Printing press project enables professor to rediscover his artistic side.

Professor of Literature Jeff Groves has a strong interest in books. Like most academics, he’s read a lot of them. His interest, however, goes well beyond their content.

Groves is a student of the history of the printed word, especially its development over the course of the 19th century. But while he has written extensively about this subject, he had never actually printed on a 19th-century press. At least, not until spring semester 2007.

Thanks to a Mellon Foundation Odyssey grant, Groves was able to dedicate the semester to refurbishing and printing on a century-and-a-half old Columbian iron hand press that is on loan to The Claremont Colleges from Ed Petko, a collector of printing presses. The First-Floor Press, as Groves has dubbed the new printing enterprise, is located on the first floor of Honnold Library. After repairing and cleaning the press, sorting the type, purchasing ink and other essential materials, the new pressroom was the site of an open house in March 2007. The open house announcement was created just as it would have been in the 1800s: set one character at a time, and imprinted one sheet at a time on the press.

When Groves wrote his proposal for the grant, he cited his childhood interest in art that had faded over the years: “When I was younger, I spent long hours engaged in artistic activities: making pencil sketches, tooling leather, taking photographs, and—my most rewarding activity of all—writing poetry. As I proceeded toward adulthood and through my education, such artistic interests began to occupy less and less of my time.”

Two years ago, Groves’ interest in printing was piqued when he audited a book arts course taught by Kitty Maryatt, the director of the Scripps College Press. “While we did only a limited amount of typesetting, printing and binding in the Scripps class,” Groves recalled, “it did help me to conceive of the daily work rhythms and practices of 19th-century printers much more fully than I had been able to before.”
HMC students Glennis Rayermann ’09, a chemistry major, and Alex Hagen ’10, a physics major, assisted Groves throughout the semester. Rayermann researched the qualities of cast iron that give this press its strength and its precision. Hagen used his knowledge of physics to calculate the weight of the press. “Assuming the parts were forged at the same time and with the same density, we disassembled and weighed one part, then calculated the rest based on the measurements. It was one scary-looking problem,” said Hagen.

The trio presented the results of their work to the Southern California chapter of the American Printing History Association (APHA) in May. They also had a paper proposal accepted for the APHA meeting at UCLA this October.

Invented in Philadelphia by George Clymer around 1812, the Columbian press features “the great lever,” as it became known, which lowers the platen onto the paper and the type to make the impression. In spite of its technological sophistication, the Columbian didn’t sell very well in the United States.

“Printers were very peripatetic in the frontier times of the 1800s,” Groves points out. “A heavy press like the Columbian didn’t travel well. It was much more successful in England, where the printing industry was more centralized.” He estimates the press in Honnold Library was built around 1850 by R. Ritchie & Son, an Edinburgh, Scotland-based firm that adopted Clymer’s design after the patent expired.

Groves is working to stimulate appreciation for a lost art. With the mechanization of printing, followed more recently by the pervasiveness of personal com-puters, the art and science of type design has dwindled. Today’s PC users have hundreds of fonts available for their use, and the subtleties of typography are often lost as a result.

“Very few people understand that ‘leading’ is derived from a lead slug that was inserted between the lines of type for spacing,” Groves explains. “Nor do they understand that point size is derived from a standard that was established in the late nineteenth century. [One point is .014 of an inch.] Like black and white photography in the era of digital cameras, hand press printing may seem like a dead technology. But that isn’t the case—today, hundreds of artists are discovering the aesthetic qualities of hand-printed books, and so presses like the Columbian are making something of a comeback.”