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This Element analyzes the relationship between gender and
Women and Letterpress
Battershill
literary letterpress printing from the early twentieth century to
the beginning of the twenty-first. Drawing on examples from
modernist writer/printers of the 1920s to literary book artists
of the early twenty-first century, it offers a way of thinking Printing 1920–2020
about the feminist historiography of printing as we confront
the presence and particular character of letterpress in a digital
age. This Element is divided into four sections: the first,
Gendered Impressions
‘Historicizing’, traces the critical histories of women and print
through to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second
section, ‘Learning’, offers an analysis of some of the modes
of discourse and training through which women and gender
minorities have learned the craft of printing. The third section,
Women and Letterpress Printing 1920–2020

‘Individualizing’, offers brief biographical vignettes. The fourth
section, ‘Writing’, focusses on printers’ own written reflections
about letterpress. This title is also available as Open Access on
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009219365 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cambridge Core.
Cambridge Elements in Publishing and Book Culture
Series Editor:
Samantha Rayner
University College London
Associate Editor:
Leah Tether
University of Bristol
Publishing and Book Culture

Women, Publishing, and Book Culture
ISSN 2514-8524 (online)
Claire Battershill
ISSN 2514-8516 (print)
Elements in Publishing and Book Culture
edited by
Samantha Rayner
University College London
Leah Tether
University of Bristol
WOMEN AND LETTERPRESS

PRINTING 1920–2020
Claire Battershill
University of Toronto
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
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DOI: 10.1017/9781009219365
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ISSN 2514-8516 (print)
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accurate or appropriate.
Women and Letterpress Printing
1920–2020
Elements in Publishing and Book Culture
DOI: 10.1017/9781009219365
First published online: May 2022
Claire Battershill
University of Toronto
Author for correspondence: Claire Battershill, [email protected]
Abstract: This Element analyzes the relationship between gender

and literary letterpress printing from the early twentieth century
to the beginning of the twenty-first. Drawing on examples from
modernist writer/printers of the 1920s to literary book artists of
the early twenty-first century, it offers a way of thinking about

the feminist historiography of printing as we confront the
presence and particular character of letterpress in a digital age.
This Element is divided into four sections: the first,
‘Historicizing’, traces the critical histories of women and print
through to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second
section, ‘Learning’, offers an analysis of some of the modes of
discourse and training through which women and gender
minorities have learned the craft of printing. The third section,
‘Individualizing’, offers brief biographical vignettes. The fourth
section, ‘Writing’, focusses on printers’ own written reflections
about letterpress. This title is also available as Open Access on
Cambridge Core.
KEYWORDS: book history, letterpress, feminism, women’s history,

literary printing
© Claire Battershill 2022
ISBNs: 9781009219327 (PB), 9781009219365 (OC)
ISSNs: 2514-8524 (online), 2514-8516 (print)
Contents
Preface 1
1 Historicizing 5
2 Learning 26
3 Individualizing 42
4 Writing 56
Coda: Letterpress at a Distance 80
Glossary 84
Bibliography 92
Women and Letterpress Printing 1920–2020 1
Preface
This story begins in a rather unexpected place, with an unlikely figure for
a study of women and the art of letterpress printing. Robertson Davies was
a Canadian novelist and the first Master of Massey College in Toronto,
Canada. A gruff old fellow with a formidable beard, he was a celebrated
writer and by all accounts a hilarious storyteller – but he was no feminist. For
the first nine years of his time as the Master of Massey College (1963–81), in
fact, the institution only admitted men.1 He acquired printing presses for the
college, with the intention that the students might use them to print their own
writings, and so were born the ‘Quadrats’2 – a group of professional
typographers, printers, and bibliophiles who built a small society and an
impressive collection of printing materials, ephemera, and antique
equipment.3 It was in this space, called The Bibliography Room, where
I first learned how to print, in 2008, alongside other novice printers – mostly
women.4 I spent nearly every Thursday afternoon during the five years of my
PhD programme in an informal apprenticeship5 learning how to set metal
1
The first female fellows were admitted to the college in 1974. For a detailed
history of Massey College, see Skelton, A Meeting of Minds.
2
For a history of the Quadrats and a list of members, see Skelton, A Meeting of
Minds, pp. 126–8.
3
For all instances of specialist printing terminology, I either define these in plain
language within the text or indicate these in bold and include them in the Glossary
at the end of the Element for reference. ‘Quadrat’ in this context is a printing play
on words, referring triply to a small unit of spacing used to make up a line of type,
to a square used in ecology to define the boundaries of a specific area of study, and
to the architectural space of the college ‘quadrangle’ that forms an enclosed spatial
centre associated with academic life.
4
My contemporaries 2008–12 were Lindsey Eckert and Heather Jessup. I was
taught by the college librarian, Marie Korey, and the college printers, first Brian
Maloney and then Nelson Adams.
5
During my time at Massey, the apprenticeship programme was formalized and it
continues now with new ‘printing fellows’ joining each year. Please see ‘Printing
Fellowship Program’ for full curricular details and names of apprentices. For
a student’s account of the experience of learning in The Bibliography Room and
further details of the printing equipment and its provenance, see King, ‘Grab an
2 Publishing and Book Culture
type, how to clean and preserve wood type, how to sort spacing by size, how
to produce prints on a variety of different nineteenth-century cast-iron hand
presses, and how to tell the stories of those presses for interested passers-by.
Mostly, I made ephemeral prints such as bookmarks and event keepsakes and
quartos for use in book history graduate seminars.
While I was never a part of the inner circle of ‘Quadrats’ at Massey,
I accessed that space as a female student working on Virginia Woolf’s
Hogarth Press, open to learning and unaware at the time of the long history
and bounded nature of print shops as gendered enclosures. My own interest
in Hogarth Press stemmed initially from the hypothesis, also advanced by
Hermione Lee, Alice Staveley, and others, that the rhythms and processes
of letterpress printing were connected, for Woolf, to her writing.6
Following Woolf in the 1920s and 1930s, other modernist women writers
also took up letterpress printing, notably Nancy Cunard and Laura Riding,7
and in this Element I aim to enrich some of the context around and extend
the narrative from Woolf: through the trade structures that excluded
women writers to the other modernist women who also printed and then
through to the present moment and to the afterlife of the modernist

independent press in contemporary letterpress projects by women.
I recognize here that Woolf is a privileged exception in the world of
printing, as I am: quite a lot of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century print
history is predicated on the assumption that the writer and the printer would
be separate individuals with separate jobs to do. The purpose of trade
printing was not the same as acts of printing undertaken by artists or by
students. As an apprentice at Massey, however, I had academic, creative, and
historical intentions simultaneously. I wanted to learn how to print in part
because I thought it might help me think differently about how Woolf wrote
but also about how I might write. In learning to set type and to print,
Apron’. For a video tour of The Bibliography Room and an introduction to

typesetting, please see Bromberg et al., ‘An Introduction to Letterpress Printing’.
6
My first book, Modernist Lives, focusses on a rather different element of the
Hogarth Press’s operations, its biographical publications.
7
For more on Riding’s print practice, see Kopley, Virginia Woolf and Poetry and
Bö rjel, ‘The Vampire and the Darling Priest of Modernism’.
I explored the malleable relationship between language, tactility, and time.

I therefore, like Johanna Drucker,8 take as fundamental the idea that letter-
press printing is a literary art and an art of textuality. That there is
a relationship between the intellectual contents being printed and the act of
printing itself, and that this relationship is even more intimate when the
writing and the printing are done by the same individual or small collabora-
tive group, seems essential in understanding the value of printing as a form of
expression undertaken by women writers, activists, and artists in the twen-
tieth and twenty-first-centuries. The lay of the type case, the sound of the ink
on rollers, the sensory and embodied experiences of print, all of these are
pleasures and processes that matter to writers who print. The words on the
page also matter enough to the writers who produce them that they demand
the care, attention, and time required by the slow art of letterpress. Figure 1 is
an example of a keepsake produced by Elisa Tersigni, at the time one of the
student apprentices in The Bibliography Room, as a commentary on the
gendered nature of printing.
In what follows, I will lay out what I see as some of the contours of the
rich history of women and letterpress printing in Canada, the United States,
and the UK, through the twentieth century and up to 2020. I propose here
a number of ways of thinking interdisciplinarily and theoretically about the
historiography of women and printing. Throughout, I take an integrative
approach, pulling materials from design history, printing history, book
history, literary studies, creative writing studies, feminist historiography,
and interdisciplinary craft studies.
This Element is organized in four sections. In Section 1, I begin with
a methodological reflection on the existing critical discourse on women and
printing, an analysis of some of the particular considerations of letterpress’s
role in a contemporary era, and a reflection on why practitioners might choose
this technology now. I continue in Section 2 with an analysis of some of the
modes of discourse and training through which women have learned the craft
of printing. In this section, I also offer a brief description of the process of
letterpress printing itself and its associated terminology, which I read for its
gendered linguistic associations. In Section 3, I discuss short vignettes
8
Drucker, ‘Letterpress Language’.
Figure 1 ‘Let Her Press’ printed in the Massey College Bibliography

Room by Elisa Tersigni. Photograph by Tim Perry. Reproduced with the
permission of the artist.
focusing on particular examples of women engaged in acts of printing as

representations of gendered labour. Section 4 focusses on printers’ own
written reflections about letterpress and particularly about the relationship
that author-printers see between their role as authors and the act of printing.
1 Historicizing
The critical history of women in printing is rich but also rather diffuse. It
crosses work in a variety of disciplines: graphic design history, literary
studies, book history, labour and political history, and women and gender
studies. There are many fascinating individual case studies of societies and
collectives, particularly in the period just preceding the one I consider here,
such as the Women’s Printing Society, the Cuala Press,9 and the Victoria
Press.10 Often these studies isolate a component of the story: the social
structures of trade unions, the mechanics of printing, or a literary analysis of
the works on the page. In this Element, I draw from all of these different
disciplinary foundations in order to form a method for analysing the ways in
which form and craft – as polysemic constructs that cross the boundary
between materiality and textuality – can encourage holistic thinking about
women and print without oversimplifying a complex and diverse set of
individual examples. In this section, I offer an interdisciplinary approach to
women and printing that considers the topic from a variety of perspectives.
1.1 Formes and Forms

The focus of this Element is, in one sense, rigorously specific: I write here
primarily about letterpress printing and not about other mechanisms by
which prints and books can be or have been made in the last 100 years. I do
not write here about zines made using photocopiers or mimeographs, about
mass-produced artefacts, about textual embroidery samplers, or about
calligraphy, although all of these are fascinating textual media with growing
critical literatures, and many of the questions provoked by letterpress
printing might equally apply to bookmaking using other methods.11 I am
interested specifically in understanding what is distinctive about letterpress
9
See Ciara, ‘Women of the Cuala Press’.
10
For an account of women’s labour in the seventeenth century, see Coker,
‘Gendered Spheres’.
11
Work on artists’ books that use a variety of print technologies is an important
source of dialogue for thinking about letterpress. See Drucker’s The Century of
Artist’s Books and Weber’s Freedom of the Presses.
in a time when transferring text in multiple copies onto paper is extremely

fast with the use of digital printing and, in some cases, no longer even
necessary at all since we frequently now do our reading on screens. To
borrow a term more commonly used for newer technologies and in design
theory, what are the precise ‘affordances’ of letterpress for literature during
this period of time, and how might those affordances relate to the tangled
histories of feminism, aesthetics, and labour in the twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries? In order to unpack these various affordances, my
specific examples here focus primarily on relatively small operations and the
work of a small subgroup of letterpress artists I define, particularly in
Section 4, as literary printers.
In her influential book, Forms (2015), Caroline Levine begins with
a challenge to the critical orthodoxy that a literary critic doing her job
ought to ‘keep her formalism and her historicism analytically separate’.12
Instead, Levine posits a framework in which ‘forms are at work
everywhere’13 and advocates for a more capacious analysis of social
and political structures, literary structures, and material structures all
as forms deserving of formalist attention. The idea of form itself has been
at the heart of literary critical crises of disciplinary self-representation
throughout the period of time I cover in this Element. Formalism’s rise
in the early twentieth century – via the New Critics such as Eliot and
Empson and the Russian Formalists – was initially concerned with the
analysis of literary texts on their own terms, stripped of easy explanatory
contextual meanings and analysable through close attention to linguistic
particulars. Formalism in this sense does not, in most cases, admit the
possibility or relevance of material form into the discussion. The ‘form’
of a poem generally would be more likely to refer to its categorization as
sonnet rather than the fact that the b o d y t e x t of the edition under
consideration is set in 12pt Caslon type. Yet material form and literary
form in the cases I discuss in this Element are aligned and allied. Johanna
Drucker’s study of early twentieth-century experimental typography
argues forcefully that ‘it is in material that the activity of signification
is produced’,14 and not only in works that exploit deliberately disruptive
12 13 14
Levine, Forms, p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Drucker, The Visible Word, p. 4.
or innovative typographical practices. A consideration of all elements of

form, literary, linguistic, material, and historical, is merited in a study of
textual artefacts and the processes and practices that produced them. The
idea of form also finds a material and literal meaning in the printing
world in the object of the ‘ffo r m e ’, the ready-to-print object: a metal
frame (a c h a s e ) in which the page layout including type, illustrations,
and spacing is locked. A forme is a bounded and constrained space in
which almost infinite possibilities have been l o c k e d u p and are ready to
print, including all of the various possibilities of literary form. Many
letterpress artists, as I will discuss in Section 3, are thinking about both
form and forme as they produce their work: they’re thinking about
language, rhythm, and metaphor just as they are about line length,
j u s t i fi c a t i o n , and paper type.
In my frame of reference, letterpress is primarily an artist’s, activist’s, or
writer’s medium, as opposed to an instrumental or commercial technology.
However, understanding the structural history of labour in printing is
crucial to understanding subsequent constructions of gender in twentieth-
century print. I therefore address industrial trade history here, particularly

in Section 2, in order to demonstrate the forms of exclusionary practices in
print shops that inform the work and the experiences of later artists. There
is, however, for most of the printers I write about here, significant self-
awareness and conscious adoption of this medium for specifically artistic,
political, or literary purposes.
1.2 Forming a Critical Discourse

