It would be possible for a man of the world to be so without ever stirring from the town of his birth, yet oftener than not the man with breadth of interest is a cosmopolitan and a traveller. Such cosmopolitans were fourteen members of the Elzevir[27] family, who, over a period of one hundred and thirty years, engaged in printing and selling small books chiefly intended for poor scholars. This Dutch family of practical internationalists established their bookshops and printing offices in nearly every large city on the continent, from Denmark to Italy, printing their books in Latin and Greek, French and Arabic, on subjects ranging from medicine to political science. All this in spite of the Thirty Years' War, which was to bring about the decline of the artificial internationalism of the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire, and in spite of similar disturbances before and after.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the geographical boundaries of printing were extended vastly outside of Europe. The colonization of North and South America was going forward. The first press in America had been established at Mexico City in 1539 by agents of Kromberger of Seville. European printing was carried to India in 1561, to China in 1589, and to Japan in 1591. The first printing was done in Russia in 1563.
Credit for doing the first printing in the American colonies, The Freeman's Oath, was once given to Stephen Daye, is sometimes latterly given to his young son, Matthew Daye. Were they more than mechanic, compositor and pressman? Who chose the copy, proofread it, set policies, pushed the work along? Possibly some of the founders of the new Harvard College, or possibly Mrs. Glover, the widow of the man who originated the idea of the press. She was probably a woman of education, since she settled in Cambridge to be near the new college and later married the President, Henry Dunster. She undoubtedly shared her first husband's independent views—he had been suspended from his parsonage in Surrey because of his nonconformity; she might have picked The Freeman's Oath for the first copy. She may have been more of a printer and more of a woman of the world than the fragments of knowledge which we have about her disclose.... Whoever guided the destiny of the first press, it was a person not completely confined by dogma, for the books included almanacs, law books and college thesis lists, as is pointed out by Carl Purington Rollins, himself perhaps our best example of a modern fine printer conscious of what is going on around him.
During the late 1700's the Industrial Revolution began, but its implications were not guessed by artisan or statesman, and the best printers were still in the age of elegance. Baskerville was businessman, eccentric, free-thinker, but his printing, as much as that of Bodoni who was employed by the Duke of Parma, was regal.
Probably Horace Walpole,[28] more than any other printer, felt that the world was his house, in which he could move about freely from room to room, always at ease. He had the wit and manners to be an ornament to French salons, the originality to introduce a new brand of literature in his Castle of Otranto—the forerunner of our mystery novel of today, the personal force to influence the trend of English architecture with his "little Gothic castle" at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham. In one of his letters to the artist Richard Bentley he says that he can't resist going to fires, and there is something of this spirit in his activities. The collector W. S. Lewis says, "He was not only, in his own word, a 'gazetteer' but the historian of English painting and gardening, an essayist, poet, novelist, pamphleteer, dramatist, printer, antiquarian, and arbiter elegantiarum and in the modern sense and phrase a 'debunker' of historical figures.... It was his main purpose in life to be the official historian of his time."
Although he had a seat in Parliament, he paid little attention to the nation's business. He represented those parts of life in the eighteenth century which had natured and were drawing to a close, as Fielding and Goldsmith, the American Revolution and the French Revolution represented things to come. Printing being one of his minor activities, he is of more interest as a human being than as a craftsman.
If Walpole was a man of the world and man of letters, John Bell[29] was man of the world and man of business. During a lifetime of eighty-six years he was, as Stanley Morison pictures him, book-seller, printer, publisher, type-founder and journalist. Like a lesser Franklin—he had not Franklin's scientific interest, integrity, or vision—he was endowed with the ability to grasp the salient facts of a trade or profession, and a wealth of exuberant interest in life around him. At the beginning of his career as a book-seller, he published a sort of early version of Wilson's Cumulative Book Index, a list of current books for the use of the trade. As type-founder (and introducer of the short "s") he employed the talent of the punch cutter Richard Austin to produce the first English "modern" type. In addition to a successful fashion magazine, he published at different times four newspapers. At one time he even made himself a war correspondent, when he visited the British Army then fighting the French Revolutionaries in Flanders. He reported the action at Ypres, made a march with the troops from Courtrai to Tournai and pursued his object of finding "active and well-informed persons in different parts of the continent" who would act as regular correspondents for his paper, The Oracle. The books he published included law books, Shakespeare, a series of the poets of Great Britain; he engaged members of the Royal Academy to illustrate the plays of a series called The British Theatre and hired the best engravers of the day to copy the paintings. He knew the literary men of the day—Sheridan wrote for his World—and even had a balloonist for a friend—Lunardi, who made the first ascent in London. Compared to his contemporary Bulmer, who could be called a printer's printer, Bell was a promoter whose medium was printing.
Of all the Didots, and they seem to have been able men, Firmin Didot[30] is of most interest to us. He taught many of the printers of Greece out of sympathy for the cause of Greek independence, the same for which Byron died. He wrote plays, translated classics, and after he retired from business he entered the Chamber of Deputies; he learned Spanish at the age of sixty-three. Desmond Flower says, in writing of him, "Printing is a curious and perhaps unsatisfactory hybrid between a profession and an art; the men who have caught the sense of it most successfully have been intelligent people who could see it whole—scholar-printer-publishers—for whom some other rivers flowed beyond the simple floods of printing ink." Perhaps when Mr. Flower wrote this he had forgotten how "tacky" printing ink is, but his meaning is a large part of what I am trying to say.