The printing-factory

I wonder why, out of the mass of all we forget, some inconsequential things stick in our minds. Perhaps they chime with our destiny, that elusive future no one can see till it arrives. And when it does, perhaps something from our rag-bag of memories may “ring a bell”, as if it had been foreshadowed. Let me offer an instance.

As a young child I mostly learned about the world through reading anything that came to hand. In the library of my boarding-school, I was drawn to tattered heaps of National Geographic, with their yellow covers & Kodachrome illustrations of exotic people and places. In guest bedrooms, it was tattered heaps of Reader’s Digest, with “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power”, “Laughter is the Best Medicine”, “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met”, “Towards more Picturesque Speech” and “Life’s Like That”.

I must have read hundreds of them: educational, entertaining, thought-provoking, all three together; familiar voices, a lens to comprehend the adult world. One Digest anecdote pops up as if it were yesterday, though I read it more than sixty years ago. It went something like this:

I’d been driving for hours through West Kentucky, needed to stop for a break to stretch my legs. I found a good spot, and there met a woman selling eggs by the roadside. Her cartons were laid out in three grades, each a different price. The mix of colours and sizes seemed the same in each, so I asked her what was the difference.

“Why, price of course!”
“Yes, but what else?”
“Nothing else. Some like to pay more to get the best.”
“So what makes the cheap ones inferior?”

Her eyes narrowed, took aim at mine. I repented my choice of word. Deciding to ignore the insult, she responded mildly.

“Everyone wants the best. That’s all I sell, even to those who can’t afford it. They’re all the same eggs.”

It might have been from “Points to Ponder”, not “Life’s Like That”. Life usually isn’t like that. Prices rule the world. It puts me in mind of a parable of Jesus, though I can’t say offhand which one. A parable of the Kingdom of Heaven, coming from West Kentucky, if there is such a place. Perhaps it was Kansas, where Dorothy came from, before she met the Wizard of Oz. In real life, prices are supposed to be governed by the laws of economics, which depend on winners getting rich and losers going hungry. Now I remember that parable. In the Kingdom of Heaven, the labourers in the vineyard all get paid the same, even if they show up late in the afternoon.

How much were her eggs worth? How much is someone’s writing worth, if anything? Does the question have any meaning? The book market feels increasingly alien, just when I’m finally planning to launch a series of books. Everyone’s obsessed with best-sellers, fizzing with hype, aggressive as sharks in a feeding frenzy, swaying to fashion’s whim like models on a catwalk. The only time I ever heard back from a literary agent, he suggested that “misery memoirs” were selling like hot cakes. Why didn’t I write something like Angela’s Ashes? A couple of years later, bookshops sprouted shelves marked “Tragic Life Stories”, or “Painful Lives”. Thus I learned that a literary agent acts not for the author but for the best-seller he may produce; just as a farmer loves his herds for their milk and their beef.

My own favourite shelf is the one marked “Collectibles” at our local Oxfam. Here I recently found Days at the Factories, by George Dodd, 1843, beautifully printed and bound. American binding are so much more solid than English. It is “illustrated by numerous engravings of machines and processes”; and was published by Augustus M Kelley of New York as part of his series “Reprints of Economic Classics”. I was drawn especially to chapter 15, “A Day at a Printing-Office”.

Neither photography nor the Linotype machine had yet been invented. Each piece of type had to be cast individually, and put into partitioned trays for a compositor. After assembling in galleys for the print run, the types were disassembled and returned to the trays. Today I can do all that with skills already familiar to a small child, without getting up from my desk. Thus I can achieve tasks which required the work of hundreds of men, women and boys, in a time not so long ago. To be precise, it was the year when Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol and then visited America, reporting his observations in a book called American Notes for General Circulation; not leaving out mention of the horrors of negro slavery.

With all those employees, all those metal types, so heavy, so expensive to produce, the printing factory had to weigh up carefully the likelihood of more impressions being required later. The stereotype was a big step forward. You cover your galley of assembled type with a layer of plaster of Paris, making sure there are no bubbles. When it dries you knock off the mould thus created from the type and press it onto molten metal just before it hardens. That was the original stereotype, before it came to mean something like “cliché”. Except that the original meaning of “cliché” was “stereotype”. They both referred to one and the same printing process.

There were of course one-man printing factories, even before 1843. William Blake ran one, using the method of relief etching he invented. I’ve recently realized, with his posthumous help, that I can be a one-man publishing company, as described in two recent posts. Two hundred years after Blake, we can all be “desk-top” publishers, should we so wish. It’s much simpler if we leave money out of it. Printing with real paper and ink still costs of course, but with “print-on-demand” it’s no obstacle. Everything is looked after. Still sitting at home, you collect the difference, if any, when the costs have been deducted from selling price. Nihil obstat.

I decided to research what kind of authors have given away their work free, and whether any of it was what I’d call world-class. That’s how I discovered Francis Heaney and his short work Holy Tango, anagram for “anthology”. He takes an author’s name, such as Tennessee Williams, and constructs an anagram: “Ellen’s Siamese Twin”. Then he writes a short play with this title, in the late playwright’s style. And so on with other parodies, variously erudite and funny. There is no need to review his book or even quote from it, since here it is free to download and copy. But I can’t resist quoting from this poem called “Likable Wilma”, inspired by her anagram, the poet William Blake:

Wilma, Wilma, in thy blouse,
Red-haired prehistoric spouse,
What immortal animator
Was thy slender waist’s creator?

When the Rubble clan moved in
Was Betty jealous of thy skin,
Thy noble nose, thy dimpled knee?
Did he who pencilled Fred draw thee?

Wilma, Wilma, burning bright, ye
Cartoon goddess Aphrodite,
Was it Hanna or Barbera
Made thee hot as some caldera?

World class? It helps to know who Fred & Wilma are (The Flintstones), & be familiar with giants of literature such as TS Eliot (to get the most from the opening poem, “Toilets”). If Francis Heaney can offer Holy Tango without charge, I can do no less (or is it “no more”?) with Wayfaring. It doesn’t stop him selling the same book in print format on amazon.com at three different prices: $16.95 collectible signed first edition with a drawing of a “cute chicken” beside the inscription; $8.50 new; $0.01 “used—good”. Plus postage.

The woman in West Kentucky or Kansas must be long gone, but her legacy lives on. And yes, sometimes life is like that. In 1843 hundreds of workers were needed to produce something I can make in in this guest bedroom-cum-study, which sadly has no tattered heaps of Reader’s Digest to offer. I find it laborious to print & bind a single copy of Ellie’s Divine Economy; but I can if I want. Fortunate are we, if able to escape the tyranny of money!

Do help yourself to Wayfaring. It wants an Afterword, but that will come after. Then I’ll post the new edition and let you know. This “printing-factory” pays no regard to deadlines. Other volumes will follow. For those who like to pay more to get the best, affordable paperbacks will be available on Amazon; with even some signed by the author, why not? Purchasers may request drawings of cute creatures, if my grand-daughter can be persuaded to oblige.

Technology shows us how things can be free. The divine economy comes a step closer. More in my next.