Although letterpress printing has its own specific history, new work on this
subject must, of course, be situated in relation to the broader critical debates
about gender in book history. In a 2020 roundtable hosted by the
Bibliographical Society of America entitled ‘Building Better Book
Feminisms’, Leslie Howsam looked back at her 1998 article in SHARP
News, ‘In My View: Women and Book History’. In writing that piece, she
intended to begin a conversation in the field about the fact that, although
book history as a whole tends either to be treated as a genderless, object-
oriented space or to default to masculinity, ‘women can be identified at
every node in the cycle and at all periods in history’.15 While the work of
feminist recovery has highlighted specific women involved in the produc-
tion of books – from widows managing printing operations after their
husband’s death to feminist collectives running publication initiatives spe-
cifically aimed at female readerships – Howsam noted that the methodolo-
gical structure of book history could hardly be considered feminist.16
Reflecting on this piece twenty-two years later, Howsam remarked that
she had hoped it would be the first in a great number of feminist book
historical ventures and that it would spark a lively conversation in our
field.17 And so she waited . . . and waited. In spite of Howsam’s call to bring
women’s labour and practice more to the fore in book history discussions,
Kate Ozment, writing in 2019, persuasively delineates the ways in which
‘the history of the book is still largely defined as a male homosocial
environment where female figures are briefly mentioned on the margins
of textual production or invisible altogether’.18 In spite of the rich tradition
of work on women and print on which I build here, there is clearly still more
to be done, particularly on the matter of how we theorize gender in book
history.
A practice of feminist book history scholarship depends on an explicitly
and generously citational ethos that acknowledges lineages of discourse
both within and outside the field. As Ozment points out, however, the
establishment of canonical and overly rigid critical and methodological
approaches can be just as limiting in practice as relying on a small selection
of frequently repeated case studies and examples. If we continue to rely too
heavily on Robert Darnton’s models and examples for book history – which
was never his intent in any case in creating them – we risk missing what
might exist outside or beyond or even deeper within Darnton’s ‘commu-
nications circuit’ and lose some of the sociological structures and nuances
that underlie each of the different components of the model itself.19 Part of
the reason for my granular focus in this Element on letterpress printing
15
Howsam, ‘In My View’, p. 1. 16 Ibid., pp. 1–2.
17
Evangelestia-Dougherty et al., ‘Building Better Book Feminisms’.
18
Ozment, ‘Rationale for Feminist Bibliography’, p. 50 (emphasis added).
19
Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?’, p. 68.
specifically, and even on a particular kind of letterpress printer, is to isolate

a component of book historical production that has its own complex and
specific history of gendered labour practices and subsequent artistic refa-
shionings. Part of what I seek to do in this Element is to suggest – as Alice
Staveley put it, recontextualizing for book history Gertrude Stein’s phrase
that there ‘is a there there’ – that the broader subject of women and
letterpress is one we can treat with the same analytical force as we do the
purportedly genderless or object-oriented history of print.20 The metaphor
of the constellation might serve us as feminist historians here: we can
apprehend patterns and images even as we acknowledge the limited nature
of our own perspectives.
The gender dynamics of the book trade at large are, as has been amply
documented, more nuanced and diverse than the specific history of women
and letterpress.21 Unlike bookbinding, which has a long, rich history of
women’s participation;22 unlike editorial and secretarial work, which was
historically (and often invisibly) done by women (particularly as the
industry began to be ‘feminized’ through the nineteenth century, as
Sarah Lubelski has shown in her excellent study of Bentley’s);23 unlike

the ‘feminizing’ of typesetting in the photocomposition era, when it could
be done at a keyboard;24 when the physical work of operating a printing
press was a foundational part of the commercial trade, women could run
the feeding station of a steam press but not actually operate it. J. A. Stein
argues that printing and specifically the role of the press machinist
continued into the 1980s to call up a specific association with ‘masculine
craft identities’.25 Even as offset lithography began to take over in the
trade, there was a further retrenchment of gendered roles, including ‘a
masculine embodiment that was attuned to and shaped by the materiality
and aesthetics of printing technologies’.26 Stein further notes that the
20
Staveley, in conversation, May 2021.
21
For broader bibliographic work on gender in this scholarly field, see Coker and
Ozment’s excellent ‘Women in Book History Bibliography’.
22
See Tidcombe, Women Bookbinders.
23
Lubelski, ‘A Gentlewoman’s Profession’. 24 See Cockburn, Brothers.
25
Stein, Hot Metal, p. 75. 26 Ibid.
continuation of this gendered dynamic in the print industry after the

commercial decline of letterpress points to the fact that these masculine
associations were not tied specifically to letterpress traditions but were
related to ‘other dimensions of technology, such as aesthetics, design,
embodied “know-how” and the physical presence of large-scale machin-
ery on the shop floor’.27 I would like to define and interrogate the
gendered resistance culture that arises in letterpress communities of the
twentieth century and, particularly with the rise of online communities,
into the twenty-first. What does it look like to take a craft with a history of
masculine professional identities and make it feminist or feminine or non-
binary? What does it mean, moreover, to make it into a frequently and
deliberately amateur undertaking – something you learn not necessarily
through a formal apprenticeship or a trade school but through old manuals
scavenged from used book sales or borrowed from libraries, from friends
in your own little studio, or simply through trial and error?
1.3 Constellated Historiography

Print feminisms, perhaps unsurprisingly, follow the broad strokes of the

history of feminism through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first:
from the first wave of suffragettes using letterpress to make posters and
pamphlets28 through to the present day of interrogating what narratives of
predominantly white women’s history can mean for intersectional construc-
tions of gender29 that unravel hegemonic categories. As the labour struc-
tures around women’s participation changed through the course of the
century, so too did the content of the prints, reflecting the feminisms of
the moment.
Part of what I intend to do in this Element is to intervene methodolo-
gically in the field by considering how and why we might approach the
study of women printers in a constellated rather than a comprehensive
fashion. I focus here on some very bright stars and some less visible ones,
and some patterns and implications arise from seeing them together, but
I make no attempt here to suggest that I’m showing the whole firmament.
The figure of the constellation has helped me to think about the extremely
27
Ibid. 28
See Murray, ‘Deeds and Words’. 29
See Mowris, ‘What I Learned’.
challenging process of example selection in a time period that is so full, so

diverse, and so complex that drawing out particular examples almost
inevitably feels either overdetermined by existing canons of print culture
or feminist history or else completely random. Thinking about feminist
historiography as a constellated practice allows patterns and suggestions of
meaning to come into and fall out of view; it suggests that some kind of
narrative is possible but that comprehensiveness is not the goal. I also hope
to offer a method in which other views of the field are not only possible but
explicitly welcome. I hope readers will consider this Element an enthusiastic
invitation to future work in this area, particularly in contexts outside Britain
and North America.
Rather than providing a comprehensive collection of women who print
using letterpress in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I instead gather
a constellation of examples in order to suggest what it might mean more
broadly for the historical masculinities of letterpress printing culture to
encounter non-dominant gendered experiences. The inevitable gaps and
silences in this Element are due in part to the uneven nature of research on
printing history and particularly on the aspects that go beyond the actual
printed documents themselves to consider questions of labour and affective
experience. In the secondary literature on women and print, noting the
fragmentary nature of the archival record is something of a critical com-
monplace. Dianne L. Roman describes the sources on pre-nineteenth-
century American women in print as ‘unruly, tangled, and for some,
nonexistent’.30 Roman also points out that even existing well-known
resources, such as Lois Rather’s Women As Printers (1970) are not always
consistent or accurate, and materials are often gathered from a variety of
sometimes unlikely places and pieced together. Maryam Fanni, Matilda
Flodmark, and Sara Kaaman favour the term ‘messy history’, coined by
the graphic designer Martha Schofield, to describe their gathering of
historical documents and essays on the history of women in graphic design.
They describe their materials as a ‘collage of images’,31 another helpful
aesthetic figure for thinking about feminist historiography as a citational
30
Roman, ‘Detangling the Medusa’, p. 83.
31
Fanni, Flodmark, and Kaaman, Natural Enemies of Books, p. 14.
and yet non-comprehensive practice. The challenges of collecting thorough

resources have led to a frequent practice, too, of list and bibliography
making. In 1983, Barb Wieser of the Iowa City Women’s Press compiled
a directory of women printers and typesetters but was careful to emphasize
that it was ‘only a partial listing’.32 Cait Coker and Kate Ozment’s ‘Women
in Book History Bibliography’ and the Alphabettes bibliography of women
in type33 follow similar impulses to collect and continually expand the range
of reference for this discipline. The narrative threads in this Element are
necessarily and deliberately fragile, in keeping with feminist traditions of
form and narration that argue against teleological or developmental histor-
ical narratives and in favour of instances of resonance within the historical
record that can illuminate their surroundings without overdetermining the
story.
Part of the reason for the fragility of these many distributed archives of
print history and for the fragmented components of the historical record is
that, while it is most often straightforward to find out directly from a printed
object or from a library catalogue which publisher or press printed a book, it
is much more difficult to be precise about who did the actual printing, and
even less straightforward to establish or discern the gender identity of that
person. Elis Ing and Lauren Williams are currently investigating the work
of women printers in McGill Library’s Special Collections, and one of their
search techniques has been to look for the words ‘veuve’ or ‘widow’; prior
to the twentieth century, it was common for women to have their printing
work in family firms acknowledged only after their husbands had died.34
For the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such a search would prove less
fruitful, since a much wider array of women and non-binary and gender-
nonconforming people now engage in printing practices. Since many
women were, for reasons I will discuss in Section 2, often not historically
32
Wieser, ‘Women’s Printshops and Typesetting’, p. 9.
33
Veguillas, ‘Women in Type Bibliography’.
34
Ing and Williams, ‘At the Helm but Unheard’. For more on the history of
widows as printers, see Moog, ‘Women and Widows’, and, in the American
context, Ford, ‘Types and Gender’.
members of official trade unions, sometimes there is very little or no

documentation of their employment or their printing output.
The constellation as a spatial figure assumes gaps between luminous
points, but those spaces always offer the possibility of future discovery. The
printers I do feature here, particularly those in Section 4, connected to
a feminist British literary modernist tradition originating with Virginia
Woolf, skew affluent, white, literary or artistic, and well-connected. They
are some of the people who left substantive documentary evidence of their
labour and their process and whose work speaks to one another, and it is
worth acknowledging that there were many more women – and, notably,
women of colour – working as letterpress printers in this time period. Many
will have left very little trace beyond the books they printed, many of which
would not have borne even their names.35 It is partly because of the
collaborative nature of textual production that historical evidence of these
experiences is difficult to come by: printers don’t always (or even often)
write about printing, neither do they always (or even often) appear in
photographs. As Christine Moog notes, writing about some of the earliest
women working in the book trade, ‘roles that women in the industry have
played have largely been ignored – in part due to lack of archival material
and in part due to the fact that when women produced printed pieces, they
often either did not attribute their names to their work or instead credited
themselves as “heirs of a master printer”’.36 Writing in 1981 for the journal
Library Review, the printer Jean Engel urged women’s studies scholars to
take notice of women printers in spite of the dispersed and sometimes
unconventional nature of the materials they were producing: ‘We need
librarians to be aware of the existence and importance of woman-produced
materials, even though they don’t fit the norm. We need women’s studies
faculty to be aware of the publishing and printing origins of the texts they
use and of their own options in feminist publishing.’37 Institutional collec-
tions definitely contain women’s materials, but it is also crucial in the history
of printing more generally to consider alternative spaces that might house
35
For an examination of the available sources in the early American context, see
Barlow, Notes on Woman Printers.
36
Moog, ‘Women and Widows’, p. 3. 37 Engel, ‘Why Feminist Printers?’, p. 15.
some otherwise uncollected materials. The contemporary poet and printer

Lauren Elle DeGaine, writing of her historical work on women type
designers, proposes internet auction sites as other important repositories
for research:
The ‘eBay archive’ allows women’s work to be recovered

from the margins and provides a piece of the story of the role
of women in design, print culture, and book history. Such
commercial sites comprise a kind of extra-institutional inter-
national finding aid that has become an important scholarly
mechanism for recovering research material currently miss-
ing from institutional archives. At the same time, it also
highlights the instability of material culture traded in the
open market.38
Engel’s call for preservation of textual forms that might not always make it
into conventional collections aligns with Alan Galey’s work on what he
calls ‘pro-am’ or pro-amateur online archives.39 Printing historians, parti-

cularly those who once worked in the trade, are avid collectors and
cataloguers, particularly of historical equipment. These digital spaces are
often sites of memory and collection that contain tremendously rich detail
unavailable elsewhere. DeGaine’s emphasis on seeking out and locating
unconventional sources for historical materials shows that part of the way in
which we can ensure preservation of these stories is by writing and thinking
about them even in the absence of a robust or coherent institutionalized
historical record. For research on contemporary letterpress practitioners,
web communities, the Instagram archive, and the TikTok archive are
particularly vital.40
38
DeGaine, ‘The “eBay Archive”’, para. 15.
39
See Galey, ‘Looking for a Place to Happen’.
40
I will discuss the online communities of letterpress more in Section 1, but a good
example of an online community output is Brown, Detlef, and Townsend, Proof:
A Letterpress Podcast, in which letterpress practitioners discuss their practices and
equipment.
1.4 The Embodied Language of Print

I began with the personal story of my own entry into letterpress printing
because, as an embodied cognitive experience, t y p e s e t t i n g and printing
are practices that you need to physically do in order to learn. By under-
taking the print process by hand, you learn the language and the nuances
of what it means to press type into paper and thereby make an impression.
As Sarah Werner argues, there is no escaping gender, even in the
seemingly object-oriented world of bibliography: ‘If I’m only interested
in the mechanics of printing, need I think about gender at all?’ Werner
asks; ‘Well, yes, always yes, but especially yes in Renaissance England,
where the word “press” was a term that could be used both to refer to
printing but also to a physical pressing of a man into a woman, that is, an
act of sexual penetration and deflowering.’41 Wendy Wall points to the
‘bawdy’ implications of the phrase ‘undergo a pressing’, which in
Elizabethan drama referred to ‘act[ing] the lady’s part’, giving rise to
what Wall describes as the many ‘contradictions and slippages’42 inherent
in the gendered language of print. The etymological layering of ‘press’ is
just one example of printing terminology as a language of the body. We

speak of type ‘faces’, and the anatomy of a s o r t is itself a gendered one: it
has a body, a shoulder, feet, and a beard.43
Printing is a discipline rife with puns. The bodily language of typogra-
phy suggests multiple layers of meaning and interpretation, even if many of
the literal origins of printing terms and expressions we now use have
become dead metaphors. The affective valences of printing words and
phrases often reveal themselves when the terms are reconnected to their
printing origins. ‘Out of sorts’ in printing refers to the heart-stopping
moment of setting a job and realizing you haven’t enough letters (ssorts)
left in your case to say what you mean; uppercase and lowercase letters have
their origins in the spatial positioning of type cases; and ‘mind your p’s and
q’s’ (that general phrase exhorting people to fastidiousness) is in printing an
expression that refers to the easy confusion for printers between these two
41
Werner, ‘Working Towards a Feminist Printing History’, p. 6.
42
Wall, The Imprint of Gender, p. 2.
43
Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, p. 9.
sorts. I include a Glossary of printing terminology (indicated in bold) at the

end of this Element in part to orient the reader and ensure that the specialist
terminology itself is not used in an exclusionary fashion but in part also to
foreground myriad ways in which the language of print is multivalent and
slips easily into a layered historical discourse.
The matter of printing language also raises aesthetic questions. One
specific way of tracing the shift in the nature of letterpress through the
twentieth century and into the twenty-first is to follow its shifting
material aesthetic. The varying depths of impression that type can
make in paper are called ‘bbi t e ’ (deep) and ‘kki s s ’ (light) impressions. It
is impossible not to see the embodied implications of these terms,
describing an encounter between paper and type in a language of intimate
physical exchange. Letterpress printing that kisses the paper just lightly
enough to produce an even impression was, until recently, considered the
most skilful and pleasing outcome; this way there was no indent visible
on the back of the page, so double-sided printing could occur without
obscuring any text.
Other methods of printing, such as digital and offset methods, do not

produce this bite at all, and so it has become a kind of aesthetic shorthand
for a material experience that announces its connections to the past, even
though historically printers were trying to be ‘kissers’ rather than ‘biters’.
As the printer Amelia Hugill-Fontanel notes, William Morris had an
influence in bringing ‘bite’ impressions into favour among fine printers in
the nineteenth century, and ever since ‘it’s been traditionally understood
that the kissers were commercial and the biters were fine printers’.44 In the
twenty-first century, the ‘bite’ of letterpress is what indicates a certain
authenticity, regardless of the type of print being produced. Musing on
the modern popularity of the bite impression, the printer and founder of
Ladies of Letterpress, Kseniya Thomas, speculates on the possibility of the
bite coming into popularity because of the shift towards a more amateur
print culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: ‘I almost wonder if
the deep impression we associate with letterpress today came about when
people without printing backgrounds came to letterpress, pulled their first
44
Hugill-Fontanel, ‘Impression’, para. 4.
print on their old press, and realized that the default setting – a palpable
impression – was beautiful.’45 The foregrounding and prevalence of bite
impressions highlight materiality and emphasize a ‘printishness’ akin to
Jessica Pressman’s concept of the distinctly twentieth- and twenty-first-
century phenomenon of ‘bookishness’: ‘a creative movement invested in
exploring and demonstrating love for the book as symbol, as art form, and
as artefact’.46 Just as bookish artists and enthusiasts delight in leather
bindings, the aesthetics of illustrated dust jackets, and the codex as an art
medium, printers who foreground the materiality of their practice are
deliberately emphasizing the particular sensorial qualities of print.
One complicating issue with the contemporary trend for bite impres-
sions is that to press lead into paper, especially if the paper has not be
dampened first, requires the printer to use so much p a c k i n g as to make
a deep bite is also to damage the type. Little by little, the m e t a l t y p e is
worn away by this approach, and older w o o d t y p e can crack under too
much pressure. When so much of the type that printers today use is
antique and, in some cases irreplaceable, there is concern, especially in
the conservation community, that aggressive biting is inappropriately

degrading pieces of type as artefacts. Hugill-Fontanel concludes her
essay on ‘Impression’ with this advice to printers: ‘[D]on’t settle into
the bite for bite’s sake hoopla . . . Practice safe impression!’47 Yet, since
the bite is what distinguishes relief from digital printing, it’s unlikely that
the aesthetic preference for deep impressions will go away any time soon;
in fact, many printers have found ways around this by creating new
p h o t o p o l y m e r p l a t e s that don’t need quite such a careful approach as
antique blocks and s o r t s do. The bite offers a tactile experience that
contains vestiges of strength and power. One way of distinguishing
letterpress or relief printing from laser or digital is to run a finger along
the text. The texture resulting from a bite impression matters and has
meaning to letterpress printers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
who practice this craft even as it is no longer a commercially dominant
45
‘An Interview with Kseniya Thomas’, para. 11. 46
Pressman, Bookishness, p. 1.
47
Hugill-Fontanel, para. 10.
printing technology. The kiss is still prized by many practitioners and in

library and museum settings, but the biters are also here to stay.
It might be worth pausing here for a moment, speaking of the bite and
the kiss, to consider what exactly an impression is and what it means to
make one. In various contexts, the term takes on new meanings: in elocution
or poetic metre, an impression refers to a stress or emphasis; materially, it’s
a mark produced on any surface by pressure; and even in the specialized
discourse of printing and bibliography, there are numerous meanings of the
term, since it refers to the mark made by the type in the paper but also to
a printing of a number of copies that form one issue or course of printing.
Impressions in the social or interpersonal sense are nearly always gendered
in myriad conscious and unconscious ways. Like Cathleen A. Baker and
Rebecca M. Chung, the editors of Making Impressions: Women in Printing
and Publishing (2020), I find the layered meaning useful when thinking
about women in print: they ‘make impressions’ in all of these different
senses of the word. As sometimes-conspicuous historical outsiders, women
stood out in print shops as they pressed their words into paper. Much more
broadly, the OED offers a general definition of the noun ‘impression’ as ‘the
action involved in the pressure of one thing upon or into the surface of
another; also, the effect of this’,48 and an 1875 English translation of Plato’s
Dialogues follows this same sense: ‘[T]he creation of the world is the
impression of order on a previously existing chaos.’49 As I discuss particu-
larly in relation to the work of Anaïs Nin in Part 3, this sense of seeking
solace also applies in a print context: there is something consoling about the
‘impression of order’, even if that order is available only as a neatly
distributed and organized typecase.
1.5 Letterpress in the Late Age of Print

