Technologies of Publishing

by

Alexis Weedon

• LAST MODIFIED: 23 September 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0217

Introduction

The technologies of book and periodical manufacture moved publishing from the business of lone booksellers and their friends to that of a limited company tied by trade partnerships in production, distribution, and sales with other manufacturing firms. It is wrong to see this as driven solely by technology; other factors such as increasing population, the spread of education, and the politics of imperialism were behind this burgeoning of print. Yet the innovations in paper manufacture, printing and typesetting, and binding and distribution meant that by the end of the century books and periodicals were affordable to the vast majority of the population of the British Empire and across the United States. The “iron hand” press used in the eighteenth century was superseded by steam-powered “printing machines” which over the century doubled and then quadrupled the size of the sheets which could be printed. In Samuel Smiles’s classic Men of Invention and Industry (New York: Harper and Bros., 1884), he included Frederick Koenig as the inventor of steam printing, along with the Walter’s Press of The Times and William Clowes’s London plant, which printed the first cheap high circulation periodical, Charles Knight’s The Penny Magazine, in 1832. These were given equal billing by Smiles alongside inventors of the screw propeller, the marine chronometer, and the industries of ship building, gas lighting, and the British silk industry. The steam engine powered the continuation of new designs of mechanical presses and bigger and faster presses, and those needed paper which was cheap and made in bespoke sizes and in rolls for the press. These and other innovations changed the look and feel of the book over the century. Scholarship has focused on ‘The Material Book’ as it is felt in the hand as it moved from a bespoke binding in tooled leather for the customer’s library to being sold off the shelf in the bookshop in a case-bound copy with colored boards providing a hard cover, a printed dust jacket, or in collections of books in uniform bindings in imitation a ‘Gentleman’s Library.’ Studies of The Material Book acknowledge the proliferation in quality and bindings for a retail market with a range of price points, at the cheaper end of that market producing sixpenny, tuppenny and penny paper-bound books printed economically on magazine presses on wood-pulp paper and in small type for the young newly literate working classes. Such studies document the revolution in printing technologies which extended into a wider visual culture; late-19th-century wallpaper and textile designs are still reproduced today, and reproductions of paintings through engraving, lithography, and color printing made art available in the Victorian home. The scientific experimentation in materials and inks created new color ranges and the photomechanical reproduction of photographs through screen mesh led to the burgeoning of a pictorial press. Creative typography and graphic design in advertising enticed the eye; in the street there were billboards and in shop windows packaging to persuade customers. This bibliography draws together key contemporary sources from the Victorian period and modern scholarship with a focus on UK and United States.

From Bibliography to Book Manufacturing

The nineteenth century can be seen as the end of the hand press period, and so current bibliographic techniques of studying individual volumes and how they were collated are of less help in understanding the means of production than the study of patents and the mechanical operation of printing and papermaking machines. General overviews tend to focus on a particular aspect of book or periodical production such as the development of printing presses, or offer a view of business development, such as examined in Feather 1990 and Weedon 2016. Both are useful. Understanding can be built by starting from authoritative but concise essays such as Raven 2015, Banham 2020, and the chronological diagrams of Twyman 1994. Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography is a handy technical introduction which explains why bibliographic techniques can fail when mechanical printing dominates (and also where they can be useful as proven in Shillingsburg 1981, cited in Examples of the Effect of New Technologies on Publishing Business Practices). Alderson 2009 gives a more general introduction to the production of children’s books and the implications for authors and illustrators of the genre. The multivolume Histories of the Book frequently have sections on production technologies and labor conditions, sometimes as case studies (Gross, et al. 2010). They chart the changes from Koenig’s cylinder press, employed by The Times in November 1814 to increase its print run from one thousand to four thousand copies, through the improvements by Applegarth and Cowper in the 1820s. Further inventions increased the speed of printing with the rotary press, Hoe’s invention commonly used for periodicals. For the post-1840 industrialized period in America Winship 2009 provides a comprehensive overview in a single chapter and Dewalt gives a summary of printing technology as it developed in Canada (Dewalt 2004–2007).

• Alderson, Brian. “The Making of Children’s Books.” In The Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature. Edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel, 35–54. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

  Helpfully illustrated, this is an overview of the expansion of this market sector in the nineteenth century.

• Banham, Rob. “The Industrialization of the Book 1800–1970.” In A Companion to the History of the Book. Vol. 2. Edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 453–469. Wiley, 2020.

  DOI: 10.1002/9781119018193.ch30

  Helpfully extends into the long nineteenth century. Part IV.

• Dewalt, Bryan. “Printing Technology.” In History of the Book in Canada, 1840–1918. Vol. 2. Edited by Fiona Black, Patricia Lockhart Fleming, and Yvan Lamonde, 89–100. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004–2007.

  Looks at printing and the material form of the book in Canada. Part Two.

• Feather, John. “Technology and the Book in the Nineteenth Century.” Critical Survey 2.1 (1990): 5–13.

  Focusing on the democratization of print through the technologies which cheapened and often reduced the quality of printed matter.

• Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

  The section ‘The Machine Press period from 1800–1950’ (pp. 189–312) is still the clearest introduction to the complexities of technological innovation in book production.

• Gross, Robert A., Mary Kelley, and David D. Hall, eds. A History of the Book in America. Vol. 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840. Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2010.

  Compilation of studies which focus on America and contrast technological development in urban and rural areas. See for example Karen Nipps’s case study on “Urban Printing” (chapter 2, Part 3, pp. 137–145), and Jack Larkin’s “Printing Is Something Every Village Has in It” in “Rural Printing and Publishing” (Part 4, pp. 145–160) as well as the printers who moved across the country sharing their trade in William S. Pretzer’s ‘“Of the Paper Cap and Inky Apron” in “Journeyman Printers” (Part 5, 160–172).

• Raven, James. “The Industrial Revolution of the Book.” In The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book. Edited by Leslie Howsam, 143–161. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

  Useful succinct introduction to the technologies and advances from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century in Britain, Europe, and (briefly) globally.

• Twyman, Michael.  “Two Centuries of Printing: Book Production History Diagrams.” Publishing History (Cambridge) 36 (1994): 103.

  Diagrammatic representation of the technological development in book production.

• Weedon, A. Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–1916. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.

  Explains publishers’ and printers’ abbreviations in archival sources. Demonstrates how the technical revolution led to a mass market for books.

• Winship, Michael. “Manufacturing and Book Production.” In A History of the Book in America. Vol. 3, The Industrial Book, 1840–1880. Vol. 3. Edited by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, Michael P. Winship, and David D. Hall, 40–69. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

  Compilation of studies which focus on America in the middle of the nineteenth century. Michael Winship’s chapter (chapter 1) is an authoritative summary of the technological innovation by American publishers and printing firms of the time drawing on his own research.