The dear man! He wants so much to save your soul. Meanwhile, his good wife is laying the table for their evening meal. Her smile is motherly. Maybe she has guessed you were counting the plates. Pleasant odors come from the kitchen. Our gracious host brings your coat, helps you put it on, hands you your hat, opens the door and you step out into a Chicago snowstorm.
At this point the script calls for slow music and heart-rending sobs—another Kate Claxton in the Two Orphans. Also for melodrama! This is a beautiful snowstorm. The evening is mild and the flakes are big. They sail lazily through the amber light of the street lamps, feather the bare branches of trees that print a fantastic pattern against the red-brick housefronts. The drifts must be at least an inch deep. And tomorrow ... tomorrow, you will, as always happens on Sunday, go to a restaurant on Clark Street where you will be served two pork tenderloins, flanked by a mound of mashed potatoes topped with gravy, and one other vegetable, and supplemented by bread and butter and a cup of coffee—all for twenty cents. Joy bells ringing!
A couple of weeks later you are standing at a case in the printing plant of Knight & Leonard. Mr. Leonard happens to be passing. He stops and glances at your galley, type arrangement for a catalog cover. He is interested and asks where you learned job composition. In one graphically condensed paragraph, dramatically composed, for it has been prepared in advance in anticipation of this much wished-for opportunity, you tell the story of your life—and make a momentous proposition.
The next morning you are seated at a flat-top desk in the second-floor office. You have your drawing material and are designing a new booklet cover for the stationery department of A. C. McClurg. It is understood that when orders for drawing fail you will fill in by setting type.
Now you are, at nineteen, a full-fledged designer and working at a window opposite Spalding’s. On playing days you watch Pop Anson and his be-whiskered team enter a barge and depart for the ball park.
One day a young man appears at K & L’s with proofs of halftone engravings. He has been with the Mathews Northrup Press in Buffalo, where he had learned the process. He is now starting an engraving plant in Chicago. K & L print some specimen sheets on coated paper. These are probably the first halftones ever engraved in Chicago, also the first printing of halftones. K & L are Chicago’s leading commercial printers, quality considered. Mr. Knight is a retired Board of Trade operator. Mr. Leonard is the practical printer. He is also the father of Lillian Russell. Once, when she is appearing in Chicago, Miss Russell visits at the office. You are thrilled.
A man, trained in Germany, grinds ink for K & L. He is located on the floor above the office. You occasionally visit him. He gives you much good advice. The Inter Ocean, located on the next corner, installs a color press. The K & L ink expert helps get out the first edition.
For two years or more you occupy that desk and never again see the composing room. During this period, while receiving twenty-four dollars a week, you marry that young lady of your ten-year-old romance.
The J. M. W. Jeffery Co., show printers, is turning out some swell posters designed by Will Crane. They are printed from wood-blocks and are wonders. An artist by the name of Frank Getty is designing labels in the Chicago sales-office of the Crump Label Company. They are a glorious departure from the conventional truck of the label lithographers.
Joe Lyendecker is designing covers in color for paper-bound novels. They are gorgeous. There are no art magazines or other publications helpful to designers. You, like others, have a scrap-book made up of booklet covers, cards and other forms of advertising. A designer by the name of Bridwell is doing some thrilling work for Mathews Northrup in Buffalo, a concern that is setting a stiff pace for other railroad printers. Abbey, Parsons, Smedley, Frost and Pennell, and Charles Graham in Harper’s Weekly, are models for all illustrators.