While an entirely linear or progressive narrative history of letterpress
would involve some oversimplification, it is important to acknowledge
the basic technological shift that attends this moment in print history. In
their account of the material and technological development of print
technologies in the twentieth century, Sarah Bromage and Helen William
48
‘Impression’, n., para. 1. 49
Ibid.
note that ‘until the middle of the twentieth century print production
remained a labour intensive process. The traditional work practices that
had existed since the mid-1800s remained largely unchanged and the work-
force was strictly demarcated along work role and gender lines.’50 What
happens to those reified work roles and gender lines when this old technol-
ogy finds itself decontextualized in a contemporary context? Even as
letterpress ceased to be the technology of choice for newspapers, novels,
and many other kinds of everyday texts, towards the end of the twentieth
century, it gained a new market for upscale commercial ephemeral pro-
ducts, including wedding invitations and business cards.51 It continued, at
the same time, to be a form that suited and was intimately tied to experi-
mental literature, activism, and poetry. The 100 years leading up to our
present moment – an era Ted Striphas terms ‘the late age of print’, – are
marked by a ‘persistent unevenness’ and ‘dynamism’52 in the use of print
technologies and in the purposes to which those technologies are put. In the
case of letterpress printing, Striphas’ characteristic late twentieth- and early
twenty-first-century ‘dynamism’ is embodied in the shift away from com-
mercial and newspaper printing at the start of the century and towards art-
making, poetry broadside printing, protest posters, postcards, and wedding
invitations at the century’s end.
While the vital work of feminist print historians working on earlier
periods informs this project, in this study, I am most interested in print
production in the twentieth century into the twenty-first, and particularly the
relationship between letterpress technologies and experimental literary works
created by self-taught modernist women writers. The choice of letterpress
when other technologies are available is important but often overlooked in
the context of the longer history of the book. Much of the scholarly work on
book history and on practices of printing – everything from Robert Darnton’s
‘What is the History of Books?’ (1982, and revisited in 2008) to Roger
50
Bromage and William, ‘Materials, Technology, and the Printing Industry’, p. 41.
51
A search for ‘letterpress’ on the digital handmade craft marketplace, Etsy, as of
this writing, turns up over 50,000 results: https://www.etsy.com/ca/search?
q=letterpress
52
Striphas, The Late Age of Print, p. ix.
Chartier’s ‘The Author’s Hand to the Printer’s Mind’ (2013) – specifically

focusses on historical periods in which letterpress printing is the dominant
commercial mode of transmission for texts. The essential bibliographical and
scholarly work of Cait Coker, Margaret J. M. Ezell, Wendy Wall, Helen
Smith, Michelle Levy, Kate Ozment, and Sarah Werner, and others on
women in print, focusses primarily on a time period when letterpress printing
was the default technology for textual circulation. By the mid-twentieth
century, however, letterpress printing was no longer something that needed
to be done in order for a text or a piece of print to reach its audience. As
letterpress printing became more of an aesthetic choice and an artistic practice
through the twentieth century, it reverberated with meanings that carried
valences inherited from the complicatedly gendered traditions described in
earlier periods, often in unpredictable and subtle ways. As the viability of
letterpress within the printing industry dwindled with the rise of newer, more
efficient equipment, letterpress printing became aligned with museum culture,
with heritage, with art, and with community-based and activist initiatives.
The histories of feminist do-it-yourself (DIY) initiatives from the beginning
of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first are fragmented and often
moving. These are stories of resilience and power, and of aesthetic and
political radicalism.
1.6 Letterpress as Contemporary Craft

Because letterpress printing and especially hand-setting type became an
increasingly niche activity in the twentieth century, it now calls up the full
complexity and slipperiness of ‘craft’ as a concept. Drawing on and extend-
ing David Pye’s classic formulations of craft theory in The Nature of Art and
Workmanship (1968), Alexandra Peat argues that in the early twentieth
century: ‘[C]raft could be the authentically human handmade alternative
to industrial modernity or something automotive and mechanical; it could
be a skilled profession or work done by an amateur with a sense of vocation;
it could be the opposite to art or elevated to an art form; it could designate
the solidly material or it could carry a spiritual resonance.’53 Fundamental to
Pye’s theory of craft is the distinction between what he calls the
53
Peat, ‘A Word to Start an Argument’, p. 36.
‘workmanship of risk’ and the ‘workmanship of certainty’. In the former,

the outcome or product of a craft practice is not predetermined but depends
on the execution of a process by a fallible human being, whereas the latter
implies the precision and replicability of modern industrial practice. Pye
suggests that printing occupies a complex position between these two poles,
requiring skill and care but also resulting in duplication of a similar result
over and over once the type is ready to print (one element of risk he leaves
out, I think, which I will return to in Part 3 in my discussion of Virginia
Woolf’s printing practice, is the contingency of inking). Pye’s association of
print with certainty is also an indication of the complex status of print and its
relation to the notion of making by hand. Walter Benjamin famously aligns
print with reproducibility and replication that lacks ‘the here and now of the
original’.54 And yet printing using hand presses with movable type now
seems difficult to dissociate from traditions of craft and the handmade when
the alternative of digital printing is even further removed from the originat-
ing hand and far more ‘certain’ in the prints’ easy sameness. Pye argues in
his work that in an era when industrial production suffused with certainty is
available, craft that involves risk and a great deal of skill and time must be
undertaken ‘for love and not for money’.55 His theory prefigures also a shift
in critical discursive practices in the later part of the twentieth century
towards thinking about craft practice as closely aligned with particular
forms of contemporary art.
Glenn Adamson points to the specific and complex character of craft
practice in the modern and contemporary eras and suggests that ‘modern
craft would be best seen not as a paradox or an anachronism, or a set of
symptoms, but as a means of articulation. It is not a way of thinking outside
of modernity, but a modern way of thinking otherwise.’56 The contra-
dictory and slippery nature of craft and its implications are essential in
considering the specific nature of letterpress as a creative and material
practice. Betty Bright describes contemporary letterpress practice as one
experiencing a historic shift in materials, making it ‘a medium ripe for
54
Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’, p. 21.
55
Pye, ‘The Nature of Art and Workmanship’, p. 349.
56
Adamson, ‘Introduction’, p. 5.
artistic restatement’.57 That restatement, however, has occurred variously

and with a great deal of complexity. Bright describes the contemporary
landscape as one in ‘a state of healthy confusion, as we seek a paradigm that
links craft with art and yet is flexible enough to absorb new practices
without shutting out the accumulated knowledge that is their
backstory’.58 This paradigm involves an incredibly delicate balancing act:
managing to encourage the lineages and histories of craft practices while at
the same time opening up to innovation in what can be an incredibly
particular and precise practice with very specific standards and rules. As
Peat notes, the reputation of craft often splits dichotomously in a divided
critical landscape, but letterpress printing seems to hold all of these contra-
dictions within it: printing by hand is often an ‘and’ rather than an ‘or’ – art
and its opposite, amateur and professional, spiritual and solidly
material. Craft – like form, as I discussed earlier – is a concept that not
only crosses but disassembles the boundaries between material and linguis-
tic: now a contentiously debated term in creative writing pedagogy, the
craft of language and the craft of print overlay in uncertain and often
ambivalent relation.59
Another ‘and’ that applies to certain kinds of modern handicraft is that it’s
often part of both the past and present. Through the twentieth century and into
the twenty-first, therefore, letterpress printing undergoes a transformation
from a dominant professional technology essential to the circulation of texts
to a niche historically informed pursuit. For modernist and mid-century
writers, the use of this technology complicates the very modernity of the
works being produced by hand and introduces the rich and manifold questions
of craft and aesthetics that come with the choice of hand-printing over
mechanical or digital process that are more efficient on a commercial scale.
1.7 Why Letterpress?

A question that must be applied to any examination letterpress of our
current era is why do this difficult, finicky, time-consuming thing now, in
57
Bright, ‘Handwork and Hybrids’, p. 135. 58 Ibid., p. 149.
59
For nuanced perspectives on creative writing education and the discourse of
craft, see Salesses, Craft in the Real World and Wesbrook et al., Beyond Craft.
the twent-first century, when other options for making words appear on
paper or even on screens are readily available? The contemporary jeweler
and writer Bruce Metcalf asks a similar question of handcraft more gen-
erally: ‘Why bother when cutting-edge technology is moving towards the
complete automation of manufacturing? . . . Isn’t it stupidly nostalgic and
obsolete, or nearly so?’60 Metcalf points to psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow’ – a state of deep concentration in
which a practitioner feels transported to a realm of intense enjoyment that
rewards the hard and patient work, and that often goes into highly skilled
activities – as a motivator for craft practitioners. As the printers Cathie
Ruggie Saunders and Martha Chiplis point out, there is a strong affective
pull for those interested in letterpress now: ‘[T]here is little pleasure greater
than the satisfaction gleaned from the humble punch of metal into paper.’61
The printing historian Will Ransom similarly suggested in 1929 that maybe
the best reason to print is for the pleasure of printing: ‘The simplest and
perhaps truest type of private press is that maintained by one who is, at least
by desire, a craftsman and finds particular joy in handling type, ink, and
paper, with sufficient means and leisure to warrant such an avocation. His
literary selection may leave something to be desired and art may be
disregarded or amazingly interpreted, but he has a good time.’62
Ransom’s observation here – with its male pronouns, characteristic for
the time – is also indicative of a longstanding rift between book art as
material art and as literary content. Print quality and verse quality were not
always aligned, and this notion that book arts and literary arts can operate
independently of one another is one reason it remains challenging to marry
the two. Learning how to print and learning how to write require very
different modes and kinds of education in two historically separate disci-
plines. It’s important to note also in Ransom’s suggestion the privileged
nature of this craft, especially when it’s undertaken as an amateur pursuit
rather than as a profession: in 1929 as now, it requires ‘sufficient means and
leisure’ to produce letterpress prints, particularly if the press is not
a specifically or dominantly commercial enterprise.
60
Metcalf, ‘The Hand’, para. 5. 61 Saunders and Chiplis For the Love, p. 11.
62
Ransom, ‘What Is a Private Press?’, p. 118.
The possible justifications for producing letterpress works also change

through the course of the twentieth century. At first, small hand presses and
other such printing equipment was being sold off from the trades and was
relatively readily available; buying a tabletop Kelsey or Adana press in 1930
might be something like buying a photocopier/scanner today (Anaïs Nin,
about whom I write more later, bought her treadle-operated platen press for
$75 USD in 1941, which is the equivalent of about $1,250 USD in 2021
currency. Similarly, the woodcut artist J. J. Lankes purchased
a Washington-Hoe press for $50,63 ‘shortly after the war when [he] was
given to understand that many were broken up and disposed of as scrap
iron – no doubt for making shells, a more profitable business than making
prints)’.64 In 1929, the Excelsior Printing Supply Company was advertising
its small tabletop Kelsey 3’x5’ presses along with a starter kit of supplies and
an instructional manual for $15.70 USD.65
For printers working for much of the century, the choice of letterpress as
a technology was less about historical nostalgia and more about agency and
availability: the larger commercial presses were dauntingly large and heavy,
and digital printing obviously wasn’t available until relatively recently. To

make beautiful prints within a domestic setting, a tabletop hand press like
a Kelsey (in the United States) or an Adana (in the UK) was a logical
choice. In the twenty-first century, however, and as a resurgence in demand
for these smaller presses also started to arise, the availability of the machines
decreased and the cost correspondingly increased. Now, various do-it-
yourself and even build-it-yourself printing presses have been devised
both for sale and for wider distribution. The Provisional Press Project,
for example, arose during the 2020 pandemic as a means of distributing
functional flat-bed platen presses for artists and students who lacked access
to their studios during public health closures.66 The prevalence of these
kinds of new technology for an old craft brings us back to the relief
63
Approximately $740 USD in 2021. 64 Lankes, A Woodcut Manual, p. 26.
65
Approximately $250.00 USD in 2021. For more on the history of Kelsey,
including several digitized advertisements, see Alan Runsfeld’s resource ‘The
Excelsior Press Museum Print Shop’.
66
‘Provisional Press’, para. 1.
impression as a primary motivation for letterpress printing: without the

cast-iron originals creating the prints, the bite impression itself is the
remaining element that links a letterpress work back to print history.
It is important to note that obsolescence isn’t quite the right way of
describing letterpress, even today, because the old machinery – assuming
it’s been cared for or restored –actually still works, and in many ways the
hybrid practices of digital technology and letterpress become more and
more effective at printing as the century goes on. This is not the experience
of trying to run Windows 95 on a 2020 PC, in which case the operating
system is obsolete in the sense that it no longer functions in concert with
a new machine. This is rather more like the contemporary trend, indicated
by the popularity of social media and crafting sites like Ravelry and Etsy,
for knitting. The knitting needles still work as knitting needles have done
since eleventh-century Egypt – it is just that there is no need to use them
these days in order to procure a garment to help you stay warm. The time
and embodied consciousness that made a piece of letterpress printing is
there, even if, or maybe especially because, you can’t always see it and even
if, or perhaps especially because, you could get the words on the page more
expediently in some other way.
2 Learning
This part explores the question of how letterpress printing, as a skilled craft,
has been taught and learned through the twentieth century and into the
twenty-first. Throughout this section, I show how printers’ educations and
labour conditions have been gendered. A crucial thread here is the contrast
between education in formal trades and union participation and education
that occurs outside those structures through books, online resources, and
manuals, or through small print networks or countercultural groups. This
distinction in modes of education and degrees of labour organization also
raises the matter of distinguishing between fine printers, in the tradition of,
for instance, William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, and focussing on news-
papers, advertisements, handbills, and other trade content.
I hope that in addition to outlining the history of how different kinds of
printers learned to print, this section might also be fruitfully used as
a resource for teaching, especially in combination with some of the supple-
mentary materials in the bibliography. I therefore begin here with my own
brief illustration of the basic process of setting type and printing by hand.
I then move through the historical structures and debates around printing
education and labour organization through the century. This part lays the
foundation for understanding and interpreting the written accounts, images,
and prints in the sections that follow: in order to appreciate the significance
of printing language, it’s important to understand the mechanics of the
process and how these mechanics reflected the complex characterization of
printing as a form of craft, a form of art, and a form of labour.
2.1 Fundamentals of the Letterpress Printing Process

When people are learning to set type, what exactly is it that they need to
know? The metaphors and figural connections that writers and printers
ascribe to the language of their medium is governed by a very specific set of
material acts, objects, and principles. To begin from the (mechanical)
beginning: letterpress is a form of relief printing in which an inked, raised
surface is impressed on a piece of paper or other substrate. Before 1900, it
wouldn’t have been particularly necessary to put the ‘letterpress’ in front of
‘printing’, because textual printing would almost always have been done this
Figure 2 The process of setting type and printing on an Adana tabletop

press. Photograph by and of the author, 2014.
way.67 The machine used to create this type of print varied over time and
still varies, and the degree of handwork required can be more or less
depending on the intervening technologies that aid the process.
For the most basic letterpress setup, composing (sometimes otherwise
called setting type, hand setting, or typesetting) takes place letter by letter,
with individual sorts lined up in a composing stick.
Each line is then placed on a large, flat imposing stone and surrounded
with wooden furniture, locked up using metal quoins into a frame called
a chase, and then the whole thing – now called a forme – is laid on the press
bed. The whole process of preparing for printing is called makeready.
Then, ink is applied either directly to the type on the form using a hand
roller or using an automatic inking function on the machine. The substrate
is fed into the machine – and there are many variations on possible types of
machine, ranging from the portable tabletop press to behemoth poster
presses, which I will discuss further later – and then, voilà!, you can pull
67
Many excellent general histories of printing are available. For the classic biblio-
graphical starting point, see Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography.
your print. In many larger commercial operations, the compositor who set
the type and the pressman who pulled the prints were separate roles carried
out by individuals with distinct skills and training, although learning the
whole trade was often part of an apprenticeship process, and in many small
operations a printer would carry out all the roles.
Linotype and intertype machines, invented in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, and used widely until the 1970s and 1980s, mechan-
ized the typesetting process. The operator used a keyboard to assemble
matrices, not sorts, which then cast a whole line at a time (a ‘line o’ type’
also called a slug) and eliminated one step in the process of typesetting. In the
UK, monotype, a different process using perforated paper tape, was the
preferred technological advancement in typesetting. These machines elimi-
nated the need to hold a stick of type and the labour of dissing it for reuse
after printing. Once the work was printed, used slugs could be melted down
to be reused, and the process began over again. Commonly used early in the
century in newspaper operations, linotype casters were huge and expensive,
so they tended not to be common in domestic or small operations. However,
there are still a few of them kicking around in operation at small presses
today.68 Later in the twentieth century, it became hard even to give them
away, and many were scrapped after they fell out of general use for news-
papers in the 1980s. The preservation, restoration, and resale of letterpress
equipment has become a highly specialized, niche activity. It is now possible
to acquire some equipment through eBay and other online marketplaces, as
DeGaine reminds us, but for much of the later twentieth century and early
twenty-first, specialist dealers, like Don Black Linecasting in Toronto (now
sadly closed) tended to be the most reliable providers to furnish new printers
with equipment that had been lovingly restored to usable condition.
2.2 Hierarchies of Labour: Apprenticeships, Unions,

and the Printing Trade
Before considering the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it’s necessary to
briefly address the long history of gendered labour in the printing industry
68
For discussion of the practices of Coach House Press, including a combination of
linotype and digital methods, see Maxwell, ‘Coach House Press’.
and delineate the ways in which the systems and structures of labour in these
worlds continued throughout the century to bear on perceptions of women
as printers. Well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the printing
industry continued to be impacted by what it inherited: exclusionary trade
unions, factory acts that legislated restrictions on female participation in
industrial labour, and cultures of misogyny and gender essentialism.
From the fifteenth century onwards, letterpress printing was a trade most
commonly learned ‘on the job’ through a hierarchical apprenticeship pro-
gramme. Printers’ ‘ddevils’, as they were commonly called, were charged
with the dirtiest and most repetitive jobs in the shop: cleaning the floors and
dealing with the ‘hhellbox’ of discarded type destined to go back to the type
foundry. Eventually they worked their way up to more skilled roles, but
only after having spent years observing the craft and learning from within
the printing space. By the nineteenth century, a fairly rigid apprenticeship
system of hiring young boys for these jobs was standard across most of
Europe. The completion of an apprenticeship led to the status of journey-
man printer, and as Cynthia Cockburn notes: ‘[T]he butterfly that emerged
from the chrysalis of apprenticeship could never again be confused with the
mere grubs of the labouring world’;69 this repeated trope of ‘youthful
suffering to win manly status’ was a significant narrative element of the
structure of print education right up to the twentieth century.
It’s important to emphasize that the culture of exclusionary and misogynist
practice in the print shop did not mean that there were no women printers. It
did mean, however, that if women were working in these contexts, no matter
the job they were doing, they very rarely had access to the same rigorous
training programme as men who performed the same operations. As the
historian Ulla Wikander notes, in the nineteenth century: ‘[G]irls were not
accepted into apprenticeship programs. Refusing women access to education
was a method of exclusion.’70 While men could be assured of their profes-
sional status in a skilled trade following their apprenticeships, there was, as
Sian Reynolds puts it, ‘no such thing as a “time-served journeywoman” in
printing’,71 even though women did in fact work in the industry. As Mary
69
Cockburn, Brothers, p. 16. 70 Wikander, ‘The Battle’, p. 107.
71
Reynolds, Britannica’s Typesetters, p. 137.
Biggs points out, two basic views of the gender dynamics of the print industry
of this early part of the century tend to dominate: ‘[T]he union view of the
typographers as pioneer egalitarians, and the feminist view of the union as
a destroyer of the first and best opportunity women had to participate in
a remunerative skilled trade. As far as they go, both views are correct.’72 As in
many labour markets, significant political and social complexity arose around
the matters of equal pay, training, and unionization, especially since printing
was considered a prestigious industrial craft associated with the dissemination
of literature and of knowledge. Moreover, as Christina Burr notes:
‘[A] gender division of labour was in place with women occupying those
positions socially defined as unskilled, namely press feeding, and folding,
collating, and stitching in the bindery.’73 These activities notably tended to
exclude what is sometimes referred to in contemporary documents as the
‘heavy’ work of actually pulling the prints: of making impressions. As Karen
Holmberg points out, the legacy of assigning women less ‘skilled’ roles fed back
into some of the erasures of labour in the historical record that now pose
challenges for historical research: ‘[E]ven in the latter part of the twentieth
century, printing still bore the mark of the masculine-guild mentality; the male
was the owner and master printer, while those who labored at setting type,
folding, sewing, or binding, were never acknowledged in the published book.’74
The recovery of particular settings or stories where women participated in
the print industry makes up the bulk of existing secondary criticism about
women in print. As Moog notes, one of the earliest and most frequently cited
examples of European women printing were the nuns working at the Convent
of San Jacopo di Ripoli in Florence in 1476, their labour documented in the
convent’s records.75 Women were not always entirely excluded from the
labour unions later, either. The International Typographical Union (ITU),
founded in the United States of America in 1852, admitted some women as
72
Biggs, ‘Neither Printer’s Wife Nor Widow,’ p. 432.
73
Burr, ‘Defending the Art Preservative’, p. 48.
74
Holmberg, ‘Case Studies’, p. 200. Holmberg links this phenomenon more
broadly in letterpress printing with the artistic ‘handmaiden’ syndrome described
by Olson in Silences.
75
Moog, ‘Women and Widows’, p. 2.
early as 1869. Women’s branches and subgroups and advisory committees

arose in various contexts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
including local branches, such as the Women’s Co-Operative Printing
Union of San Francisco (1869) and the Women’s International Auxiliary
(1909). Biggs also points to the existence of women-run and operated full
production organizations in the nineteenth century, such as the Bohemian
Women’s Publishing Company of Chicago and the Victoria Press.76
However, there remained significant complexity and variety in women’s
participation both in the unions (which also fragmented along different profes-
sional lines over the years) and in the industry as a whole, in different national
contexts. In France, for example, there was a massive growth in female
employment in the printing trades between 1866 and 1896, largely because
women were working for less pay and were therefore attractive to employers.77
The situation was not the same in the UK. There, male union leaders were
more successful in excluding women from the trade, and as Reynolds points
out, there were further regional differences between the north and the south of
the UK and in Scotland. Moreover, the Factory Act of 1867 legislated restric-
tions on the labour of women in industrial sectors in England: they could work
no more than ten hours a day. No such restrictions were placed on men’s
working hours. As Reynolds notes, in the twentieth century, ‘the printing trade
was in many countries a particular focus both for new technology and the
employment of women’78 and as such contemporary assessments of the print-
ing trade were sites of debate about female labour in general.
Exclusionary tactics were linguistic as well as practice based. As Alice
Staveley remarks, even as women were admitted into unions and were under-
taking printing work, ‘the rhetoric of exclusion remained powerful and carried
a frisson of ecclesiastical prohibition’79 since the union branches, called ‘ccha-
pels’, were often possessed of extravagantly masculine cultures. A glaring
example of such rhetoric in the printing trades appears in a 1904 study
supported by the Women’s Industrial Council in the UK called Women in
the Printing Trades: A Sociological Study. In this work, author J. Ramsay
76
On the latter, see Cait Coker. 77 Wikander, ‘The Battle’, p. 108.
78
79
Staveley ‘My Compositor’s Work’, p.1.
McDonald (who was subsequently British Prime Minister from 1929 to 1931)
lays out the conditions and structures around women’s labour and particularly
focusses on the matter of equal pay for equal work. In an introductory section,
‘The Trades Described’, McDonald notes that each step in the letterpress
printing process requires ‘a high degree of skill and experience . . . which
women seldom attain’.80 Women in the Printing Trades maintains throughout
that it is impossible to see women’s work in printing as equal to men’s.
McDonald suggests that women fail to sufficiently advocate for their own
proper conditions of labour and show little ambition for innovation or change:
‘[S]he has preferred to remain incompetent.’81 The ‘industrial mind and
capacity of women’82 is shown here not to be held in very high regard.
Predictable discriminatory ideas about marriage and motherhood as barriers
to proper work (‘liabilit[ies]’83 in McDonald’s terms), along with a supposed
lack of physical strength, fed into an overall dismissal of the notion that women
might be considered on any kind of equal ground. Not to mention McDonald’s
basic understanding of gender itself as fixed, tied to physiology and biological
determinism, and devoid of personal or cultural expressions or of a spectrum of
possible identities. McDonald’s ideas about women printers seem to be shared

by the shop and press owners he studies and interviews. One London firm
interviewed in the study described the idea of paying women at the same rate as
men as ‘ridiculous . . . They would never be worth as much because they stay
so little time.’84
Ramsay’s study did, however, encourage some feminist discursive inter-
ventions into debates about industrialism and labour. Reviewing McDonald’s
study in the Journal of Political Economy in 1905, Edith Abbott writes: ‘[O]ne
is forced to the conclusion that [the causes of inequality outlined by
McDonald] are likely to disappear wholly when we have that longed-for
“readjustment of traditional modes of thought” to the employment of
women; and, with this change in the attitude of the community toward her
work, the woman wage-earner will be found to be as energetic, ambitious,
and competent as the man.’85 This first-wave feminist perspective clearly
80
Women in the Printing Trades, p. 3. 81 Ibid., p. 65. 82 Ibid., p. xvii.
83
Ibid., p. 66. 84 Ibid., p. 148.
85
Abbott, ‘Women in the Printing Trades: Book Review’, p. 300.
indicates the relationship between discussion of industrial work in the printing

industry and perceptions of female labour and gender roles more broadly.
Abbott also suggests here that all perceived barriers to women’s participation
were just that: perceived rather than actual, products of culture rather than
empirical facts.
Much later than McDonald’s study, there continued to be a male-
dominated culture in the industrial world of letterpress printing and parti-
cularly in the unions. The union activist and printer Gail Cartmail notes
that, in the 1970s and 1980s, the National Graphical Association (NGA) in
the UK was jokingly referred to as ‘No Girls Allowed’.86 Reynolds notes
that following her own education in hand setting at art college, she learned
of the ban on women from joining the NGA, the injustice of which was
partly what drove her to write historically about the female compositors
who worked on the Encyclopedia Britannica.87 The exclusionary union
organization was not a deterrent for Cartmail, who pursued equal pay for
women and advocated for a broader diversity in the industry: ‘[W]hat
I know’, she writes, ‘is that diversity strengthens organizations, and that
includes workers’ organizations . . . women made it possible for the union to

encourage a much wider diversity including ethnicity and understanding
aspects of disability.’88 With Cartmail’s remarks, it is possible to trace the
emergence of some understanding of intersectional constructions of identity
in the world of printing, with its long-standing history of privileging white,
male, cis individuals as labouring bodies.
The labour landscape in the commercial world of print altered signifi-
cantly as new technologies supplanted letterpress as the dominant commercial
mode. As letterpress declined in the mid-twentieth century, an alternative
method of printing was starting to take over in the commercial trades: offset
lithography. The key aesthetic difference between lithography and letter-
press is that the former is a flat method rather than a relief method.
Lithography also differs functionally from letterpress in the sense that the
same printing surface can incorporate both text and images, making their
86
Fanni et al., ‘Excerpt from a Conversation’, p. 151.
87
88
Fanni et al., ‘Excerpt from a Conversation’, p. 151.
integration on the page much more straightforward. Offset lithography

(sometimes called photolithography) really took off in the 1960s.
Xerography, the precursor of digital printing, was around by 1949.
Technologies coexisted for quite some time, until eventually relief printing
became a rarity in the commercial sphere around the mid-to-late 1980s.
By 1986, the ITU had disbanded, owing to the technological shifts that
had drastically changed and fragmented the industry. This event in the
history of letterpress printing was structurally significant. With the closure
of commercial letterpress operations and the move to speedier technologies,
the rigid labour structures that had dominated the commercial industry gave
way to a more fragmented and less regulated world for letterpress printers.
This is the moment – if there can be a single moment – when letterpress
structurally moved from industrial practice to craft, and from a highly
regulated industry to a world of freelancers, artists, and self-employed
practitioners. Cockburn documents this moment of transition in the UK
context in her beautiful study Brothers, in which she articulates the decline
of the compositors’ professional role in the 1980s as a transition with an
enormous impact on professional cultures of masculinity.

While the dissolution of many of the systems and structures that long
governed the industrial print industry made way for more diverse participa-
tion, it has also led to a problem now common across industries of late-
capitalist neoliberal work structures. Many letterpress printers and graphic
designers now work as freelancers or run their own businesses. This of
course means they often work without the benefits, standards, and protec-
tions afforded to unionized workers. As Fanni, Flodmark, and Kaaman
note, the contemporary labour situation is a ‘precarious, tough, and in many
ways lonely condition. But at the same time framed with apparently positive
words like freedom and flexibility’. While the unions had their glaring
problems, they also did the important work that unions do of advocating for
reasonable conditions, survivable hours, and safe labour practices. They
also created communities around the industry, and while they were not
communities with open doors or feminist ethics, they offered the possibility
of collegiality and shared work. As Fanni, Flodmark, and Kaamen note,
their own interest in the history of their professions was sparked by a desire
to seek in the past a sense of ‘collectivity, community, and an understanding
of material conditions’89 that seems absent in twenty-first-century fragmen-

ted and individualistic work conditions.
2.3 Other Ways to Learn: Handbooks and Guides

