Fyfe 2012

Fyfe, Aileen. Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Impt disciplinary difference: she is a cultural historian, not a literary critic

Preface/Intro

• xvi: Having founded the publishing house of W & R Chambers in 1832, he was now coproprietor of one of Edinburgh's larger printing and publishing operations.... The New York Literary World declared that William and his brother Robert had "done more, perhaps, than any other two individuals of the age for the promotion of sound and useful knowledge".... By this time, [1850s] Chambers had abandoned the traditional skills associated with hand printing and become an enthusiastic convert to the latest innovations in printing processes and machinery: machine-made paper that was produced in ever-larger sheets; stereotype plates that preserved the form of moveable type long after the original type was dispersed; and, especially, printing machines that could be driven by steam power. These techniques had existed in 1820, but the British book trade did not adopt them until much later. William Chambers's firm would become one of the pioneers, transforming printing from a handcraft to a great Victorian industry and doing so, moreover, not simply in search of profit but as a means of bringing cheap instructive print and education to a universal readership.
• 1: As a journalist remarked in 1855, "the quantity of printed matter that now issues from the press, and passes through the shops of booksellers to the public, is something totally unprecedented."
  • this is always the sense after Gutenberg
• 2: ...the great literary works were far less representative of the output of the print trades of their day than we might imagine. Almanacs, spelling books, and dictionaries had long been the bread and buter of publishing, and by the middle decades of the C19, publishers were issuing enormous quantitites of schoolbooks, railway timetables, cookery books, and cheap instructive texts on a wide range of topics. These sorts of books were usually available for a few shillings [vs. 31s.6d. for a 3-vol novel, though those were aimed at libraries][.]
• Of course the flood of cheap print was not the only significant change to C19 life. [Steam navigation and electricity, especially the electric telegraph]
• 3: the telegraph's domain was the almost-real-time communication of brief, valuable information between two (or a small number of) affluent correspondents. Throughout the C19, therefore, the printed word continued to convey the widest variety of forms of information to the widest variety of people [at mid-century].
• the difference of print as a commodity from other commodities -- Bagehot, "we go by train, but we are not improved at our journey's end" -- though Freedgood would rightly argue that Wedgwood vases and hat pins do have the power to affect the soul
• 4: Cheap print influenced people's minds, not just the material conditions of their daily lives. It represented a potential force for true social improvement.
• The modern estimates also confirm contemporary impressions that the years around 1850 were particularly special. Not only was this the time of hte most rapid rate of growth in the output of the book trade in the entire century (albeit short lived), but, as historian Simon Eliot has shown, it was when the price structure of the British trade changed: the time when cheap books because more common than expensive ones [books priced under 3s.6d.]
  • Get: Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800-1919. London: Bibliographical Society, 1994.
• 5: For Victorians, the most striking symbol of the new world of abundant, cheap print was the steam-powered printing machine....the printing machine may have been the most dramatic of the technical changes in the printing trade, but it was accompanied by the arrival of machine-made paper, stereotype plates and edition [case] bindings, and several new techniques for reproducing illustrations.
• 6: In their [Knight's, Chambers's] emphasis on technology, they largely ignored the social, political, and commercial factors in which the new processes operated. The exception was their recognition of increased literacy rates[.]
  • Scholarly practices can run the risk of reifying the practices of Victorian book trade practitioners in this way (esp. with labor)
• Her intervention: she argues that we're better on "social, economic and cultural contexts of print," but not as much on the new technologies themselves, treating them as merely instrumental
• Bibliographers and historians of printing have provided us with explanations of each of the new processes, descriptions and illustrations of the printed product that resulted, instructions on how to identify surviving specimens, and descriptions of the various types of machinery that make it all possible. But we know surprisingly little about how such technologies were used in practice or how their use fitted into wider commercial or social objectives. Despite the fact that strong technological determinism is out of fashion, there remains a widespread assumption in the history of publishing that it is sufficient to remark that the arrival of new technologies and methods of production were hugely significant, without asking why, or how, or to whom, or where. Meanwhile, historians of technology have demonstrated that technology rarely, if ever, has the straightforward, world-changing effect that the Victorians took for granted.
• 7: We know when and by whom steam-printing machines, stereotyping, and machine-made paper were invented, but we do not yet know how and why certain printers and publishers started using them while others did not.
• ...the first commercial steam-printing machine was commissioned by the proprietor of the Times newspaper and brought into use in 1814.
  • Get: John Feather, A History of British Publishing, London, Routledge, 2006.
• ...Most literary book publishers saw no need to abandon a system that was working well...The real question, then, concerns what was going on in the period between the newspapers' adoption of the new technologies, around 1820, and their eventual percolation through most of the British book trade, sometime after 1850. Studies of particular publishing houses give some hints [and publishing societies like Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge].
• 8: Knight and Chambers were pioneering in their use of new processes to produce general knowledge works in a range of new format,s at a time when they were otherwise restricted to the big London newspapers, the most successful of the weekly magazines, and the charitable publishing societies.
  • Was Knight printing Shakespeare reprints in the 1830s? Was Chambers?
• Both were convinved that knowledge ought to be widely available, and that, in the absence of a proper educational system for all classes [until 1870s], cheap instructive publishing was the most effective way of achieving this aim.
• Focusing less on invention of new tech than "the complex ways in which individuals decided whether to acquire the new machinery or techniques, when to do so, and what to use them for."
• 9: [Stakes] The Chambers brothers are a revealing example because they were part of what we might call the second wave of adopters. Chambers came to steam printing and stereotyping some 15 or 20 years after they had been invented, when they were relatively well developed but had yet to come into widespread use. Being ahead of the crowd meant that [the] Chambers were choosing to use new processes at a time when their uses and roles in the publishing business were still fluid and open to negotiation. Chambers needed to - and yet also had the freedom to - configure the techniques in the best way for their particular philanthropic ambitions and commercial needs.
• Archive: W & R Chambers Archive, deposited in the National Library of Scotland
• 10: It was the pressure of producing sufficient copies of this [Chambers's Journal weekly] magazine, combined with an intense desire to increase its circulation, that originally led the firm to both steam printing and stereotyping. This in itself was not particularly unusual, but what was striking was their subsequent decision - having purchased a printing machine of their own - to experiment in printing different types of work by steam. They were among the first in Britain to print books by steam power. They also used stereotype plates to coordinate the activities of two geographically distant printing centers, thus overcoming the difficulties of distribution in the pre-railway era, one of several problems that were arguably exacerbated by their location in Edinburgh rather than in London.
  • 3 part structure: early years and expansion, mature period and impact of railways
  • look up:
    • stereotyping: The process of making a mould of a page or forme of type and cast- ing its identical image as a thinner metal plate took even longer to per- fect than that of casting movable type. The advantage of permanently locking up the type of a book often printed must have been early recognised, but the advantage of moulding was that it released the type for other purposes, besides retaining, in the mould, the means of making a second plate, should the first wear out. Probably invented in Holland in the second half of the 17th. century, a form of stereotype was used by Jacob Athias for the con- traband English bibles printed there to undercut those of the King’s Printer and the University presses which held the privilege for print- ing them. Used again by Johann Muller of Leyden for his Syriac New Testaments (1709 and 1713), the process was effectively re-invented first by William Ged of Edinburgh in the late 1720s and again by Alexander Tilloch c. 1780. The improvements made by Earl Stanhope finally established it between 1800 and 1820, and thereafter the technique was widely used in England and (particularly) America from the second decade of the 19th century onwards. (ABC for Book Collectors, 210-11)
    • Chambers's Journal: