Research Catalog
Personal impressions : the small printing press in nineteenth-century America / Elizabeth M. Harris.
- Title
- Personal impressions : the small printing press in nineteenth-century America / Elizabeth M. Harris.
- Author
- Harris, Elizabeth M.
- Publication
- Boston : David R. Godine ; London : Merrion Press, 2004.
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1 Item
| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | Request in advance | Z231.5.L5 H377 2004 | Off-site |
Holdings
Details
- Additional Authors
- Description
- 200 p. : ill.; 23 x 29 cm.
- Summary
- "Printing was the most widespread, and competitive business of nineteenth-century America. Every city had not only its big presses for printing catalogues, books, and newspapers, but also countless smaller presses for printing small jobs - the pamphlets, posters, handbills, stationery, cards, and tickets that gave the century so much of its color. Several of the names we now count as giants of the publishing industry: Scribner, Doubleday, George Houghton of Houghton Mifflin, and Donald Brace of Harcourt Brace started out not as publishers but as small-job printers, running their own shops and working humble, everyday, manually operated presses. This complete, definitive, and richly illustrated survey of small nineteenth-century printing presses, written by a former curator at the Smithsonian Institution, is the first history of these lovely, useful, and prodigiously varied machines. There was, in those days, a small printing press for every purpose. And there were innumerable boys and men eager to make their fortunes by investing in one, printing for a local clientele, and, with luck, building a printing or publishing empire. What the desktop computer is to today, these small iron workhorses were to the nineteenth century, and this book, which catalogues, describes, and illustrates over a hundred small printing presses and their makers, giving machine specifications as well as patent information, is a mine of previously undocumented printing history. No one seriously interested in the story of American printing can afford to be without it."--Publisher's description.
- Alternative Title
- Small printing press in nineteenth-century America
- Subject
- Genre/Form
- Catalogs.
- History.
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (p. 194-195) and index.
- Processing Action (note)
- committed to retain
- Contents
- Small presses in a big trade : a survey -- A note on the rail presses -- Glover Snow's 'History of small presses' -- Kelsey's own story -- Catalogue of small presses.
- ISBN
- 0903560267
- 9780903560269
- 1567922686
- 9781567922684
- LCCN
- ^^2004105558
- OCLC
- 58797418
- Owning Institutions
- Harvard Library