Since the structures outlined earlier were hardly inclusive, although efforts on
the part of women like Cartmail made significant changes, women often
learned to print from books and manuals or informally from friends with
experience rather than from formal education in schools or from the predictable
and rigid systems of trade apprenticeship programmes. The exclusionary
structures of printing described also apply most to the commercial trades
producing newspapers, large-run bestsellers, and other commercial artefacts.
Smaller operations often took different approaches to education. The poet
Laura Riding, for example, learned how to set type from a friend, Vyvyan
Richards, who herself had acquired a press to produce fine editions of
T. E. Lawrence’s work.90 Virginia Woolf took a similar approach, learning
from ‘the old printer’, Mr McDermott, a neighbour in Richmond, after being
denied entry to the London School of Printing because of her class back-
ground and her established reputation as a literary journalist. Anaïs Nin

learned to print from manuals she borrowed from the library. Yet letterpress
printing (especially the part of the process known as makeready) is the kind
of thing that is much, much easier to learn by being shown physically how to
do it. The apprenticeship model in the printing trades was in place for good
pedagogical reasons.91 Even early printing manuals were mostly designed
more as notes and reminders for those who had already apprenticed. Learning
to print from a printing manual is about as easy as learning to ride a bicycle by
89
Fanni et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 6.
90
Borjel, ‘The Vampire and the Darling Priest’, p. 63.
91
Even one of the earliest documents of letterpress instruction, Moxon’s Mechanick
Exercises (1685), points to the challenge of describing a physical process in words:
‘I thought to have given these Exercises the Title of The Doctrine of Handy-Crafts;
but when I better considered the true meaning of the Word Handy-Crafts, I found
that Doctrine would not bear it; because Hand-Craft signifies Cunning, or Sleight,
or Craft of the Hand, which cannot be taught by Words, but is only gained by
Practice and Exercise’, p. 12.
reading a book about spokes and tires: it is possible, and the guides are
definitely useful, but there are better ways.
That said, various manuals and guides to printing were produced from
the very earliest days of print, and adapted to reflect the different types of
machinery that became available through the century. Manuals were not
originally designed as stand-alone resources, but rather as resources for
printers who had already undertaken apprenticeships to remind them of
good habits and best practices. In her study of some of the most well-known
early printing manuals, Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1685) and
John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1755), Maruca points out that while
these guides have tended to be read as neutral instructional documents, ‘we
can begin to glean the local and historical meanings of print [from analyzing
manuals] and see it not as a fixed essence, but an active and ever-changing
ideological tool.’92 Reading Moxon’s language of typography for its gen-
dered implications, Maruca points to Moxon’s ‘intense, almost lascivious’
descriptions of typecasting as evidence for the frequent linguistic slippage
between the bodies of the type and the body of the printing labourer.93
While the twentieth-century guides are slightly less overtly sexualized than
the examples Maruca pulls from Moxon, they nevertheless display a situated
gendered identity. A number of pamphlet-sized guides aimed at the hobby-
ist were included alongside presses when they were purchased, as in this
example of The Printer’s Guide Book produced by the Excelsior company to
accompany its hobby-grade tabletop Kelsey presses, complete with an
illustration of a well-to-do gentleman in a bowtie with his tabletop press,
demurely smoking a pipe as he holds up his perfect print (Figure 3).
From the outset, then, it is clear that even fairly straightforward-seeming
technical manuals outlining print processes are far from genderless objects.
The manual goes on to show in simple line illustrations and sparse text that
‘printing is no mysterious business’,94 although they concede that it does
take practice to get good results. To start with, they illustrate the process of
setting type and pulling prints, as depicted in Figure 4, starting with the
printer’s name.
92
Maruca, ‘Bodies of Type’, p. 323. 93
Ibid., p. 328.
94
‘The Printer’s Guide Book’, p. 1.
Figure 3 The Printer’s Guide Book (1929).
In addition to manuals like these that accompanied the presses them-

selves, the companies also often produced newsletters with tips and tricks
for printers, such as Kelsey’s ‘The Printer’s Helper’ and Adana’s
‘Printswift’. When I examined copies of these I found, unsurprisingly,
that the male pronoun was used exclusively in the instructions in these
publications. I won’t belabour the point, but a characteristic example from
a 1963 issue of ‘The Printer’s Helper’ will perhaps suffice to illustrate the
tone: ‘Every printer knows the necessity of getting all the lines in a job of
equal tightness if he is not to have trouble with the characters either
working up when he is printing or even dropping out before he is able to
Figure 4 Process illustration from The Printer’s Guide Book (1929).

get the chase in the press. Many learn this through experience, in fact most
of us.’95 The universal ‘every printer’ gives way here to ‘he’ the printer, and
concludes with the first-person plural: a rhetorical indication that women
are not the target audience. While it would be reasonable to argue that the
singular ‘he’ was often used as neutral at this time, the assumed masculinity
of the reading audience is even more overt elsewhere in the newsletters.
A regular column in the newsletters was the ‘A Kelsey Man Comments On’
section. The readers who wrote to the newsletter and had their letters
printed were men, and there was a general development of a community
of ‘Kelsey Men’ as a kind of brand-identified group. Unlike the large,
expensive commercial cylinder presses, the Kelsey tabletop hand presses
were generally aimed at amateur printers or at non-printing businesses
seeking to do their own printing ‘in-house’, and even when attempting to
sell products to younger users, the target demographic was ‘boys’ rather
than youth or children in general.96 While the dapper, leisurely masculinity
portrayed in these marketing and instructional materials is particular to
Kelsey’s brand, it indicates that even when access to hobby materials or
machines opens up to amateurs outside of the trade, the discourse doesn’t

cease to be exclusionary. Even if a woman or non-binary person could
certainly buy their own Kelsey press to do ‘real printing’, the accompanying
ephemera is evidently not written for her or for them.
The existence of word-of-mouth culture, small collectives, and pamph-
lets and books for education hasn’t, of course, entirely supplanted more
formal educational processes for learning how to print. Many women now
learn, as I did, to print at university; in studios offering classes; in
specialized courses such as the Rare Book School;97 or in art school. By
an informal count there are now at least twenty-six post-secondary
printmaking programmes at universities and fine arts schools in the
United States of America, the UK, and Canada with dedicated letterpress
components.98 These tend to be part of BFA programmes or graduate arts
and humanities programmes, although the variety of courses and offerings
95
‘The Printer’s Helper’, p. 1. 96 ‘Kelsey Advertisement’, p. 1.
97
‘Rare Book School’.
98
With thanks to Jess Lanziner for gathering information about these programmes.
crosses disciplines and schools. Even more weekend or week-long work-

shops and informal courses through community letterpress studios,
museums, and special collections are rising worldwide, and printing
museums around the world offer demonstrations, open days, and events.99
Online and scholarly communities, too, have generated robust educa-
tional resources for learning about craft and technique. The Ladies of
Letterpress collective was founded specifically to provide support and train-
ing in the absence of industrial apprenticeship: ‘[I]t’s in the context of there
being zero formal, long-term training available to would-be printers, and the
community of letterpress printers being pretty dispersed, that we started
Ladies of Letterpress. This was in 2008, just as it became really easy to start
communities of shared affinities online. We set out to fill the gap between
enthusiasm and education, and make it easier for people starting out in
letterpress to get where they wanted to be.’100 The open-access resource
Letterpress Commons, hosted by Boxcar Press, is a user-generated commu-
nity that hosts instructional essays, PDFs of manuals for particular machines,
a map of letterpress studios around the world, and tips and suggestions for
finding internships and other experience.101 Developed in 2012, the site was
designed to provide ‘an up-to-date manual of letterpress printing . . . one
with the capabilities to expand along with the letterpress community’.102 The
Alphabettes collective, which focusses specifically on women in typography
and type design, similarly hosts online forums for discussing technique,
historical equipment, and other practical matters for letterpress printers, and
has cultivated a user community engaged in sharing and disseminating
knowledge. The LetPress listserv, Briar Press, Starshaped Press’s
‘Weekend Printer’ blog, the Proof Letterpress Podcast, ‘Hamilton Hangs’
hosted by Hamilton Wood Type, and the Five Roses Press resource are
further examples of online communities that preserve and disseminate
practical knowledge for new printers while maintaining and supporting
a community of long-time practitioners. The Book/Print Artist/Scholar
of Color Collective, founded by Tia Blassingame in 2019, brings together
99
For a global directory of printing museums, see ‘Letterpress: Printing Museums’.
100
‘An Interview with Kseniya Thomas’, para. 13. 101 ‘Letterpress Commons’.
102
Ibid., para. 1.
and showcases the work and thinking of book artists of color in virtual and
live events and collaborative initiatives.103 These open-access resources
serve at once to aggregate resources, while also providing new and experi-
enced printers alike with a community of expertise and knowledge sharing
that brings letterpress techniques into the digital age.
103
Blassingame, ‘Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective’.
3 Individualizing
In this section, I offer biographical vignettes of a small collection of women
whose work has shaped the history of twentieth-century women’s print
culture. The cases I briefly analyze here span the century and range from
iconic accounts and depictions of women printing (such as those of Nancy
Cunard and Jane Grabhorn) to more obscure examples (such as the
pseudonymous local newspaper printer ‘Eve’, and the nuns of a Montreal
convent). Some of these printers’ projects aligned with artistic movements
such as surrealism, while others fall more into the history of industrial
labour in the twentieth century. Through some remaining photographs, it is
possible to see female bodies engaged in printing, which presents them both
as revived subjects of historical inquiry and in pursuit of their own profes-
sional aspirations. Where possible I have reproduced the images here, and
elsewhere I have pointed to digital collections and resources that house
supplementary visual materials. The wide variety of postures, poses, and
compositional strategies depicted in these women’s engagement with the
machines and materials of printing allows us to see the eclectic mixture of

settings, styles, and approaches that women undertook through this period
of time. This section’s set of biographical and photographic impressions can
also help reconceive the gendered history of print: fewer images of and
stories about large groups of men in factory settings, more of women
undertaking the full process of print production themselves.
3.1 Magique Circonstancielle: Surrealism’s Veiled Meanings

One of the most striking sets of images of a woman with a printing press is not
in fact of a letterpress process but rather an etching press. The series of
photographs taken by the surrealist artist Man Ray of his then-assistant, the
artist Meret Oppenheim, in the atelier of the engraver and painter Louis
Marcoussis. This sequence was taken in 1933. Man Ray’s photographs of
Oppenheim offer some of the most powerful commentaries on the layered and
complex relations between female bodies, artistic production, and aesthetics.
The very presence of nudity alongside industrial equipment immediately
destabilizes viewer expectations, and Oppenheim’s ironically melodramatic
pose against the press calls up a complex series of gendered associations.
Figure 5 Erotique voilée, Meret Oppenheim à la presse chez Louis

Marcoussis (1933) © Man Ray Trust/SOCAN (2021).
The image in Figure 5 from the series, titled Erotique Voilée was
published in the surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1934, alongside an
essay, ‘La beauté sera convulsive’ by André Breton. In the periodical,
the image of Oppenheim appears alongside other photographs by Man

