Ascending a few steps, we come into the composition room, occupying the central and larger portion of the second story. It contains sixty or more windows, is spacious and well-lighted, and yet, especially in the winter, when the windows are closed and the heat necessarily intense, the fumes from the chemicals render the work very unhealthy, especially to some constitutions. Long rows of double stands reach the entire length of the apartment.
At every one of these stands a patient worker—he must be patient if he is a faithful type-setter. Here are men past their prime, young men, boys and one woman. There have been three. One left her stand for a husband, another—Miss Mary Green—left hers to become the editor of a real-estate journal in Indianapolis, Indiana. The third, in neat calico dress and apron, stands beside a window, “setting up” her daily task. The pay of women in this room is the same as that of the men, viz., $24 per week.
A portion of this floor is shut in for the executive printing. This was made necessary by the fact that before it was done, the country found out what was in the president’s message before it was published. Such tricks and stratagems were used by “correspondents” to discover in advance what was in the president’s message, that one president had a press, types and workmen brought into the White House, that he might have his message confidentially printed, and “keep it to himself” till he was ready to give it to the world.
The supreme pride of these congressional printers is their “rule-and-figure work.” Confused tables of Commercial statistics, astronomical calculations, and abstracts of Government estimates, are marshalled into columns with the precision of a well-trained brigade.
The executive binding-room is fitted up with powerful machines for trimming the edges of books, shears for cutting pasteboard, etc. Here stands a man who does nothing, from the beginning to the end of the year, but cut book-covers. In another room are “ruling machines,” exquisite pieces of mechanism, which trace, in a year, acres of paper with the delicate red, blue or black lines which rule with mathematical accuracy the blank-books of the Government.
The third floor is almost exclusively devoted to binding. Some of the most beautifully bound books in the world here issue from the hands of the Government bindery. There are always specimen-copies of scientific and other important reports, which are bound in Turkey morocco, finely marbled and exquisitely gilded. The first volume of the Surgeon-General’s Medical and Surgical History of the War, on the day of our visit, was receiving this artistic finish, of delicate gold leaf, stamped upon the rich, dark-green morocco.
The furnaces for heating the stamps, for gilding, are heated by gas, which is considered safer, cleaner and healthier than charcoal. Still the ladies employed in this gold-leaf work suffer for want of air. The hottest summer day the windows have to remain closed, as the lightest zephyr may ruffle fatally the mimosa edges of the tremulous foil.
In the folding-room, on this floor, we find an army of maidens, whose deft and flying fingers fold the sheets, and make them ready for the binder. In the new wing beyond we come into the “stitching-room.” Here also the busy fingers and needles of women fly. Long rows of women, chiefly young girls, sit at tables beside wire frames, which hold down and mark the piled-up folios.
Standing beside a young slender girl, she seemed to have the St. Vitus’ dance. Every muscle and nerve in her body flew. The very nerves in her face twitched with the quick intensity of her movement; while her fingers stuck the needle and drew the thread with the persistency of a perpetual motion.
“You should be paid good wages to work like this,” I said.