Read an Excerpt
Will Bradley's Graphic Art
By Will Bradley, Clarence P. Hornung Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2017 Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-81882-5
CHAPTER 1
Will Bradley: Notes Toward an Autobiography
THE BOY PRINTER OF ISHPEMING
It is graduation day in the little brown schoolhouse on Baltimore Street in Lynn, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. Miss Parrot is the teacher — a dear! You are six years old; next month you will be seven. The blackboard is covered with chalk drawings: sailboats, steamboats, ferryboats, trains of cars, houses, people and animals. You are the artist. Your mamma, with other mammas, is sitting on the platform, proud of her Willie — who is probably plenty proud of himself.
Lynn is a shoe town. This is 1875. Most of the work is done by hand. The employees are all natives — Universalists and Unitarians, probably. Many women work at home, binding uppers and tongues of high, lace shoes. You have a little express wagon. You carry finished work back to the factories and return with a supply of unfinished. For each trip you are paid five cents. With your savings you buy a printing press. It is the kind you place on a table and slap with the palm of your hand. In business offices it is used to stamp date lines. Your father is drawing cartoons for a Lynn daily — perhaps the Daily Item. He brings you a box of pi. When you succeed in finding a few letters of the same font you file them to fit the type slot in the press. Your father is ill, an aftermath of the Civil War. You have moved to the section called Swampscott. This is too far away for you to attend the school to which your class has gone. Your mother goes out every day to do dress-making. A playmate takes you to his school. But most of the time you remain at home with your father. He tells you he hasn't long to live, says you have been a good boy and that when you grow up you will want to be an artist and there will be no money for your education. He gives you much fine advice which you never forget. Then he sends you out to play. You go to Fisherman's Beach and watch the fishermen take lobsters out of the boiling pot. They give you the little ones the law forbids selling. You crack them on a rock, and have a feast. Sunday mornings, or occasionally on a Saturday night, you go to the baker's and get your warm pot of baked beans and buy a loaf of brown-bread — always an event of delicious anticipation. Between meals, when you are hungry, there is often a cold cod-fish cake to be found in the pantry.
Your mother and you are now alone in the world and you are on the "Narrow Gauge" on your way to Boston. You are sucking a "picklelime," always found in glass jars at the candy counter of every railroad and ferry waiting room. It will be made to last until you reach Boston and are at the Park Street corner of the Common watching the Punch and Judy show while your mother is shopping. At noon you sit in a booth and eat clam chowder at a restaurant on Corn Hill. After the meal your mother takes you to a wholesale house where she has a friend. Here you are bought a suit of clothes.
"But isn't it too big, Mamma?"
"Yes, dear; but children grow very fast and soon it will fit you — and Mamma can't afford to buy you a new suit every year."
And now you are on your way to Northern Michigan, where your mother has a sister whose husband is paymaster at the Lake Superior Iron Mine. En route you stop at Providence where you are intrigued by the teams of twenty or more horses that pull freight cars through the down-town districts. You think it would be fine to be a teamster. At Thompsonville, Connecticut, you go to school for a few weeks. On circus day you are allowed to have a vacation. You ride a pony in the parade and ask your mother if you can't join the circus and ride in the parades every day.
It is your first day in the little mining town of Ishpeming. You are standing in the middle of the road watching children going home from school; the girls giggle, the boys laugh at the new boy in a too-big suit. One little girl has cute pigtails. You like her. You are now quite grown up, nearly ten. At a Sunday-school picnic you tell the little girl you are someday going back to Boston and learn to be an artist. You ask her to wait for you. She promises. With this important problem settled you can now give all of your attention to the question of how you are to get an art education.
In the fall you go to school and somehow manage to pull through. Your uncle and aunt go for a visit "back East." Your mother keeps house for your cousins. Every night when you go to bed you kneel down and ask God to tell your uncle to bring you a printing press, the kind with a lever, like the ones shown in the Youth's Companion, Your uncle brings you an Ingersoll dollar watch.
It is your second year in school. You now have a step-father. He is a fine man and you like him and he likes you — but of course you can't expect him to pay for your art education. You are having trouble with arithmetic — something in division. Teacher says, "Take your books and go home, Willie, and remain until you have the correct answer."
You don't like arithmetic, anyway.
"Mother," you ask, "may I go to work and earn money so I can learn to be an artist?"
