I do not wish to belittle the affection a professional printer may have for his work. He should love his work. But he can love it only in a different way: for after all he is essentially a businessman about it. His work, like that of any other businessman, is something he has to sit down to by nine in the morning and something he can't leave until five at night. It is something that involves landlords and labor unions, payrolls and tax inspectors, truckmen, office-boys, salesmen, compositors, pressman, bindery workers—and customers. He has to worry about payments, and depreciation, and publicity, and time sheets.
The professional has to concern himself with all these things which are not printing at all, because he is in business and has to make money. His primary yardstick of success as a professional is: How much money did we make last year? Of course he has other minor yardsticks of success too: he may be successful because his presses turn out useful things like timetables, or gratifying things like corporation reports for the year, or beautiful things like four-color reproductions of Varga girls. To make these things well is a kind of fun; and insofar as the fun comes from the satisfaction in the thing itself rather than in the profit that derives from it, I'd like to call it amateur satisfaction.
But essentially our professional printer—and permit me to limit myself to the professional book printer—is supposed to make money, not to have fun. And he makes money best, nowadays, if his plant is equipped with the efficient modern machinery which is designed for maximum production. Such machinery is a wonderful creation of man; it is thrilling to watch in action; and it gets results. But it has its disadvantages. Now that mechanization is becoming more and more complete in more and more places, we can begin to see clearly the greatest disadvantage of all: under such mechanization individual workers have lost pride and satisfaction in their work, because they have become mere replaceable units of less and less importance; whereas the machines they operate are more and more important, and have become the essential units.
A generation ago the professional printer might have boasted of his skilled compositors, who could set type more expertly, or his skilled pressmen, who could make more careful overlays or match ink better than someone else's craftsmen. Today he boasts of his remote-control composing machines, his presses which come close to eliminating make-ready altogether, and his ink supplier's new gadget which matches colors scientifically. Today the most successful printer is the one who with the least possible dependence on man-power, can keep the most presses running fastest for the greatest number of hours per day and days per year. He is not the one with the most skilled craftsmen.
In such a world, where the executive's function is to feed the machine and the workman's is to tend it, the human spirit begins to cry out for the fun in work which I have called the amateur satisfaction. It is true that today's shorter working hours—which the machine makes possible—permit people to have more outside fun; permit the manager to play more golf, and the workman to play more softball (or more pinball) in the late afternoon; it is true that more people now see more beer advertised on more television programs, and may even drink more of it, in the evenings. But managers and workmen alike turn so avidly to such kinds of fun because they no longer get fun out of their daily work. It is becoming harder and harder for people to equate work and happiness.
Now I do not set myself up as a social reformer dedicated to the dream that all people should be happy in their work. Nor do I propose as a step to this end that we revert, smash the wonderful machines, and go back to the good old days when everyone really did work with his hands—usually from dawn to dark, six days a week. There was no pinball or television then, but still I do not wish to go back! Nor do I suggest that the solution is the promised thirty-hour week, with all the workmen driving their own Buicks home at two each afternoon, and taking out the wife and kiddies to Braves Field or the Gardner Museum.
But I do suggest that some of you people who really love printing, but are too involved with the nine-to-five daily business of it to enjoy it much, should enrich your lives by becoming amateur printers in your spare time. You will have fun.
I yield to no man in my boredom with vegetables and salads. I see green at every meal save breakfast. I have eaten enough stringbeans to stretch—if they were straightened out and laid end to end—from Fordhook Nurseries in Delaware to the city of Burbank, California. If you could see all the lettuce leaves I have consumed in my lifetime, piled leaf on leaf and dripping in their oils, their vinegar, their mayonnaise, and their roquefort dressings, you would be absolutely appalled. But, bored as I am with green things on the table—bored because despite their goodness they have been too plentiful and too easily come by—I am not bored on those occasions when, like Candide, I cultivate my garden, get my hands into the dirt, and smell God's good fragrance in the loam. To watch the power of living things like salad greens and stringbeans pushing their way out of the seed, up through the earth, reaching down for water and up for sunlight with an irresistible drive, is to realize afresh the power of life on this planet. It is a reinvigorating and religious experience. It is impossible to watch seeds grow into plants and flowers and fruit and still to believe cynically in a mere mechanistic explanation for such a life drive. To get back to the seed, the earth, and the root is to re-experience the fun and meaning of life.
In the same way that I have become bored with salad, we have all become bored with words, printed words. We have seen too many of them, we have read too many of them, we have measured, or proofread, or edited, or sold, too many of them. We have forgotten their primal power, their irresistible living urge. We have forgotten that sincere authors have not put them down on paper because of two cents a word or 10 per cent of the retail gross—that they have been written (in the best cases) out of human necessity, human ebullience, human passion, human sympathy, or human understanding. The industrial book-printing world cannot ever think of words in that way. It must always think of them as areas of type 22 by 28 picas, as numbers of pages which do or do not make up a multiple of thirty-two, as units of sale at $3.00 less 40 per cent.