Ray and Brassai of corals, salt crystals, geodes, abstract figments, playing
cards, and sculptures. Breton’s meditations in the essay emphasize com-
plexity and contradiction: ‘La beauté convulsive sera erotique-Voilée,
explosante-fixe, magique-circonstancielle, ou ne sera pas’ (16).104 The
combined effect of images and text is glittery and destabilizing, at once
organic and unnatural. In Breton’s framework, beauty and aesthetics are
inherently paradoxical, and in a gesture of surrealist collaboration, Man
Ray and Brassai’s images are titled after the aesthetic contradictions that
Breton articulates in the essay. The title Erotique Voilée suggests both
concealment and exposure, and the possibility of reading the printing
press as a veil is a highly evocative one: rather than elucidating or making
accessible, the press here obscures. This image is one of the most well-
known portraits of Oppenheim, whose art works, including her ‘Table
with Bird’s Feet’ and ‘Breakfast in Fur’ came to be central in the surrealist
movement as subversions of domestic artefacts and fusions of the animal
and the human.105 The fact that she is most often depicted now in a nude
taken by a man in another man’s atelier has struck some feminist critics as
enraging (‘peut-être fâcheux’, writes Alexandre Mare),106 since they wish
that these photographs would not stand in for the legacy of an artist whose
own works were so innovative, influential, and distinct from those of her
male counterparts.
In her work on Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press, Mercedes Aguirre
contrasts the Oppenheim portraits with Cunard’s professional and con-
structed photographs of her printers’ identity (discussed later), and reads
the press in Érotique Voilée as an ‘eroticised object dissociated from its
primary function’,107 which – while it seems valid in relation to the
nudes – is complicated in view of the whole sequence of Man Ray’s
104
‘Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, explosive-fixed, cirumstancial-magic,
or it will not be’ (my translation).
105
National Museum of Women in the Arts, ‘Meret Oppenheim: Tender
Friendships’.
106
Mare, ‘La beauté sera désinhibée’, p. 153.
107
Aguirre, ‘Publishing the Avant-Garde’, p. 285.
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“I conceal it, but I own I conceive terrible apprehensions from the
affair at Prestonpans, where the conduct of our general, &c., was ——
I won’t give it the right name, but that of the rebels excellent; and,
from what I can collect, and the judgment which I form upon the
opinion of the soldiers here, they are admirably disciplined, and, our
soldiers have felt, well armed. They showed resolution and conduct
in taking the little battery, and as they are vigorous and savage, their
leaders well know how to point their strength properly and
effectually. There is something, too, in their artful taciturnity that
alarms one. They say it is a fact that from their setting out to this
hour it is not easy to say who leads them, nor are they seen in a
manner till they are felt, so silent and well conceived are their
motions. I hope all this is known above much better than it is here,
and that it is now seen that this rebellion is not to be quashed by
small pelotons of an army, but must be attended to totis viribus.
Who can say what will be the consequence of such an advantage
gained in England?” In another letter Herring mentions that a
meeting of the county was held at York, at which he presided.
London was of course full of rumours, and a letter from Lady
Hardwicke gives them in grave yet ridiculous detail. After saying that
the merchants had stopped the run upon the bank, she mentions a
report that the Chancellor was turned out; that the Duke of
Newcastle and his brother had run away, some said, to the
Pretender; and others, that Lestock, the Admiral, had produced three
letters from him forbidding him to fight; and these reports gained a
universal run. People were told at the turnpikes as they passed
through, that London was in an uproar and his Grace fled. Nay, the
mobs gathered in crowds about his house, and saw some of the
shutters unopened, whence they concluded he was gone; and when
he went out they surrounded his chariot, and looked him in the face
and said, “It is he! he is not gone. What is our condition, when such
monstrous lies are spread to increase the terrors of honest minds?”
The Archbishop’s exertions gave great satisfaction to the King,
whom he had so worthily and courageously served; and the
Chancellor immediately wrote him an account of an interview which
he had with his Majesty on the occasion. “I own,” said he, “I feel a
particular pleasure in the great and noble part which your Grace has
taken on this occasion, and in the gallant, wise, and becoming
manner in which you have exerted yourself. I was so full of it, that I
went immediately to Kensington, and gave the King an ample
account of it in his closet. I found him apprised of it in the Lord
Lieutenant’s letters, which he had received from the Duke of
Newcastle; but he was so pleased with it that he was desirous of
hearing it over again. I informed his Majesty of the substance of your
letter, the sermon your Grace had preached last Sunday, and with
such prodigious expedition printed and dispersed; and when I came
to your speech, he desired me to show it him. His Majesty read it
over from beginning to end, gave it the just praise it so highly
deserves, and said it must be printed. I told him I believed it was
printing at York, but it is determined to print it in the Gazette. When
I had gone through this part, I said, your Majesty will give me leave
to acquaint my Lord Archbishop that you approve his zeal and
activity in your service—to which the King answered quick, My lord,
that is not enough; you must also tell the Archbishop that I heartily
thank him for it. His Majesty also highly applauded the affection,
zeal, and unanimity which had appeared in the several lords and
gentlemen on this occasion.”
The Chancellor also informs him that ten British regiments had
arrived from Flanders, and that eight battalions more, and 1500
dragoons were ordered to embark. He then makes a natural and just
remark on the faction that had clamoured against putting the
country into a state of defence. “I know some friends of yours who
had talked themselves hoarse in contending for this measure, and
whose advice, if followed some time ago, might have prevented, in all
human probability, this dismal scene. But the conduct of some
persons on this occasion has been infamous.” He then marks the true
conduct to be adopted in all instances of civil war. “A great body of
forces will forthwith be sent to the North. I contend every where, that
they must be a great body, for the protection of the King’s crown and
his people. The work of the Revolution, which has been building up
these seven-and-fifty years, must not be risked upon an even
chance.” Such is true policy. The defence of an empire must not be
risked upon a chance; the benighted and dishonest theorists, who
would enfeeble the defences of England in our day, for the sake of
gaining the clamour of a mob, would be the first to fly in the hour of
danger; and although the certainty of a French war from the
ambition of the monarchy, is at an end, and the Prince de Joinville is
not likely to realise the suggestions of his detestable pamphlet, and
have the honour of pouncing on our sea-coast villages; a Republic is
a neighbour to which we have not been accustomed for a long while,
and which, with the best intentions for the present, may very
suddenly change its mind.
Another letter from Herring shows the gallant spirit which may
exist under lawn sleeves. “I purposed,” said he, “to have set out for
London on Wednesday; but I have had a sort of remembrance from
the city here (York) that it will create some uneasiness. There is a
great matter in opinion; and if my attendance at Bishopsthorpe
serves to support a spirit, or to preserve a union, or that the people
think so, I will not stir.... I have therefore put off my journey, but
ordered my affairs so, that at the least intimation from your
Lordship, I can vasa conclamare, and set out in an hour. To talk in
the style military, (though my red coat is not made yet,) the first
column of my family went off a week ago, the second moves on
Wednesday, and the third attends my motions. I purpose to leave my
house in a condition to receive the Marshal, if he pleases to make use
of it. And there is a sort of policy in my civility, too; for while he
occupies it, it cannot be plundered. I know your Lordship has ever an
anxiety for your friends. But, if I must fly, the General and his
hussars have offered to cover my retreat. But enough of this; I had
rather laugh when the battle is won, and could not help putting up an
ejaculation at the pond-side to-night,—Heaven grant I may feed my
swans in peace!”
The mention of the red coat was probably suggested by a report
that the Archbishop had been seen in uniform. And the “hussars”
were a troop of young gentlemen, whom General Oglethorpe had
embodied at York.
The prelate was somewhat of a humorist; and he thus writes on his
military reputation:—“I find I must go into regimentals, in my own
defence, in a double sense; for an engraver has already given me a
Saracen’s head, surrounded with a chevalier in chains, and all the
instruments of war, and the hydra of rebellion at my feet. And I see
another copperplate promised, where I am to be exhibited in the
same martial attitude, with all my clergy with me. By my troth, as I
judge from applications made to me every day, I believe I could raise
a regiment of my own order. And I had a serious offer the other day
from a Welch curate, from the bottom of Merionethshire, who is six
feet and a half high, that, hearing that I had put on scarlet, he was
ready to attend me at an hour’s warning, if the Bishop of Bangor did
not call upon him for the same service.”
The disregard of all preparation had left the whole English border
defenceless. Hull and Carlisle were the only towns which had any
means of resistance. York had walls, but they were in a state of decay,
and had not a single piece of artillery. Thus the invaders were
enabled to pursue any road which they pleased. But their entrance
into England should have taught them that their enterprise had
become hopeless. The country people every where fled before them—
the roads were filled with the carriages and waggons of the gentry
hurrying to places of safety. No gentleman of rank joined them. One
army was on their rear, and the main army, under the Duke of
Cumberland, was between them and London.
In the metropolis, the spirit of the people, always slow, until the
danger is visible, now awoke. The lawyers, in a procession of two
hundred and fifty carriages, carried up an address to the King,
assuring him of their loyalty. The trained bands were summoned.
Troops were sent to the coast to watch the French, if they should
attempt invasion; alarm-posts and signals were appointed in case of
tumults in London, and the capital was at length in safety against a
much superior force to that of the Chevalier. But in December the
gratifying news came, that on the 5th the invaders had retired from
Derby, and were rapidly returning to the North.
The disorder and exhaustion of those gallant but unfortunate men,
must have left them an easy prey to the superior forces which were
now on their track, when the pursuit was suddenly stopped by an
alarm of French invasion. Twelve thousand men had suddenly been
collected; the Duke of Richelieu, with the Pretender’s second son,
had come to Dunkirk; transports were gathered along the coast; and
the invasion would probably have been attempted, but for a storm
which drove many of their ships ashore near Calais. The troops in
London were but six thousand! The 16th of April, at Culloden, closed
this most unhappy struggle, and gave an internal peace to England
which has never been broken.
The remarks in the memoir on this daring enterprise seem to be
imperfect. The first is, that if England was to have been invaded at
all, the effort should have been made before the army could be
brought from Flanders. The second is, that the retreat from Derby
should have been exchanged for a march on London. But the former
would have required a totally different plan of operations. The Prince
should have landed in Kent, if his object was to take London by
surprise. But, as his only troops must be the clans, he must look for
them in the North; and it would have been impossible to march an
army from the Highlands to the metropolis in less than a fortnight.
On the second point, the retreat from Derby was obviously necessary.
The clans were already diminishing—every step must be fought for—
they were but half armed—and the King’s troops were increasing day
by day.
In one remark we agree, that the Chevalier should never have
attempted more than the possession of Scotland. He should have
remained in Holyrood House. There he had a majority of the nation
in his favour,—the heads of the clans, and the old romantic
recollections of his ancestral kings, all tending to support his throne.
A French force might have been easily summoned to his assistance,
and for a while he might have maintained a separate sovereignty. It
is, on the other hand, not improbable that the Scottish nation might
have looked on the sovereignty of a son of James, the persecutor,
with jealousy; Protestantism would have dreaded a French alliance;
and the expulsion of the Chevalier would have been effected in
Scotland on the model of the English expulsion of James. Still, the
experiment was feasible for the claimant of a crown; and the success
of the adventure might have continued long enough to produce great
evil to both countries.
We have found these volumes highly interesting, not merely from
the importance of their period, but from their containing events so
curiously parallel to those of our own time. Among the rest was the
appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. A letter from
Charles Yorke thus says:—“The Archbishop of Canterbury died
suddenly on Saturday. The Bishop of London has declined the offer
of succeeding. It is now offered to the Bishop of Salisbury, who has
not yet returned an answer. If he refuses, which some say he will, the
Archbishop of York will be the man.”
The reasons for these refusals were probably the reluctance to
change, at the advanced age of these bishops,—Sherlock, of
Salisbury, being seventy, and Gibson probably about the same age.
The fees for possession are also immense, and we have heard them
rated at little short of £20,000.
The Lord Chancellor announced the offer to the Archbishop of
York, who returned the following remarkable answer:—“I am
honoured with your Lordship’s of the 13th inst., which I embrace
with all my heart, as a new instance of that friendship and affection
for me which for so many years have been the support, and credit,
and comfort of my life.
“I have considered the thing, my best friend and my most
honoured Lord, with all deliberation and compass of thought that I
am master of, and am come to a very firm and most resolved
determination not to quit the See of York on any account or on any
consideration.... I am really poor; I am not ambitious of being rich,
but have too much pride, with, I hope, a small mixture of honesty, to
bear being in debt. I am now out of it, and in possession of a clear
independency of that sort. I must not go back, and begin the world
again at fifty-five.
“The honour of Canterbury is a thing of glare and splendour, and
the hopes of it a proper incentive to schoolboys to industry. But I
have considered all its inward parts, and examined all its duties, and
if I should quit my present station to take it, I will not answer for it
that in less than a twelvemonth I did not sink and die with regret and
envy at the man who should succeed me here, and quit the place in
my possession, as I ought to do, to one better and wiser than myself.”
This language might have been received with some suspicion in
other instances; but Herring was a straightforward as well as a very
able man, and there can be no doubt that he spoke what he thought.
But he seems to have mistaken the position of the Primate as one of
splendour, for we certainly have seen instances in which it displayed
any thing but splendour, and in which the great body of the clergy
knew no more of the halls of Lambeth, shared no more of its due
hospitality, and enjoyed no more of the natural and becoming
intercourse with their metropolitan, than if he had been a hermit.
This grievous error, which has the necessary effect of repelling and
ultimately offending and alienating the whole body of the inferior
clergy, a body who constitute the active strength of the
Establishment, we must hope to see henceforth totally changed. In
the higher view of the case, an Archbishop of Canterbury possesses
every advantage for giving an honourable and meritorious popularity
to the Church. By his rank, entitled to associate with the highest
personages of the empire, he may more powerfully influence them by
the manliness and intelligence of his opinions: a peer of parliament,
he should be a leader of council, the spokesman of the prelacy, the
guide of the peers on all ecclesiastical questions, and the courageous
protector of the Establishment committed to his charge. In his more
private course, he ought to cultivate the association of the learned,
the vigorous, and the active minds of the country. He ought
especially to be kind to his clergy, not merely by opening his palace
and his hospitalities to them all, but by personal intercourse, by
visiting their churches, by preaching from time to time in their
pulpits, by making himself known to them in the general civilities of
private friendliness, and by the easy attentions which, more than all
the formalities of official condescension, sink into the hearts of men.
It is absurd and untrue to say that an archbishop has no time for all
these things. These things are of the simplest facility to any man
whose heart is in the right place; and if, instead of locking himself up
with two or three dreary effigies of man, in the shape of chaplains,
and freezing all the soul within him by a rigid and repulsive routine,
he shall “do as he would be done unto” if he had remained a country
curate, an Archbishop of Canterbury might be the most beloved,
popular, and for all the best purposes, the most influential man in
the kingdom.
Old age was now coming on Lord Hardwicke, and with it the
painful accompaniment of the loss of his old and intimate associates
through public and private life; his own public career, too, was come
to its close. In 1756 the Newcastle ministry was succeeded by that of
the celebrated William Pitt, (Lord Chatham,) and Lord Hardwicke
resigned the Great Seal. The note in his private journal states, “19th
November 1756, resigned the Great Seal voluntarily into his
Majesty’s hands at St James’s, after I had held it nineteen years,
eight months, and ten days.”
All authorities since his day appear to have agreed in giving the
highest tribute to this distinguished man. His character in the
Annual Register says, “In judicature, his firmness and dignity were
evidently derived from his consummate knowledge and talents; and
the mildness and humanity which tempered it from the best heart....
His extraordinary despatch of the business of the court, increased as
it was in his time beyond what had been known in any former, on
account of his established reputation there, and the extension of the
commerce and riches of the nation, was an advantage to the suitor,
inferior only to that arising from the acknowledged equity,
perspicuity, and precision of his decrees.... The manner in which he
presided in the House of Lords added order and dignity to that
assembly.” Lord Campbell, in his late “Lives of the Chancellors,”
characterises Lord Hardwicke as “the man universally and
deservedly considered the most consummate judge who ever sat in
the Court of Chancery.”
An instance of his grace of manner even in rebuke, amply deserves
to be recorded. A cause was argued in Chancery, in which a grandson
of Oliver Cromwell, and bearing the same name, was a party. The
opposing counsel began to cast some reflections on the memory of
his eminent ancestor; on which the Chancellor quietly said, “I
observe Mr Cromwell standing outside the bar, inconveniently
pressed by the crowd; make way for him, that he may sit by me on
the Bench.” This had the effect of silencing the sarcasms of the
advocate. Lord Hardwicke seems to have excited a professional
deference for his legal conduct and abilities, which at this distance of
time it is difficult even to imagine. But the highest names of the Bar
seem to have exhausted language in his panegyric. Lord Mansfield
thus spoke of him on being requested by a lawyer to give him
materials for his biography. The answer is worth retaining for every
reason.
“My success in life is not very remarkable. My father was a man of
rank and fashion. Early in life I was introduced into the best
company, and my circumstances enabled me to support the
character of a man of fortune. To these advantages I chiefly owe my
success. And therefore my life cannot be very interesting. But if you
wish to employ your abilities in writing the life of a truly great and
wonderful man in our profession, take the life of Lord Hardwicke for
your object. He was indeed a wonderful character. He became Chief
Justice of England and Chancellor from his own abilities and virtues;
for he was the son of a peasant!”
Not exactly so, as we have seen; for his father was a respectable
man, who gave him a legal education. But the great Chancellor
certainly owed but little to birth or fortune.
We have heard much of the elegance and polish of Mansfield’s
style, but, from the imperfect reports of public speeches a hundred
years ago, have had but few evidences of its charm. One precious
relic, however, these volumes have preserved. On his taking leave of
the society of Lincolns Inn, (on his being raised to the Bench,) the
usual complimentary address was made by Mr Charles Yorke. The
reply, of which we give but a sentence, was as follows:—
“If I have had in any measure success in my profession, it is owing
to the great man who has presided in our highest courts of judicature
the whole time I attended the bar. It was impossible to attend him, to
sit under him every day, without catching some beams from his light.
The disciples of Socrates, whom I will take the liberty to call the great
lawyer of antiquity, since the first principles of all law are derived
from his philosophy, owe their reputation to their having been the
repeaters of the sayings of their great master. If we can arrogate
nothing to ourselves, we can boast of the school we were brought up
in. The scholar may glory in his master, and we may challenge past
ages to show us his equal.”
After brief allusions to the three great names of Bacon, Clarendon,
and Somers, all of whom he regarded as inferior either in moral or
natural distinctions, he said,—“It is the peculiar felicity of the great
man of whom I am speaking, to have presided for nearly twenty
years, and to have shone with a splendour that has risen superior to
faction, and that has subdued envy.”
The melancholy case of Admiral Byng occurred in this year, (1757)
and is well reasoned in this work. The writer thinks that the
execution was just. A death by law is naturally distressing to the
feelings of humanity, and the degradation or banishment of the
unfortunate admiral might possibly have had all the effects of the
final punishment, without giving so much pain to the public feelings.
Still, the cabinet might justly complain of the clamour raised against
their act, by the party who arraigned them for the death of Byng. In
command of a great fleet on a most important occasion, he had
totally failed, and failed in despite of the opinions of his own officers.
He had been sent for the express purpose of relieving the British
garrison of Minorca, and he was scared away by the chance of
encountering the French fleet: the consequence was, the surrender of
the island, and the capture of the garrison. On his return to England,
he was tried and found guilty by a court-martial: he was found guilty
by the general opinion of the legislature and the nation; and though
the court-martial recommended him to mercy, on the ground that
his offence was not poltroonery, but an “error in judgment;” yet his
reluctance to fight the French had produced such ruinous
consequences, and had involved the navy in such European disgrace,
that the King determined on his death, and he died accordingly. An
error in judgment which consists in not fighting, naturally seems, to
a brave people, a wholly different offence from the error which
consists in grappling with the enemy. And, though Voltaire’s
sarcasm, that Byng was shot pour encourager les autres, had all the
pungency of the Frenchman’s wit, and though British admirals could
require no stimulant to their courage from the fear of a similar fate,
there can be but little doubt that this execution helped to make up
the decisions of many a perplexed mind in after times. The man who
fights needs have no fear of court-martials in England. This was a
most important point gained. The greatest of living soldiers has said,
that the only fault which he had to find with any of his generals, was
their dread of responsibility. The court-martial of Byng taught the
British captains, in the phrase of the immortal Nelson, that “the
officer who grapples with his enemy, can never be wrong.”
On the 25th of October King George II. died. He had been in good
health previously, had risen from bed, taken his chocolate, and
talked of walking in the gardens of Kensington. The page had left the
room, and hearing a noise of something falling, hurried back. He
found the King on the floor, who only said, “Call Amelia,” and
expired. He was seventy-seven years old, and had reigned thirty-four
years.
The King left but few recollections, and those negative. He had not
connected himself with the feelings of the country; he had not
patronised the fine arts, nor protected literature. He was wholly
devoted to continental politics, and had adhered to some continental
habits, which increased his unpopularity with the graver portion of
the people of England.
In 1763 Lord Hardwicke’s health began visibly to give way. He had
lost his wife, and had lost his old friend the Duke of Newcastle. Death
was every where among the circle of those distinguished persons who
had been the companions of his active days. He had great comfort,
however, in that highest of comforts to old age, the distinctions and
talents of his sons, who had all risen into public rank. But the
common fate of all mankind had now come upon him; and on the 6th
of March he breathed his last. “Serene and composed, I saw him in
his last moments, and he looked like an innocent child in its nurse’s
arms,” is the note of his son. He was seventy-four. His remains were
interred in the parish church of Wimpole.
The peerage and estates still continue in the family, and are now
represented by the estimable and intelligent son of the late Admiral
Sir Joseph Yorke. On the death of the Chancellor’s eldest son, who
had succeeded to the title, the eldest son of Mr Charles Yorke became
Lord Hardwicke. This nobleman, who was remarkable for
scholarship and refinement of taste, had held the anxious office of
Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the year of the Rebellion 1798. His son,
Lord Royston, a very accomplished person, being lost by shipwreck
in the seas, the son of the well-known admiral, who had been so
unhappily killed by a flash of lightning in a boat off Portsmouth,
became the heir.
It is in the history of men like Lord Hardwicke that England justly
prides herself. Here is an instance of the prizes which lie before the
vigour, talents, and principles of her great men. The son of a country
solicitor rises to the highest rank of a subject, forces his way through
all the obstacles of narrow means, professional prejudice, learned
difficulty, and humble birth; takes his place among the first ranks of
the aristocracy, guides the law, shares in the first influence of the
state, is the pillar of government, and chief councillor of his king;
accumulates a vast fortune, becomes master of magnificent estates,
and founds a family holding in succession distinguished offices in
church and state, and still forming a portion of the nobility of
England. And all this was done by the talents of a single individual.
Long may the constitution live which offers such triumphs to
integrity and learning, and glory be to the country which has such
men, and fixes her especial renown on their fame!
The biography is vigorous, intelligent, and remarkably interesting.
No historian can in future write the “Reign of George II.” without it.
It passes through times of singular importance: and while the
volumes are essential to the student of legal history, they offer a high
gratification to the general reader.
HOW WE GOT POSSESSION OF THE
TUILLERIES.
CHAPTER I.
HEADS OR TAILS?
I like political ovations. It is a very pleasant thing to perambulate
Europe in the guise of a regenerator, sowing the good seed of
political economy in places which have hitherto been barren, and
enlightening the heathen upon the texture of calico, and the
blessings of unreciprocal free-trade. I rather flatter myself that I have
excited considerable sensation in certain quarters of Europe,
previously plunged in darkness, and unillumined by the argand lamp
of Manchester philosophy. Since September last, I have not been
idle, but have borne the banner of regeneration from the Baltic to the
shores of the Bosphorus.
As the apostle of peace and plenty, I have every where been
rapturously greeted. Never, I believe, was there a sincerer, a more
earnest wish prevalent throughout the nations for the maintenance
of universal tranquillity than now; never a better security for that
fraternisation which we all so earnestly desire; never a more peaceful
or unrevolutionary epoch. Such, at least, were my ideas a short time
ago, when, after having fulfilled a secret mission of some delicacy in
a very distant part of the Continent, I turned my face homewards,
and retraced my steps in the direction of my own Glaswegian Mecca.
In passing through Italy, I found that country deeply engaged in
plans of social organisation, and much cheered by the sympathising
presence of a member of her Britannic Majesty’s cabinet. It was
delightful to witness the good feeling which seemed to prevail
between the British unaccredited minister and the scum of the
Ausonian population,—the mutual politeness and sympathy
exhibited by each of the high contracting parties,—and the perfect
understanding on the part of the Lazzaroni, of the motives which had
induced the northern peer to absent himself from felicity awhile, and
devote the whole of his vast talents and genius to the cause of foreign
insurrection. I had just time to congratulate Pope Pius upon the
charming prospect which was before him, and to say a few hurried
words regarding the superiority of cotton to Christianity as a
universal tranquillising medium, when certain unpleasant rumours
from the frontier forced their way to the Eternal City, and convinced
me of the propriety of continuing my retreat towards the land of my
nativity. Not that I fear steel, or have any abstract repugnance to
grape, but my mission was emphatically one of peace; I had a great
duty to discharge to my country, and that might have been
lamentably curtailed by the bullet of some blundering Austrian.
Behold me, then, at Paris—that Aspasian capital of the world. I had
often visited it before in the character of a tourist and literateur, but
never until now as a politician. True, I was not accredited: I enjoyed
neither diplomatic rank, nor the more soothing salary which is its
accompaniment. But, in these times, such distinctions are rapidly
fading away. I had seen with my own eyes a good deal of
spontaneous diplomacy, which certainly did not seem to flow in the
regular channel; and, furthermore, I could personally testify to the
