From Paper-mill to Pressroom

by William Bond Wheelwright

The mortar and pestle were succeeded by a machine mechanically imitating the handwork of beating the rags to pulp. This was called a stamper. The old mortar remained, but the beating was done by iron-shod hammers, which were raised and released by cams on a shaft turned by water-power. Note the stamper in the foreground of the picture of Ancient Paper-making on page [II].

The Dutch improved upon this device by the invention of the Holland beating engine about 1770, which in its essentials is practically the same thing to-day on a much larger scale.

Until the year 1798 there had been no further advance in mechanical inventions for paper-making, but let us pause a moment for a consideration of the paper itself.

The early raw material consisted solely of cotton and linen rags, and there was very little variety of output. Until 1750 all the paper was made on molds, the seats of which were made by fine parallel wires supported by heavier wires, which ran at right angles to them. Consequently all the paper was what is called “laid.” In 1750, at the instance of the famous Printer Baskerville, a mold was made with a woven-wire seat, and the first “wove” paper was used in his famous Edition of Virgil.

The characteristics of the earlier paper are well summed up by Mr. De Vinne in an article on woodcut printing which appeared in Volume XIX, No. 6, of Scribner’s Magazine, a reading of which impresses one with the limitations of ancient paper-making as contrasted with the complexity of modern paper-making, and all the study which its variations impose upon the modern printer who seeks proficiency.

“Much of the paper made in the sixteenth century,” he says, “was unsuitable for woodcuts. By far the larger portion was made of linen stock, hard and rough as to surface, laid, or showing the marks of the wires upon which the pulp had been crushed, or ragged edges, unsized and very sensitive to dampness, uneven in thickness, usually thin in the center and thick at the edges....

“The paper selected was, in most cases, too rough and hard to be forcibly impressed against the delicate lines of fine woodcuts. It was the usage everywhere to soften the paper by a careful dampening.

“When the paper was sized it was more weakened by this dampening, which really lightened the labor of the pressman. But unsized paper was only about half the price of sized, and the inducement to use it was great. The unsized paper was dampened with difficulty, it greedily sucked up water, and when fully wet became flabby and unmanageable. Under searching pressure of the woolen blanket which was always put between the paper to be printed and the printing surface, this flabby paper was forced around the finer lines of the cut, making them much thicker than was intended.”

Let those whose shallowness leads them to regard modern paper-making as an abortion of a once noble art take thought!

The transition from the old ways of paper-making to modern processes was sudden. The century which gave them to us stands out in radiance against the dark ages of heavy toil at the vat and press.