“When the tide is at the lowest, ’tis but nearest to the turn.”
That quotation certainly applies to the year 1895 that had started with so little to its credit in the annals of commercial printing and in which we were now witnessing an encouraging æsthetic awakening in the kindred field of publishing. Choice little volumes printed on deckle-edge papers were coming from those young book-making enthusiasts—Stone and Kimball in Chicago and Copeland and Day in Boston—and were attracting wide attention and winning well-earned acclaim. Also there were the Kelmscott Press hand-printed books of William Morris, especially his Chaucer, set in type of his own design and gorgeously illustrated by Burne-Jones; the Vale Press books, designed by Charles Ricketts and for which he also designed the type; the exotic illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley in John Lane’s Yellow Book, all coming to us from London. Then there was the excitement occasioned by our own “poster craze,” with its accompanying exhibitions giving advertisers and the general public an opportunity to see the gay designs of Chéret and the astounding creations of Lautrec. All these were indicative of a thought-quickening trend due to have a stimulative influence in the then fallow field of commercial printing.
The Wayside Press which I opened in this year of transition was so named for a very real reason. I had worked in Ishpeming and Chicago so as to earn money to take me back to Boston where I hoped to study and become an artist, the profession of my father. I had always thought of printing as being along the wayside to the achieving of my ambition. And I chose a dandelion leaf as my device because the dandelion is a wayside growth.
On the main business street in Springfield there was a new office building called the Phoenix. In two offices on the top floor of the Phoenix Building I had my studio. Back of the office building there was a new loft building on the top floor of which I was establishing my Wayside Press, a corridor connecting it with the top floor of the Phoenix Building and thus making it easily accessible from my studio. It was an ideal location, and with windows on two sides and at the south end insuring an abundance of sunshine, fresh air and light, the workshop was a cheerful spot and one destined to woo me (probably far too often) from my studio and my only definitely established source of income, my designing.
My first Wayside Press printing, before the publication of my magazine, was a Strathmore deckle-edge sample book. Heretofore all Connecticut Valley paper-mill samples, regardless of color, texture or quality of paper, had carried in black ink, usually in the upper corner of each sheet, information as to size and weight. No attempt had been made to stimulate sales by showing the printer how different papers might be used. But one day just after the Press opened, I had a visitor who changed all that.
I had a bed-ticking apron that had been made for me by my wife, copying the apron I had worn when at the ages of fifteen to seventeen I had served as job printer and foreman of that little print shop in Ishpeming, where I used to proudly stand, type-stick-in-hand, in the street doorway to enjoy a brief chat with my wife-to-be, then a school-teacher and my sweetheart, as she was on her way to school. Wearing that apron, and at the stone, is how and where Mr. Moses of the Mittineague Paper Company, first of the Strathmore Paper Company units, found me on the occasion of our first meeting.
In my mind’s eye I can see Mr. Moses now as he entered from the corridor. He was wearing a navy blue serge suit that emphasized his slight build and made him appear younger than I had expected. I was then twenty-seven and undoubtedly thought of myself as quite grown up, and I marveled that a man seemingly so young should possess the business knowledge necessary to have put him at the head of an even then well-known mill. The contrast of that natty blue-serge with my striped bed-ticking apron should have made me self-conscious. Perhaps it did; but, filled with the youthful enthusiasm and glorious hopes of a dreamer, I probably had thoughts for nothing but my new print shop and publishing. Seeing me unpacking type, my visitor may have thought my time could have been employed more profitably at my drawing-board, as of course it could—though in my then frame of mind it could not have been employed more enjoyably. Displaying samples of his new line, Mr. Moses asked if I would lay out and print a showing for distribution to commercial printers and advertisers.
I explained that the Wayside Press was being established for the printing of Bradley: His Book, an art and literary magazine, and for a few booklets and brochures—publications to which I planned to give my personal attention throughout all details of production, and that I had not contemplated undertaking any outside work.
However, after a moment’s brief consideration, I became so intrigued with the printing possibilities of these new Strathmore papers, their pleasing colors and tints, together with their being such a perfect, a literally made-to-order, vehicle for Caslon roman and Caslon Black, that I enthusiastically agreed to undertake the commission—a decision for which I shall always feel thankful.
The favorable publicity won by the use of these “old-fashioned” types on Strathmore papers, convinces me that to attain distinction a print shop must possess personality and individuality. At any rate, my continued use of Strathmore papers with appropriate typography and designs aroused such widespread interest among merchants and advertisers and brought so many orders for printing that it soon produced the need for more space. My plant was then moved to a top loft in a new wing that had been added to the Strathmore mill at Mittineague, across the river from Springfield.