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Walt and Sam

Scenes from U.S. Book Production in mid 19th century.

Panel on Whitman as Bookmaker November 12, 2005

With a book, it is initially a paradox that we convey conceptual works via physical objects. But that paradox pales in context of another; that there is little correlation between the activities of making that object and the concepts conveyed.

The 19th century set directions for technological advance still pursued today. For example, instantaneous communication, digital encoding, photographic reproduction and audio recording were first achieved then. The book making industry was part of this paradigm shift. Increasing literacy, spreading to working class, drove a transition from methodic hand production to integrated machine production.

On either side of 1850 transitions in book production had either been recently introduced or were looming. These transitions include (1) the shift from hand made to machine made paper and the associated shift from rag derived to plant fiber derived paper pulps, (2) a shift from printing directly from set type to printing on plates derived from set type, (3) a transition from hand sewing to machine sewing of books, (4) a transition from starch based (paste) to protein based (glue) adhesives in book production, (5) a transition from in-boards to case construction binding with an associated use of specialized book cloths and stamping on the spine of the cover, (6) a transition from flat bed to rotary or vertical platen presses, and (7) a transition from hand set to machine set type with the associated transition from hand casting to mechanical casting of type.

Immersed in this disruption, apprentices in the book production industries had to learn established practice at the same time that it was being changed. The experience influenced their careers and subsequent endeavors. Two of these apprentices were Sam Clemens and Walt Whitman. By the mid 19th c., both were at work in the printing and publishing industry following apprenticeships as compositors and adventures as tramp printers. Although younger Clemens worked for a brief period in New York City, Walt Whitman was based in the East at Brooklyn in a region of the largest concentration of book production industry in the country.

Both Clemens and Whitman derived writing acuities from the experience of type composition and sentence assembly in the compositor’s stick. With Clemens, “The paradigm of typesetting governed his prose writing and his hand writing, resonating with his speaking style.”(1.), while “…Whitman probably never composed a line of poetry without, in his mind’s eye, putting it on a composing stick.”(2.). They also shared an awareness of the physical processes of book production which helped to formulate their literary intentions.

Later in the century, Sam Clemens became enmeshed in the developments leading to mechanical setting of type. Here his years of hand composition fixed his anticipations. Imagining that the technical path was keyboard assembly of pre-cast type, he lost his fortune investing in the doomed Paige typesetter. Meanwhile, the clock maker, Ottmar Merganthaler developed the line caster based on the keyboard assembly of counter-form matricies.

Walt Whitman’s apprenticeship at the case and his activities and connections in the book production community contributed to his success. He directly managed production of his books, including his participation in the imposition, composition, printing, illustration and binding of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. This exceptional production has proven a timeless, continually modern, book work. He ingeniously utilized the resources of materials, skills and technologies to create a physical work of art that conveys his voice.

Various components of the 1855 edition help to explain its physical presence while they also reflect the industrial habitat of book production in the New York city region. The text paper is machine made, though rag derived. It comes from the stock of the dingy, paper dust clouded, job printing shop where the book was printed. This is the precursor paper of our own laser and copier stocks.

The binding is produced with the earliest, purpose made, book cloth and the binding construction illustrates the revolutionary case construction by then a predominant method only in New York. Case construction, as contrasted with the previous in-boards construction, introduced the technological pathway that would eventually lead to mechanization of the bookbinding process.

Another component featured in Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass was one of which he was not aware. This was the sewing of the book which was the domain of a women’s work force whose methods and specifications would not be fully understood by the book making men. It is in the sewing that we observe one of the few features of routine and cost cutting among all the others that characterize an exceptional book production.

The women worked from a standard length of thread provided in skeins and hung from their sewing frames. Books of various heights and thicknesses were all sewn as endless stacks of gatherings to be separated into individual volumes in a subsequent step. The set thread length, divided by the distance between the outer sewing stations, gave the number of gatherings that could be sewn between knots. The women could not control the pull through time of the fixed length of thread, but they could influence the distance between outer sewing stations and, thereby, the number of gatherings which could be sewn between knots and needle re-threadings. Such seeming the small time savings were important when we consider the speed of repetitive hand sewing induced by a meager piece rate per gathering.

Book sewing remained a conventionalized, female gendered operation throughout the hand sewn book period. The standard stitching on sunken cords, attaching two gatherings for every pass of the thread, remained the same across the revolution from in-boards to case construction. This crucial, mid 19th century industrial change involved reassignment of men at forwarding and finishing and significant modification of their methods and equipment while it left the women and their sewing work undisturbed.

The 1855 Leaves of Grass is conventionally sewn in a high production hand sewing operation. It was indistinguishably treated amid an unending workflow. The distance between outer sewing stations extended to only 2/3 of the text height. The gatherings were sewn two at a time resulting in only two stitches per gathering and these stitches only extended to 1/3 of the text height.

This sewing for a text as large at the 1855 edition (22.0 cm gold edge variation text block and 28.5 cm plain edge variation text block) was so abbreviated that it has impaired the durability of the publication. It was consistently applied in the forwarding of all the binding variants. As such it is an exemplar of cheap book production practice, typical of the industrialized hand methods, but at odds with a quality of the book that Walt intended to make.

Gary Frost 11.11.05

(1.) Powers, Ron, Mark Twain, A Life, Free Press, 2005, p.50. (2.) Folsom, Ed, Whitman Making Books, Books Making Whitman, University of Iowa Press, 2005, p.4.