Mechanick Exercises Research Articles

Scale and Skill in British Print Culture: Reading the Technologies, 1680–1820

Scale and Skill in British Print Culture: Reading the Technologies, 1680–1820 Jon Klancher (bio) In the long eighteenth century, a technology was something to read—a printed treatise or manual of skills that encompassed the whole range of what were then called the mechanical arts. The OED marks this meaning of the word as obsolete after 1860 (sense 1), but it flourished far and wide before then. Some of these works hewed closely to the ground of traditional artisan labor, like Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683). Others deployed sophisticated idioms of mathematical measuring, like Benjamin Martin’s Logarithmologia (1740), and later, more spacious versions like Thomas Martin’s The Circle of the Mechanical Arts (1813) began to register the impact of steam technology on older and newer kinds of British skilled labor. At least one special case, Jeremy Bentham’s Chrestomathia (1816), would raise the level of these print technologies to an influential mode of social theory and a mapping of emergent disciplines of modern knowledge.1 Such works can be hard to read today (and are often not easy to find), but for us they have a two-fold importance. On the one hand, they speak to the new forms of modern work that were emerging in the long eighteenth century in what recent economic historians classify as lower, medium, and higher-skilled British labor, kinds of skill about which the print technologies [End Page 89] could teach readers during the early industrial revolution. Such books did not tell their readers about the wider theory of the division of labor adumbrated by Adam Smith, nor did they offer any critical (let alone radical) perspective with which to measure the increasing inequality of labor and rewards put in place by 1800 (fig. 1). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The third 1703 edition of Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises focused on six occupations, ECCO; Thomas Martin’s 1813 The Circle of the Mechanical Arts explored sixty-six fields of labor, GOOGLE. But with their microscopic attention to the rapidly shifting skills being empowered or disempowered by new technologies and capital investments, these books offer a rare inside look at the language of vocation and practice. This language did not provide the high-minded sense of vocation now usually associated with a calling to one of the modern professions, but the gritty vocabulary now customarily assigned to vocational schools and to everything beneath what colleges and universities have, since the nineteenth century, been calling the arts and sciences. The discourse of mechanical arts largely fell out of this latter category by the mid-nineteenth century, but it was robustly at the center of arts and sciences during the long eighteenth century.2 [End Page 90] Meanwhile, these print technologies were among the first to adapt an old word to a new modern usage: scale. Today we grapple with complex questions of scale in such realms as the digital, with its problematic of scalability in computing and visualizing; or in globalization, with what cultural geographers have called a “rescaling of social life.”3 With the advent of the Anthropocene, there is also the sense of scale-shock we experience when trying to grapple with the implications of climate change, pondering with Dipesh Chakrabarty the challenge to “think human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once” (earth’s history, human history, industrial history).4 This essay uses early-modern print technologies to begin to answer a more preliminary question: where did we get the modern language of scale from in the first place? And what did this language have to do with problems of scale posed by emerging disciplines in the nineteenth century, or by capitalist modernity more broadly? From the Latin word scala (or ladder), scale or scales had once denoted a fixed and balanced order of things: the great scale of being, the immutable scales of justice. Our historical print databases show the rise of a new and different sense of scale from the seventeenth- to the mid-nineteenth century: to measure weight, then space, then time. For natural philosophers of the Royal Society, there was little possibility of experiment without using a scale...

The Collation of John Hawkins's Troublesome Voyage (1569), and its Wraparound Blank

John Hawkins’ Troublesome Voyage (1567) is a little known two-sheet octavo. This note demonstrates that the British Library copy of Troublesome Voyage retains its B8 leaf, which the online English Short Title Catalogue’s (ESTC) record of collation presents as excised. The note then shows that the British Library’s copy’s B8 was a wraparound blank, and that the offset mirror image of the title-page found on the verso of that copy’s B8 reveals a method of warehouse storage which is different to that taken to be the historical norm, Martin Moxon’s description of the printing house’s warehouse keeper in his Mechanick Exercises (1683-4).

The Bagford Chapel Rules: A Set of English Printing House Regulations, CIRCA 1686–1707

