Teaching Print History with Popular Culture
Posted by Cait Coker
Raise your hands if you’ve been binging your streaming backlog during the winter break. Hey, us too! The third season of Outlander just dropped on Netflix, which is handy for both the historical melodrama and for teaching print history. Yes, you read that right.
You see, a major plot point for the series involves one of the main characters, Jamie Fraser, working as a printer in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. (In fact, the series marketing department re-created the functional print shop used in the series at the 2017 Comic-Con so that fans could screen-print t-shirts.) Fraser is also printing under an alias, so other characters track him down through archival research… perhaps I should have started by saying this show involves time travel? At any rate, by the time the show catches up to find him in his shop in episode 3x06 “A. Malcolm”, we’re treated to a lovely sequence of (largely) correct period inking and printing on an English common press.
This clip is handy because you see a number of key elements in a short period of time: working the ink with an ink knife before picking it up on the ink balls and then inking the forme; closing the frisket with its cut paper frame and the duck bills* on the tympan; rolling the bed under the platen and then pulling the bar, and then checking the printed pages.
Closer investigation also leads to some lovely Easter Eggs, as this screencap from an “Inside the World” featurette on the episode shows the additional detail of proper wood quoins and furniture used to hold the type in place:
There are some minor details in the final scene that the discerning instructor may or may not want to wax on about: For instance, the ink balls used in the scene are prepped, and someone off-stage needlessly used a brayer to spread ink on an inking stone; in historical practice, the ink would have been daubed directly onto the ink ball’s cap and worked by bouncing the balls together, as is shown in the clip, rather than working the ink on the stone and then working it on the balls again. Another small element is that the printing is being done in small bifolia rather than in quarto...but this is being pedantic. ;)
There are other clips out there of interest for showing off printing machinery. This very brief clip from the stage musical Newsies (which is intermittently available on Netflix) highlights the actual 1886 Old Style press wheeled onto the stage for the climactic number:
The actor energetically turning the wheel is entertaining but inaccurate: This machine would have operated with a foot treadle to move the wheel instead; the wheel is providing the movement between platen and bed that is created by the bar/screw mechanism used in the Outlander clip above.
If you don’t mind actual music in your musical clips, this scene from the 1992 film version shows the actors setting type as well as printing:
They also properly knock down the set formes before printing to make sure everything is type-height, although it loses a little something when you look closely enough to see that their text is now a pair of zinc blocks instead of handset type.
And going from not great to….actually bad, here’s one of the all-time unintentionally funniest scenes on printing ever:
This is a scene from The Tudors, episode 2x06 “The Definition of Love.” This is also a low-quality snippet, but you can at least appreciate the large Gutenberg-style press. You will also note that the props team did not do their research, because instead of deciding to read a history text or even some basic googling, they just made up out of thin air the idea of daubing ink onto the forme with rags. This… would not work. And would be so very messy and gross. But there is nonetheless something to be said for the gawking at the machine, because England was a (comparatively) late adopter of print.
These are a couple examples we have found useful. Do you have some favorite bits of pop culture you recommend for teaching? Let us know in the comments!
*Duck bills: You’ll notice two small folds of paper on the tympan used to keep paper in place before printing. As far as I know, this is a more modern usage from the twentieth and possibly the nineteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it would have been more common to use “points”, which are small metal tacks placed inside the tympan, and then to stab the sheet of paper onto the points; the holes that remain from this usage can sometimes be seen in the gutters of bound texts. I have also read of a practice where sheets would be temporarily pasted onto the tympan with a wheat-based glue.
About the Author
Cait Coker is Associate Professor and Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and will soon receive her doctoral degree in literature from Texas A&M University. Her current projects include journal articles on women's labor in the book trades in seventeenth-century England. She also frequently publishes on SFF and popular culture including editing the forthcoming collection The Global Vampire in Popular Culture. Contact her at: cait.coker (at) gmail (dot) com.
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