saw about the past of printing.  Next Week, we’ll get back to the future of printing, if you will or the present. 

Take care! 

Next time…

Although down at the bottom it just mentions states.  Okay.  Okay, bear with me here.