The Bagford Chapel Rules: A Set of English Printing House Regulations, CIRCA 1686–1707 Alan D. Boehm (bio) It is generally believed that only three sets of English printing house regulations—“chapel rules”—have come down to us from the period before 1800. One set, the rules of the Bowyer firm, was written in a ledger book in the late 1750s by the younger William Bowyer and one or two of his workmen. This set appears to be incomplete, for it includes no rules addressing the work of pressmen. A second and obviously complete set of rules survives from Samuel Richardson’s printing house. These are preserved in a broadsheet bearing a letterpress date of August 30, 1734, and the signatures of 20 journeyman printers Richardson employed at the time. A third group of chapel rules appears in Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing of 1683 and 1684. Unlike Bowyer’s and Richardson’s regulations, these rules did not originate in a specific printing house. Moxon merely offered them as examples of rules “usually and generally accepted” among late seventeenth-century printers.1 These three sets of chapel rules have figured as valuable historical evidence in bibliographical studies concerned with the late 1600s and the 1700s. Because they imposed standards of behavior on journeymen and promoted order in the complicated technical procedures demanded by concurrent production, the [End Page 135] regulations shed light on contemporary shop organization, workplace customs, the relationship between the master and his journeymen, and other aspects of printing.2 It should interest scholars, then, to learn that a fourth and practically unknown set of chapel rules from the period is preserved in the British Library’s Department of Printed Books. These are conveyed in a broadsheet bearing the headline “Orders to be Observed in this Printing-House.” 3 The document is part of the Bagford Title-pages Collection, which was assembled during the late 1600s and early 1700s by John Bagford (1650 –1716), a London book dealer and an antiquarian with a keen interest in bibliography. Bagford formed the Collection in anticipation of writing, as he announced in a 1707 subscription proposal, an ambitious but never completed “Historical Treatise, on that most Universally Famous, as well as Useful Art of Typography.” 4 Along with approximately 3,600 title pages of early English printed books, Bagford also collected book plates, type specimens, paper samples, printers’ and booksellers’ devices, book and manuscript auction catalogues, and other materials associated with printing, almost all of which can be dated to a period from 1528 to 1716.5 Insofar as the whole of the Bagford Collection has been surveyed and its contents enumerated, the “Orders” has not entirely escaped scholarly attention. It has been noted, albeit not described, in a handful of bibliographic publications. A. W. Pollard listed the “Orders” in an article, “A Rough List of the Contents of the Bagford Collection,” published in the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society for 1902 –1904. Ellic Howe glanced at the “Orders” in a footnote in his 1947 book, The London Compositor, Documents Relating to Wages, Working Conditions and Customs of the London Printing Trade, 1785 –1900. And in his 1974 Catalogue and Indexes to the Title-pages of English Printed Books Preserved in the British Library’s Bagford Collection, Melvin H. [End Page 136] Wolf has taken notice of the “Orders” by reprinting Pollard’s “Rough List” in its entirety.6 Unfortunately, the “Orders” is something of a fragment. In its original state, the document’s dimensions apparently exceeded the leaves of the volume into which it was pasted, and so to make the “Orders” fit Bagford cropped the head, foot, and side margins, and he also cut away a strip of white space in the middle of the sheet between the last rule directed to compositors and the sub-headline over the press room rules (consequently, the “Orders” survives in two pieces and each bears a British Museum stamp).7 Despite Bagford’s pruning, the text of the “Orders”—headline, sub-headlines, and a total of 28 rules—appears wholly intact and there is no obvious indication, material or textual, of any missing text. It is...

Bodies of Type: The Work of Textual Production in English Printers' Manuals

This essay examines the shifting, ideologically situated and contested representations of print texts and technologies in two representative printers' manuals: Joseph Moxon's 1683 Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing and John Smith's 1755 The Printer's Grammar. The construction of orderly print is supported in each by changing discourses of sexuality and gender. Moxon's manual celebrates the heterosexual working bodies of print, the laborers whose physical production of print is as important as the text supplied by writers. In Smith, however, the naturalized gendering of a now invisible print privileges only the Author, whose disembodied intellect transcends the physical book.

The first English and the first Dutch printer's manual: a comparison

AbstractJoseph Moxon's Mechanick exercises on the whole art of printing (1683-4) and David Wardenaar's Beschrijving der boekdrukkunst (1801) are the oldest printer's manuals for their respective language areas, whereby it must be noted that the English manual was disseminated in printed form, while the Dutch work has only been preserved in manuscript (annotated edition: 1982, 2nd edn. 1986). More than a century separates these two manuals, but the geographical distance is limited as Moxon (who spent some years in the Dutch printing world) regularly refers to Dutch techniques and practices. Except correspondences between the two manuals there are also many differences, the result amongst other things of the various backgrounds of the authors. Moxon - gentleman-printer and 'encyclopedian' - offers a purely technical description of the art of printing, while his Dutch colleague-employee (compositor, later overseer) - also attends to socio-economic aspects. Both the differences as well as the correspondences of the two manuals lead to the conclusion that a printer's manual does not reflect 'a definite' reality, which implies a warning with respect to the use made of this type of source by book historians.

Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing. Joseph Moxon , Herbert Davis , Harry Carter

<i>Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing</i>. Joseph Moxon , Herbert Davis , Harry Carter

Two Unique Books on “Handy-Works”

Extract HTML view is not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button. Two eighteenth century technical treatises — Mechanick Exercises: or the Doctrine of Handy-Works, 1703, by Joseph Moxon, and The Practical House Carpenter, 1796, by William Pain — have been presented to the Society by William Butler, one of our members.

To the whole book are added five tables of figures. - An advertisement of the monthly continuation of the Mechanick Exercises;

The ingenious Author having began and continu'd his three first months. Excercises on Smithery : in these three next, he gives an account of Joynery .

An account of three books. I. The royal pharmacopæa, galeno-chymical, according to the practise of the most eminent and learned physitians of France, and published with their several approbations. By Moses Charras, the Kings chief Operator in his Royal Garden of Plants. In English. II. Decameron physiologicum: Or, ten dialogues of natural philosophy. To which is added (they are the

An account of three books. I. The royal pharmacopæa, galeno-chymical, according to the practise of the most eminent and learned physitians of France, and published with their several approbations. By Moses Charras, the Kings chief Operator in his Royal Garden of Plants. In English. II. Decameron physiologicum: Or, ten dialogues of natural philosophy. To which is added (they are the Authors words) the proportion of a streight line, equal to half the arch of a quadrant. By Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury. III. Mechanick exercises: Or, the doctrine of hand, works. Began Jan. 1. prosecuted in two other essays, February 1, and March 1. 1677. And intended to be continued monthly. By Joseph Moxon, Hydrographer to the King. The diligent and Ingenious Anthor having some years since received Order and Directions from Monsieur Anthony d' Aquine , primary Physician to the French King, for composing a Galeno. Chymical Pharmacopæa : his Industrious pursuance of the same from year to year, hath at length produced this Work.