Scaling & Persisting

The Sun, No. 1. 3 September 1833. 

The first issue of The Sun newspaper, shown here, was priced at one penny. 

Robert Hoe’s machines supported the nascent development of American mass media. In September 1833, inspired by the enormous success of Britain’s Penny Magazine, Benjamin H. Daly launched The Sun, the first successful penny daily newspaper in the United States. Within four months of its launch, The Sun had four thousand subscribers—equivalent to the largest circulations of traditional newspapers in the United States at the time. By late 1834, it had the largest circulation in the United States, with over ten thousand copies printed on Hoe printing machines each day.

“New York Printing Machine, Press and Saw Works, R. Hoe & Co.” Graham’s Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 6. Philadelphia, June 1852.   

These are the R. Hoe & Co. factory buildings on Broom Street, New York City, in 1852. The illustrations in Graham’s Magazine’s article on Robert Hoe’s factory are probably the best ones of a printing machine factory in the mid-nineteenth century. Most notably they show the construction of one of Hoe’s huge type-revolving printing machines—the fastest printing machines available at the time. 

Graham’s Magazine, Vol. 41.   

This image depicts the “Great Foundery” (sic) at the R. Hoe & Co. factory. It was necessary for Hoe to produce all or most of the iron parts for their printing machines, including the giant gear in the center of the image.  

R. Hoe & Co. Printing Machines. New York, 1867.

This catalogue shows the Hoe Four-Cylinder Type-Revolving Printing Machine being operated by four men. It specifies the size of the machine’s components, the weight of the largest component, the weight of the machine boxed, and the space required for its installation. The machine, which could be built in eight sizes, weighed between 18,500 and 29,000 pounds, and was operated by a two- or three-horsepower steam engine. 

R. Hoe & Co. Manufactures of Type-Revolving, Perfecting, Single and Double Cylinder and Adams’ Printing Machines […]. New York, 1873.

The catalogue entry for a Type-Revolving Perfecting Press designed for printing books emphasizes that the speed of the machine was limited only by the speed at which paper could be fed into it by hand. Hoe's large format catalogue does not yet include a web press, which printed from a roll of paper and was not constrained by the limitations of humans feeding sheets of paper into the machine. 

Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 20, No. 1041. 9 December 1876.  

In this portrait, the son of Robert Hoe, Richard March Hoe, is styled “Colonel” from his service in the U.S. National Guard. The sheet also includes a picture of Hoe’s Web Printing Machine in operation at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The states that Hoe’s machine could print fifteen thousand copies, on both sides, per hour of an eight- or four-page newspaper. Lifting the extremely heavy rolls of paper to the height evidently required by this press design, as shown in the image, would have required a special mechanism. 

Bronze Medal. Issued by R. Hoe & Co. 1900.  

Issued by R. Hoe & Co. in 1900, this bronze medal honors Gutenberg and the Hoe Octuple Press, which printed 192,000 four-page newspapers per hour. 

Robert Hoe III. A Short History of the Printing Press. New York, 1902. 

Hoe's book is an illustrated review of advances in printing technology from the time of Gutenberg to the end of the nineteenth century; because so many advances in printing presses and printing machines had occurred during the nineteenth century, from the invention of the Stanhope iron handpress onward, Hoe focused primarily on that period. The bronze medal exhibited here is reproduced on the title page. 

Courtesy of The Grolier Club.

[Hippolyte Marinoni.] Le Petit Journal. Paris, 1902.  

This 1902 calendar was printed in color on Marinoni presses. It depicts people buying and reading copies of the newspaper from vendors, who are wearing Le Petit Journal hats with visors. Vendors display folded copies mounted on rods; a vendor in the middle of the image is holding up copies to buyers riding on the roof of the horse-drawn bus. The calendar claims that five million people per day read Le Petit Journal, and a million copies of the color supplement are printed each week. 

[Hippolyte Marinoni.] Inventions illustrés. L’imprimerie. Le petit journal supplément illustrè. 2 June 1901 

Hippolyte Marinoni (front left with arm outstretched, in black coat and top hat) demonstrates the high-speed rotary press that he invented, which printed one million copies of the illustrated color supplement to Le Petit Journal in 1890. As the inventor and builder of the press and the owner of Le Petit Journal, then the largest circulation newspaper in Europe, Marinoni placed himself in historic company. The tableau above the image includes Marinoni’s name on the far right next to famous handpress printers who had preceded him: Elzevier, Estienne, Gutenberg, and Dolet.  

K.K. Staatsdruckerei. Zur Feier des einhundertjährigen Bestandes der KK Hof-und Staatsdruckerei. Vienna, 1904.

In 1904, on its hundredth anniversary, the Imperial and Royal Court and State Printing Office in Vienna printed this elegant Vienna Secession–style commemorative book, describing its mechanized printing operation. The pages were printed on handmade paper with a carpet-like watermark covering most of the pages, viewable if the pages are held up to the light. The thin tissue guards protecting some illustrations have a similarly subtle printed pattern. The text, and an inserted list of employees who had worked at the printing office over the century, was typeset by hand without any paragraph indentation.

G. Fritz. Die K.K. Hof-und Staatsdruckerei und deren technischen Einrichtungen. Vienna, 1894.

This schematic is of the elaborate system, which involved steel cables powered by a steam engine, driving belts running printing, and other machinery, that was located on the four floors of the K. K. Staatsdruckerei, the Royal Court and State Printing Office in Vienna. A second steam engine on the same level generated electric power to light the building.

John Milton. Aeropagitica. A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England. New York: The Grolier Club,  1890.  

Theodore Low DeVinne, a founder of The Grolier Club, was a scholar-printer of wide-ranging abilities, who printed high-circulation magazines like The Century on high-speed printing machines, as well as small, limited editions printed on handpresses. This is one of 325 copies DeVinne designed and printed on Holland paper for The Grolier Club in 1890. It is his personal copy with his finely engraved “Aere Perennius” bookplate, in a special binding by Zaehnsdorf, signed and dated 1899 by Zaehnsdorf on the front, full-leather, pastedown endpaper.  

John Ruskin. The Nature of Gothic. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892.  

John Ruskin critiqued the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, arguing for a more meaningful and fulfilling relationship between workers and their work. The Nature of Gothic had a profound effect on William Morris, who issued it, with his own introduction, as one of the first publications of the Kelmscott Press. Founded by Morris in 1891 in reaction to mass-produced machine-printed books, Kelmscott published fine limited editions, set in type Morris designed, printed on handmade paper using an iron handpress, and bound by hand.  

R. S. Meryman. Robert Hoe III. 

This is a portrait of Robert Hoe III, great-grandson of Robert Hoe I, the founder of R. Hoe & Co. Inheriting the company from his father, Richard March Hoe, Hoe III built the company to its maximum size and renown. A serious book collector, Hoe III was keen to elevate American book culture to similar heights as its European counterpart, and he was one of the original organizers and the first president of The Grolier Club after it was founded in January 1884. 

Courtesy of The Grolier Club.