weight attached abroad to private commercial crusades. I needed no
official costume; I was the representative of a popular movement; I
was the champion of a class; and my name and my principles were
alike familiar to the ears of the illuminati of Europe. Formerly I had
been proud of associating with Eugène Sue, Charles Nodier, Paul de
Kock, and other characters of ephemeral literary celebrity; I had
wasted my time in orgies at the Café de Londres, or the Rocher de
Cancale, and was but too happy to be admitted to those little parties
of pleasure in which the majority of the cavaliers are feuilletonists,
and the dames, terrestrial stars from the constellation of the Théatre
des Variétés. Now I looked back on this former phase of my existence
with a consciousness of having wasted my energies. I had shot into
another sphere—was entitled to take rank with Thiers, Odillon
Barrot, Crémieux, and other champions of the people; and I resolved
to comport myself accordingly. I do not feel at liberty to enter into
the exact details of the public business which detained me for some
time in Paris. It is enough to say, that I was warmly and cordially
received, and on the best possible terms with the members of the
extreme gauche.
One afternoon about the middle of February, I was returning from
the Chamber of Deputies, meditating very seriously upon the nature
of a debate which I had just heard, regarding the opposition of
ministers to the holding of a Reform banquet in Paris, and in which
my friend Barrot had borne a very conspicuous share. At the corner
of the Place de la Concorde, I observed a tall swarthy man in the
uniform of the National Guard, engaged in cheapening a poodle. I
thought I recognised the face—hesitated, stopped, and in a moment
was in the arms of my illustrious friend, the Count of Monte-Christo,
and Marquis Davy de la Pailleterie!
“Capdibious!” cried the author of Trois Mousquetaires—“Who
would have thought to see you here? Welcome, my dear
Dunshunner, a thousand times to Paris. Where have you been these
hundred years?”
“Voyaging, like yourself, to the East, my dear Marquis,” replied I.
“Ah, bah! That is an old joke. I never was nearer Egypt than the
Bois de Boulogne; however, I did manage to mystify the good public
about the baths of Alexandria. But how came you here just now? Dix
mille tonnerres! They told me you had been made pair
d’Angleterre.”
“Why, no; not exactly. There was some talk of it, I believe. But
jealousy—jealousy, you know—”
“Ah, yes,—I comprehend! Ce vilain Palmerston, n’est-ce pas? But
that is always the way; ministers are always the same. You will hardly
credit it, my dear friend, but I—I with my ancient title—and the most
popular author of France, am not even a member of the Chamber of
Deputies!”
“You amaze me!”
“Yes—after all, you manage better in England. There is that little
D’Israeli—very clever man—Monceton Milles, Bourring, bien
mauvais poètes, and Wakeley, all in the legislature; while here the
literary interest is altogether unrepresented.”
“Surely, my dear Marquis, you forget—there’s Lamartine.”
“Lamartine! a mere sentimentalist—a nobody! No, my dear friend;
France must be regenerated. The daughter of glory, she cannot live
without progression.”
“How, Marquis? I thought that you and Montpensier”—
“Were friends! True enough. It was I who settled the Spanish
marriages. There, I rather flatter myself, I had your perfidious Albion
on the hip. But, to say the truth, I am tired of family alliances. We
want something more to keep us alive—something startling, in short
—something like the Pyramids and Moscow, to give us an impulse
forward into the dark gulf of futurity. The limits of Algeria are too
contracted for the fluttering of our national banner. We want
freedom, less taxation, and a more extended frontier.”
“And cannot all these,” said I, unwilling to lose the opportunity of
converting so remarkable man as the Count of Monte-Christo to the
grand principles of Manchester—“Cannot these be attained by more
peaceful methods than the subversion of general tranquillity? What
is freedom, my dear Marquis, but an unlimited exportation of cotton
abroad, with double task hours of wholesome labour at home? How
will you diminish your taxation better, than by reducing all duties on
imports, until the deficit is laid directly upon the shoulders of a
single uncomplaining class? Why seek to extend your frontier, whilst
we in England, out of sheer love to the world at large, are rapidly
demolishing our colonies? Did you ever happen,” continued I,
pulling from my pocket a bundle of the Manchester manifestos, “to
peruse any of these glorious epitomes of reason and of political
science? Are you familiar with the soul-stirring tracts of Thompson
and of Bright? Did you ever read the Socialist’s scheme for universal
philanthropy, which Cobden”—
“Peste!” replied the illustrious nobleman, “what the deuce do we
care for the opinions of Monsieur Tonson, or any of your low
manufacturers? By my honour, Dunshunner, I am afraid you are
losing your head. Don’t you know, my dear fellow, that all great
revolutions spring from us, the men of genius? It is we who are the
true rousers of the people; we, the poets and romancers, who are the
source of all legitimate power. Witness Voltaire, Rousseau, De
Beranger, and—I may say it without any imputation of vanity—the
Marquis Davy de la Pailleterie!”
“Yours is a new theory!” said I, musingly.
“New! Pray pardon me—it is as old as literature itself! No
revolution can be effectual unless it has the fine arts for its basis.
Simple as I stand here, I demand no more time than a month to wrap
Europe in universal war.”
“You don’t say so seriously?”
“On my honour.”
“Give me leave to doubt it.”
“Should you like a proof?”
“Not on so great a scale, certainly. I am afraid the results would be
too serious to justify the experiment.”
“Ah, bah! You are a philanthropist. What are a few thousand lives
compared with the triumph of mind?”
“Not much to you, perhaps, but certainly something to the owners.
But come, my dear friend, you are jesting. You don’t mean to
insinuate that you possess any such power?”
“I do indeed.”
“But the means? Granting that you have the power—and all
Europe acknowledges the extraordinary faculties of the author of
Monte-Christo—some time would be required for their development.
You cannot hope to inoculate the mind of a nation in a moment.”
“I did not say a moment—I said a month.
“And dare I ask your recipe?”
“A very simple one. Two romances, each in ten volumes, and a
couple of melodramas.”
“What! of your own?”
“Of mine,” replied the Marquis de la Pailleterie.
“I wish to heaven that I knew how you set about it. I have heard G.
P. R. James backed for a volume a month, but this sinks him into
utter insignificance.”
“There is no difficulty in explaining it. He writes,—I never do.
“You never write?”
“Never.”
“Then how the mischief do you manage?”
“I compose. Since I met you, I have composed and dictated a whole
chapter of the Memoirs of a Physician.”
“Dictated?”
“To be sure. It is already written down, and will be circulated
throughout Paris to-morrow.”
“Monsieur le Marquis—have I the honour to hold an interview
with Satan?”
“Mon cher, vous me flattez beaucoup! I have not thought it
necessary to intrust my experiences to the sympathising bosom of M.
Frédéric Soulié.”
“Have you a familiar spirit, then?” said I, casting a suspicious
glance towards the poodle, then vigorously engaged in hunting
through its woolly fleece.
The Marquis smiled.
“The ingenuity of your supposition, my dear friend, deserves a
specific answer. I have indeed a familiar spirit—that is, I am
possessed of a confidant, ready at all times, though absent, to
chronicle my thoughts, and to express, in corresponding words, the
spontaneous emotions of my soul. Nay, you need not start. The art is
an innocent one, and its practice, though divulged, would not expose
me in any way to the censures of the church.”
“You pique my curiosity strangely!”
“Well, then, listen. For some years I have paid the utmost attention
to the science of animal magnetism, an art which undoubtedly lay at
the foundation of the ancient Chaldean lore, and which, though now
revived, has been debased by the artifices and quackery of knaves. I
need not go into details. After long search, I have succeeded in
finding a being which, in its dormant or spiritual state, has an entire
affinity with my own. When awake, you would suppose Leontine
Deschappelles to be a mere ordinary though rather interesting
female, endowed certainly with a miraculous sensibility for music,
but not otherwise in any way remarkable. But, when asleep, she
becomes as it were the counterpart or reflex of myself. Every thought
which passes through my bosom simultaneously arises in hers. I do
not need even to utter the words. By some miraculous process, these
present themselves as vividly to her as if I had bestowed the utmost
labour upon composition. I have but to throw her into a magnetic
sleep, and my literary product for the day is secured. I go forth
through Paris, mingle in society, appear idle and insouciant; and yet
all the while the ideal personages of my tale are passing over the
mirror of my mind, and performing their allotted duty. I have
reached such perfection in the art, that I can compose two or even
three romances at once. I return towards evening, and then I find
Leontine, pale indeed and exhausted, but with a vast pile of
manuscript before her, which contains the faithful transcript of my
thoughts. Now, perhaps, you will cease to wonder at an apparent
fertility, which, I am aware, has challenged the admiration and
astonishment of Europe.”
All this was uttered by Monte-Christo with such exemplary gravity,
that I stood perfectly confounded. If true, it was indeed the solution
of the greatest literary problem of the age; but I could hardly
suppress the idea that he was making me the victim of a hoax.
“And whereabouts does she dwell, this Demoiselle Leontine?” said
I.
“At my house,” he replied: “she is my adopted child. Poor
Leontine! sometimes when I look at her wasted cheek, I feel a pang
of regret to think that she is paying so dear for a celebrity which must
be immortal. But it is the fate of genius, my friend, and all of us must
submit!”
As the Marquis uttered this sentiment with a pathetic sigh, I could
not refrain from glancing at his manly and athletic proportions.
Certainly there was no appearance of over-fatigue or lassitude there.
He looked the very incarnation of good cheer, and had contrived to
avert from his own person all vestige of those calamities which he
was pleased so feelingly to deplore. He might have been exhibited at
the Frères Provençaux as a splendid result of their nutritive and
culinary system.
“You doubt me still, I see,” said De la Pailleterie. “Well, I cannot
wonder at it. Such things, I know, sound strange in the apprehension
of you incredulous islanders. But I will even give you a proof,
Dunshunner, which is more than I would do to any other man—for I
cannot forget the service you rendered me long ago at the Isle de
Bourbon. You see this little instrument,—put it to your ear. I shall
summon Leontine to speak, and the sound of her reply will be
conveyed to you through that silver tube, which is in strict rapport
with her magnetic constitution.”
So saying, he placed in my hand a miniature silver trumpet,
beautifully wrought, which I immediately placed to my ear.
Monte-Christo drew himself up to his full height, fixed his fine
eyes earnestly upon vacuity, made several passes upwards with his
hand, and then said,
“My friend, do you hear me? If so, answer.”
Immediately, and to my unexpected surprise, there thrilled
through the silver tube a whisper of miraculous sweetness.
“Great master! I listen—I obey!”
“May St Mungo, St Mirren, St Rollox, and all the other western
saints, have me in their keeping!” cried I. “Heard ever mortal man
aught like this?”
“Hush—be silent!” said the Marquis, “or you may destroy the spell.
Leontine, have you concluded the chapter?”
“I have,” said the voice: “shall I read the last sentences?”
“Do,” replied the adept, who seemed to hear the response
simultaneously with myself, by intuition.
The voice went on. “At this moment the door of the apartment
opened, and Chon rushed into the room. ‘Well, my little sister, how
goes it?’ said the Countess. ‘Bad.’ ‘Indeed!’ ‘It is but too true.’ ‘De
Noailles?’ ‘No.’ ‘Ha! D’Aiguillon?’ ‘You deceive yourself.’ ‘Who then?’
‘Philip de Taverney, the Chevalier Maison-Rouge!’ ‘Ha!’ cried the
Countess, ‘then I am lost!’ and she sank senseless upon the
cushions.”
“Well done, Leontine!” exclaimed De la Pailleterie; “that is the
seventh chapter I have composed since morning. Are you fatigued,
my child?”
“Very—very weary,” replied the voice, in a melancholy cadence.
“You shall have rest soon. Come hither. Do you see me?”
“Ah! you are very cruel!”
“I understand. Cease to be fatigued—I will it!”
“Ah! thanks, thanks!”
“Do you see me now?”
“I do. Oh, how handsome!”
The Marquis caressed his whiskers.
“Where am I?”
“At the corner of the Place de la Concorde, near the Tuilleries’
gardens. Ah, you naughty man, you have been smoking!”
“Who is with me?”
“A poodle-dog,” replied the voice. “What a pretty creature! he is
just snapping at a fly. Come here, poor fellow!”
The poodle gave an unearthly yell, and rushed between the legs of
Monte-Christo, thereby nearly capsizing that extraordinary
magician.
“Who else?” asked the Marquis.
“A tall man, with sandy-coloured hair. La, how funny!”
“What now?”
“I am laughing.”
“At what?”
“At his dress.”
“How is he dressed?”
“In a blue coat with gilt buttons, a white hat, and such odd scarlet-
and-yellow trowsers!”
I stood petrified. It was quite true. In a moment of abstraction I
had that morning donned a pair of integuments of the M’Tavish
tartan, and my legs were of the colour of the flamingo.
“Is he handsome?”
I did not exactly catch the response.
“That will do, my dear Marquis,” said I, returning him the
trumpet. “I am now perfectly convinced of the truth of your
assertions, and can no longer wonder at the marvellous fertility of
your pen—I beg pardon—of your invention. Pray, do not trouble your
fair friend any further upon my account. I have heard quite enough
to satisfy me that I am in the presence of the most remarkable man
in Europe.”
“Pooh! this is a mere bagatelle. Any man might do the same, with a
slight smattering of the occult sciences. But we were talking, if I
recollect right, about moral influence and power. I maintain that the
authors of romance and melodrama are the true masters of the age:
you, on the contrary, believe in free-trade and the jargon of political
economy. Is it not so?”
“True. We started from that point.”
“Well, then, would you like to see a revolution?”
“Not on my account, my dear Marquis. I own the interest of the
spectacle, but it demands too great a sacrifice.”
“Not at all. In fact, I have made up my mind for a bouleversement
this spring, as I seriously believe it would tend very much to the
respectability of France. It must come sooner or later. Louis Philippe
is well up in years, and it cannot make much difference to him.
Besides, I am tired of Guizot. He gives himself airs as an historian
which are absolutely insufferable, and France can submit to it no
longer. The only doubt I entertain is, whether this ought to be a new
ministry, or an entire dynastical change.”
“You are the best judge. For my own part, having no interest in the
matter further than curiosity, a change of ministers would satisfy
me.”
“Ay, but there are considerations beyond that. Much may be said
upon both sides. There is danger certainly in organic changes, at the
same time we must work out by all means our full and legitimate
freedom. What would you do in such a case of perplexity?”
Victor Hugo’s simple and romantic method of deciding between
hostile opinions, as exemplified in his valuable drama of Lucrèce
Borgia, at once occurred to me.
“Are you quite serious,” said I, “in wishing to effect a change of
some kind?”
“I am,” said the Marquis, “as resolute as Prometheus on the
Caucasus.”
“Then, suppose we toss for it; and so leave the question of a new
cabinet or dynasty entirely to the arbitration of fate?”
“A good and a pious idea!” replied the Marquis de la Pailleterie.
“Here is a five-franc piece. I shall toss, and you shall call.”
Up went the dollar, big with the fate of France, twirling in the
evening air.
“Heads for a new ministry!” cried I, and the coin fell chinking on
the gravel. We both rushed up.
“It is tails!” said the Marquis devoutly. “Destiny! thou hast willed
it, and I am but thine instrument. Farewell, my friend; in ten days
you shall hear more of this. Meantime, I must be busy. Poor
Leontine! thou hast a heavy task before thee!”
“If you are going homewards,” said I, “permit me to accompany
you so far. Our way lies together.”
“Not so,” replied the Marquis thoughtfully. “I dine to-day at
Véfour’s, and in the evening I must attend the Théatre de la Porte St
Martin. I am never so much alone as in the midst of excitement. O
France, France! what do I not endure for thee!”
So saying, Monte-Christo extended his hand, which I wrung
affectionately within my own. I felt proud of the link which bound
me to so high and elevated a being.
“Ah, my friend!” said I, “ah, my friend! there is yet time to pause.
Would it not be wiser and better to forego this enterprise
altogether?”
“You forget,” replied the other solemnly. “Destiny has willed it. Go,
let us each fulfil our destiny!”
So saying, this remarkable man tucked the poodle under his arm,
and in a few moments was lost to my view amidst the avenues of the
garden of the Tuilleries.
CHAPTER II.
THE IDES OF MARCH.
Several days elapsed, during which Paris maintained its customary
tranquillity. The eye of a stranger could have observed very little
alteration in the demeanour of the populace; and even in the salons,
there was no strong surmise of any coming event of importance. In
the capital of France one looks for a revolution as quietly as the
people of England await the advent of “the coming man.” The event
is always prophesied—sometimes apparently upon the eve of being
fulfilled; but the failures are so numerous as to prevent inordinate
disappointment. In the Chamber there were some growlings about
the Reform banquet, and the usual vague threats if any attempt
should be made to coerce the liberties of the people; but these
demonstrations had been so often repeated, that nobody had faith in
any serious or critical result.
Little Thiers, to be sure, blustered; and Odillon Barrot assumed
pompous airs, and tried to look like a Roman citizen, at our small
patriotic cosmopolitan reunions; but I never could believe that either
of them was thoroughly in earnest. We all know the game that is
played in Britain, where the doors of the ministerial cabinet are
constructed on the principle of a Dutch clock. When it is fair
weather, the ambitious figure of Lord John Russell is seen mounting
guard on the outside—when it threatens to blow, the small sentry
retires, and makes way for the Tamworth grenadier. Just so was it in
Paris. Guizot, if wheeled from his perch, was expected to be replaced
by the smarter and more enterprising Thiers, and slumbrous
Duchatel by the broad-chested and beetle-browed Barrot.
At the same time, I could not altogether shut my eyes to the more
active state of the press. I do not mean to aver that the mere political
articles exhibited more than their usual vigour; but throughout the
whole literature of the day there ran an under-current of
revolutionary feeling which betokened wonderful unanimity. Less
than usual was said about Marengo, Austerlitz, or even the three
glorious days of July. The minds of men were directed further back,
to a period when the Republic was all in all, when France stood
isolated among the nations, great in crime, and drunken with her
new-won freedom. The lapse of half a century is enough to throw a
sort of halo around the memory of the veriest villain and assassin.
We have seen Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard exhumed from their
graves to be made the heroes of modern romance; and the same
alchemy was now applied to the honoured ashes of Anacharsis
Clootz, and other patriots of the Reign of Terror.
All this was done very insidiously, and, I must say, with
consummate skill. Six or seven simultaneous romances reminded the
public of its former immunity from rule, and about as many
melodramas denounced utter perdition to tyranny. I liked the fun.
Man is by nature a revolutionary animal, especially when he has
nothing to lose; and it is needless to remark that a very small portion
indeed of my capital was invested in the foreign funds.
I saw little of my friend the Marquis, beyond meeting him at the
usual promenades, and bowing to him at the theatres, where he
never failed to present himself. A casual observer would have
thought that De la Pailleterie had no other earthly vocation than to
perambulate Paris as a mere votary of pleasure. Once or twice,
however, towards evening, I encountered him in his uniform of the
National Guard, with fire in his eye, haste in his step, and a settled
deliberation on his forehead; and I could not help, as I gazed upon
him, feeling transported backwards to the period of Athos, Porthos,
and Aramis.
At length I received the expected billet, and on the appointed
evening rendered myself punctually at his house. The rooms were
already more than half filled by the company.
“Are the Ides of March come?” said I, pressing the proffered hand
of Monte-Christo.
“Come—but not yet over,” he replied. “You have seen the new play
which has produced such a marked sensation?”
“I have. Wonderful production! Whose is it?”
A mysterious smile played upon the lip of my friend.
“Come,” said he, “let me introduce you to a countryman, a
sympathiser; one who, like you, is desirous that our poor country
should participate in the blessings of the British loom. Mr Hutton
Bagsby—Mr Dunshunner.”
Bagsby was a punchy man, with a bald head, and a nose which
betokened his habitual addiction to the fiery grape of Portugal.
“Servant, sir!” said he. “Understand you’re a free-trader, supporter
of Cobden’s principles, and inclined to go the whole hog. Glad to see
a man of common understanding here. Damme, sir, when I speak to
these French fellows about calico, they begin to talk about fraternity;
which, as I take it, means eating frogs, for I don’t pretend to
understand their outlandish gibberish.”
“Every nation has its hobby, you know, Mr Bagsby,” I replied. “We
consider ourselves more practical than the French, and stick to the
main chance; they, on the other hand, are occupied with social
grievances, and what they call the rights of labour.”
“Rights of labour!” exclaimed Bagsby. “Hanged if I think labour
has got any rights at all. Blow all protection! say I. Look after the
interests of the middle classes, and let capital have its swing. As for
those confounded working fellows, who cares about them? We don’t,
I can answer for it. When I was in the League, we wanted to bring
corn down, in order to get work cheaper; and, now that we’ve got it,
do you think we will stand any rubbish about rights? These French
fellows are a poor set; they don’t understand sound commercial
principles.”
“Ha! Lamoricière!” said our host, accosting a general officer who
just then entered the apartment; “how goes it? Any result from to-
day’s demonstration at the Chamber?”
“Ma foi! I should say there is. The banquets are forbidden. There is
a talk about impeaching ministers; and, in the meantime, the
artillery-waggons are rumbling through the streets in scores.”
“Then our old friend Macaire is likely to make a stand?”
“It is quite possible that the respectable gentleman may try it,” said
the commandant, regaling himself with a pinch. “By the way, the
National Guard must turn out to-morrow early. The rappel will be
beat by daybreak. There is a stir already in the Boulevards; and, as I
drove here, I saw the people in thousands reading the evening
journals by torch-light.”
“Such is liberty!” exclaimed a little gentleman, who had been
listening eagerly to the General. “Such is liberty! she holds her
bivouac at nightfall by the torch of reason; and, on the morrow, the
dawn is red with the brightness of the sun of Austerlitz!”
A loud hum of applause followed the enunciation of this touching
sentiment.
“Our friend is great to-night,” whispered Monte-Christo; “and he
may be greater to-morrow. If Louis Philippe yields, he may be prime
minister—if firing begins, I have a shrewd notion he won’t be any
where. Ah, Monsieur Albert! welcome from Cannes. We have been
expecting you for some time, and you have arrived not a moment too
soon!”
The individual thus accosted was of middle height, advanced age,
and very plainly dressed. He wore a rusty gray surtout, trousers of
plaid check, and the lower part of his countenance was buried in the
folds of a black cravat. The features were remarkable; and, somehow
or other, I thought that I had seen them before. The small gray eyes
rolled restlessly beneath their shaggy pent-house; the cheek-bones
were remarkably prominent; a deep furrow was cut on either side of
the mouth; and the nose, which was of singular conformation,
seemed endowed with spontaneous life, and performed a series of
extraordinary mechanical revolutions. Altogether, the appearance of
the man impressed me with the idea of strong, ill-regulated energy,
and of that restless activity which is emphatically the mother of
mischief.
Monsieur Albert did not seem very desirous of courting attention.
He rather winked than replied to our host, threw a suspicious look at
Bagsby, who was staring him in the face, honoured me with a survey,
and then edged away into the crowd. I felt rather curious to know
something more about him.
“Pray, my dear Marquis,” said I, “who may this Monsieur Albert
be?”
“Albert! Is it possible that you do not—but I forget. I can only tell
you, mon cher, that this Monsieur Albert is a very remarkable man,
and will be heard of hereafter among the ranks of the people. You
seem to suspect a mystery? Well, well! There are mysteries in all
great dramas, such as that which is now going on around us; so, for
the present, you must be content to know my friend as simple Albert,
ouvrier.”
“Hanged if I haven’t seen that fellow in the black choker before!”
said Mr Bagsby; “or, at all events, I’ve seen his double. I say, Mr
Dunshunner, who is the chap that came in just now?”
“I really cannot tell, Mr Bagsby. Monte-Christo calls him simply
Mr Albert, a workman.”
“That’s their fraternity, I suppose! If I thought he was an operative,
I’d be off in the twinkling of a billy-roller. But it’s all a hoax. Do you
know, I think he’s very like a certain noble—”
Here an aide-de-camp, booted and spurred, dashed into the
apartment.
“General! you are wanted immediately: the émeute has begun, half
Paris is rushing to arms, and they are singing the Marseillaise
through the streets!”
“Any thing else?” said the General, who, with inimitable sang
froid, was sipping a tumbler of orgeat.
“Guizot has resigned.”
“Bravo!” cried the little gentleman above referred to—and he cut a
caper that might have done credit to Vestris. “Bravo! there is some
chance for capable men now.”
“I was told,” continued the aide-de-camp, “as I came along, that
Count Molé had been sent for.”
“Molé! bah! an imbecile!” muttered the diminutive statesman. “It
was not worth a revolution to produce such a miserable result.”
“And what say the people?” asked our host.
“Cela ne suffira pas!”
“Ah, les bons citoyens! Ah, les braves garçons! Je les connais!”
And here the candidate for office executed a playful pirouette.
“Nevertheless,” said Lamoricière, “we must do our duty.”
“Which is?” interrupted De la Pailleterie.
“To see the play played out, at all events,” replied the military
patriot; “and therefore, messieurs, I have the honour to wish you all a
very good evening.”
“But stop, General,” cried two or three voices: “what would you
advise us to do?”
“In the first place, gentlemen,” replied the warrior, and his words
were listened to with the deepest attention, “I would recommend
you, as the streets are in a disturbed state, to see the ladies home.
That duty performed, you will probably be guided by your own
sagacity and tastes. The National Guard will, of course, muster at
their quarters. Gentlemen who are of an architectural genius will
probably be gratified by an opportunity of inspecting several
barricades in different parts of the city; and I have always observed,
that behind a wall of this description, there is little danger from a
passing bullet. Others, who are fond of fireworks, may possibly find
an opportunity of improving themselves in the pyrotechnic art. But I
detain you, gentlemen, I fear unjustifiably; and as I observe that the
firing has begun, I have the honour once more to renew my
salutations.”
And in fact a sharp fusillade was heard without, towards the
conclusion of the General’s harangue. The whole party was thrown
into confusion; several ladies showed symptoms of fainting, and
were incontinently received in the arms of their respective cavaliers.
The aspiring statesman had disappeared. Whether he got under a
sofa, or up the chimney, I do not know, but he vanished utterly from
my eyes. Monte-Christo was in a prodigious state of excitement.
“I have kept my word, you see,” he said: “this may be misconstrued
in history, but I call upon you to bear witness that the revolution was
a triumph of genius. O France!” continued he, filling his pocket with
macaroons, “the hour of thine emancipation has come!”
Observing a middle-aged lady making towards the door without
male escort, I thought it incumbent upon me to tender my services,
in compliance with the suggestions of the gallant Lamoricière. I was
a good deal obstructed, however, by Mr Hutton Bagsby, who, in
extreme alarm, was cleaving to the skirts of my garments.
“Can I be of the slightest assistance in offering my escort to
madame?” said I with a respectful bow.
The lady looked at me with unfeigned surprise.
“Monsieur mistakes, I believe,” said she quietly. “Perhaps he
thinks I carry a fan. Look here”—and she exhibited the butt of an
enormous horse-pistol. “The authoress of Lélia knows well how to
command respect for herself.”
“George Sand!” I exclaimed in amazement.
“The same, monsieur; who will be happy to meet you this evening
at an early hour, behind the barricade of the Rue Montmartre.”
“O good Lord!” cried Mr Hutton Bagsby, “here is a precious kettle
of fish! They are firing out yonder like mad; they’ll be breaking into
the houses next, and we’ll all be murdered to a man.”
“Do not be alarmed, Mr Bagsby; this is a mere political revolution.
The people have no animosity whatever to strangers.”
“Haven’t they? I wish you had seen the way the waiter looked this
morning at my dressing case. They’d tie me up to the lamp-post at
once for the sake of my watch and seals! And I don’t know a single
word of their bloody language. I wish the leaders of the League had
been hanged before they sent me here.”
“What! then you are here upon a mission?”
“Yes, I’m a delegate, as they call it. O Lord, I wish somebody would
take me home!”
“Where do you reside, Mr Bagsby?”
“I don’t know the name of the street, and the man who brought me
here has just gone away with a gun! Oh dear! what shall I do?”
I really felt considerably embarrassed. By this time Monte-Christo
and most of his guests had departed, and I knew no one to whom I
could consign the unfortunate and terrified free-trader. I sincerely
pitied poor Bagsby, who was eminently unfitted for this sort of work;
and was just about to offer him an asylum in my own apartments,
when I felt my shoulder touched, and, turning round, recognised the
intelligent though sarcastic features of Albert the ouvrier.
“You are both English?” he said in a perfectly pure dialect. “Eh
bien, I like the English, and I wish they understood us better. You are
in difficulties. Well, I will assist. Come with me. You may depend
upon the honour of a member of the Institute. Workman as I am, I
have some influence here. Come—is it a bargain? Only one caution,
gentlemen: remember where you are, and that the watchwords for
the night are fraternité, égalité! You comprehend? Let us lose no
time, but follow me.”