Your mother is troubled. Finally she says, "Perhaps it will be for the best."
You go to the office of the Iron Agitator, that later became Iron Ore. George A. Newett is the owner and editor. This is the George A. Newett and the newspaper that were later sued for libel by Theodore Roosevelt. The trial took place in Marquette, Michigan, and Mr. Roosevelt won a verdict of six cents.
You are put to work washing-up a Gordon press. Then you receive your firstlesson in feeding. There is power, a small engine mounted on an upright boiler, for the newspaper press. The two jobbers are kicked. Having half an hour of leisure you learn the lay of a lower-case beside the window — where you can proudly wave to the schoolchildren as they are going home to their noon meal. You are now a working man — wages three dollars a week.
Country newspaper shops train and use local help for straight matter. For job work, ads and presswork they depend upon itinerant job printers, who seldom remain as long as six months in any one town. When the Iron Ore job printer leaves you are sorry. He has been a kind and patient teacher. You are now twelve. Mr. Newett employs a new devil and you set jobs, advertising display, make up the paper and are responsible for all presswork. Your wages are increased to six dollars a week. When the motor power fails, as it does frequently, you go out on the street and employ off-shift miners to operate the press by means of a crank attached to the flywheel.
At this early date the print shop is above a saloon and in one corner of a big barn of a room that had been a lodge hall. In winter it is heated (?) with one stove. You go to work at seven and quit at six. The outside temperature is below zero. You and your devil forage in the snowdrifts of the alley back of the building and "borrow" packing boxes to get kindling for the stove and boiler.
The Peninsula Record, across the street, is a four-page tabloid. It is printed one page at a time on a large Gordon. The owner and editor is John D. West. He offers you eight dollars a week. You are not that important to Mr. Newett — and the extra two dollars will enable you to begin saving after paying board and buying your clothes.
In a few months Iron Ore moves into a new store-building. You are now thirteen and Mr. Newett offers you ten dollars a week and the acknowledged position of job printer. At fourteen this wage is increased to twelve. At fifteen you are spoken of as foreman and are receiving fifteen dollars a week — in '85 a man's wages.
This is the early Eighties. Small towns such as Ishpeming are "easy pickings" for traveling fakers. Their advance is always heralded by the exchanges. They clean up at the expense of local merchants. All editors warn them to keep away. Iron Ore print shop is on the ground floor. The editor's sanctum is at the front. His desk is at the big window. It is nearly nine o'clock on a Friday night — "makeup" time. Mr. Newett has written his last sheets of copy and is reading proof. At the corner of Main and Division, diagonally across from the office, a faker is selling soap. In one wrapper he pretends to place a five dollar bill — a version of the "old army game." He is standing in a market wagon and has a companion who strums a guitar and sings. Attached to an upright and above his head is a kerosene flare. Mr. Newett walks leisurely to where there are several guns and fishing rods in a corner. He is an invererate sportsman in a land where game, deer and fish, is plentiful. Selecting a rifle he walks to the door and casually puts a bullet through the kerosene tank, then returns to his proof reading. Thoroughly likable, this pioneer editor — a fine boss, a true friend!
You and a compositor now have control of the town bill posting. When there are no theater or patent medicine ads to put up you cover the boards with blank newsprint and letter and picture advertisements for the stores.
You are sixteen, almost seventeen. A sheet of newsprint is tacked on the printing-office wall and, using marking ink and a brush, you are picturing and lettering a masquerade poster for the roller rink.
"Who is this young artist?"
The speaker is Frank Bromley, a well-known landscape painter from Chicago.
You tell him about your father and that you are going back to Boston to study art. He suggests your stopping off in Chicago to see him. Says he can perhaps help you.
You are nearly seventeen and already you have saved more than fifty dollars. By the early fall you have four twenty-dollar gold pieces under your socks in the top till of your trunk. Wages are always paid in gold and silver. You are now ready to start for Chicago. Two weeks later you are on your way.
FIRST SOJOURN IN CHICAGO
The artist has a studio near the McVickar Theater on Madison Street. It is the typical atelier of the Victorian Eighties: oriental drapes, screens and pottery. Jules Guerin, then an art student and later a contributor to Century, Harper's andScribner's, is clearing up and tidying for the day.
Mr. Bromley takes you to Lyon & Healy. Yes, Mr. Lyon, or maybe it was Mr. