Recasting a Craft: St. Louis Typefounders Respond to Industrialization (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Recasting a Craft: St. Louis Typefounders Respond to Industrialization William S. Pretzer (bio) Recasting a Craft: St. Louis Typefounders Respond to Industrialization. By Robert A. Mullen. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Pp. 197. $45. In just 119 pages of text, Robert A. Mullen, collections manager at the Missouri Historical Society, has provided a general introduction to the type-founding craft and a history of nineteenth-century typefoundries in St. Louis. Typefounding has never drawn much attention from historians other than specialists in the book trades. Unfortunately, this book does little to change that, although it at least provides some evidence useful for analyzing this industry in the wider context of industrial change. Recasting a Craft is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides a narrative of typefounding firms in St. Louis from 1840 to 1910. Creatively using genealogical, business, and local-history sources, Mullen reconstructs the introduction, rise, and consolidation of the industry. As major suppliers of printers' needs west of the Mississippi, St. Louis typefoundries enjoyed a half-century of prosperity. Each entrepreneur found his own competitive advantage, some by concentrating on innovative type design and mar-keting, others by diversifying into all-purpose printers' supply houses. At the trade's height in the 1880s, fewer than fifty foundries located in a dozen cities supplied the nation's printing offices. Three were located in St. Louis, making it the rival of any city in the west for supplying type and printers' equipment. Under pressure from declining sales due to mechanical line- and type-casting devices, especially the Linotype and Monotype, twenty-three foundries (including two in St. Louis) combined to form the American Type Founders Co. (ATF) in 1892. By 1910, ATF had consolidated production in its New Jersey plant, and local foundries became mere distribution centers. Still, small foundries were established in St. Louis in 1894 and again in 1907 in unsuccessful attempts to battle the "type trust." Part 2, "Adaptation to the Industrial Revolution," includes chapters titled "Growth and Change," "Designers and Marketers of Type," and "Labor and Working Conditions." These chapters retrace the same chronology and the familiar personalities introduced in the first part, but look [End Page 844] more broadly and somewhat analytically at social and economic trends, technological change, and marketing and design innovations attributable to St. Louis foundries. Mullen presents a fine description of the skill, age, and gender differentiations within the workforce, and he provides a detailed description of the organization of labor and the work process in the industrialized foundry. Unfortunately, these chapters often contain less direct evidence relating to local events and so present generic descriptions of changes in literacy and newspaper circulation, paper production, press technologies, and electrotyping and stereotyping, with the occasional reference to St. Louis. More disappointing, this organizational separation of structural history from social and economic indicators prevents Mullen from linking cause-and-effect in industrial change. It is as though the Industrial Revolution was something imposed on businessmen to which they merely "adapted," rather than a set of innovations that they themselves wrought in the competitive spirit and technological enthusiasms of nineteenth-century entrepre-neurial capitalism. Part 3 is composed of appendices, notes, a bibliography, and an index; at seventy-five pages, it is the longest of the three parts. And of those seventy-five pages, thirty-five are given over to a display of typefaces designed and produced in St. Louis. Mullen has cast his research net somewhat narrowly and relied on only the most direct forms of descriptive evidence. Thus, in the final chapter on labor conditions, the typefounder's industrial work culture is alluded to, but never compared to the earlier craft culture or to worker traditions in other book trades. A labor strike against ATF is presented in the absence of any discussion of the structural changes in the trade outlined in chapter 3 (part 2). Mullen notes that this Knights of Labor–led strike failed to receive support from the International Typographical Union (ITU), but fails to mention that the ITU was facing its own massive decline in membership due to the impact of the Linotype machine. Useful though this book is, it offers a bifurcated narrative...