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Women and Letterpress Printing 1920–2020

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009219365 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Publishing and Book Culture

WOMEN AND LETTERPRESS

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

This work is in copyright. It is subject to statutory exceptions

Abstract: This Element analyzes the relationship between gender

the early twenty-ﬁrst century, it offers a way of thinking about

KEYWORDS: book history, letterpress, feminism, women’s history,

Coda: Letterpress at a Distance 80

through to the present moment and to the afterlife of the modernist

Apron’. For a video tour of The Bibliography Room and an introduction to

I explored the malleable relationship between language, tactility, and time.

Figure 1 ‘Let Her Press’ printed in the Massey College Bibliography

focusing on particular examples of women engaged in acts of printing as

1.1 Formes and Forms

in a time when transferring text in multiple copies onto paper is extremely

or innovative typographical practices. A consideration of all elements of

century print. I therefore address industrial trade history here, particularly

1.2 Forming a Critical Discourse

speciﬁcally, and even on a particular kind of letterpress printer, is to isolate

Sarah Lubelski has shown in her excellent study of Bentley’s);23 unlike

continuation of this gendered dynamic in the print industry after the

1.3 Constellated Historiography

Print feminisms, perhaps unsurprisingly, follow the broad strokes of the

challenging process of example selection in a time period that is so full, so

and yet non-comprehensive practice. The challenges of collecting thorough

members of ofﬁcial trade unions, sometimes there is very little or no

some otherwise uncollected materials. The contemporary poet and printer

The ‘eBay archive’ allows women’s work to be recovered

calls ‘pro-am’ or pro-amateur online archives.39 Printing historians, parti-

1.4 The Embodied Language of Print

just one example of printing terminology as a language of the body. We

sorts. I include a Glossary of printing terminology (indicated in bold) at the

Other methods of printing, such as digital and offset methods, do not

the conservation community, that aggressive biting is inappropriately

printing technology. The kiss is still prized by many practitioners and in

1.5 Letterpress in the Late Age of Print

Chartier’s ‘The Author’s Hand to the Printer’s Mind’ (2013) – speciﬁcally

1.6 Letterpress as Contemporary Craft

‘workmanship of risk’ and the ‘workmanship of certainty’. In the former,

artistic restatement’.57 That restatement, however, has occurred variously

1.7 Why Letterpress?

The possible justiﬁcations for producing letterpress works also change

and digital printing obviously wasn’t available until relatively recently. To

impression as a primary motivation for letterpress printing: without the

2.1 Fundamentals of the Letterpress Printing Process

Figure 2 The process of setting type and printing on an Adana tabletop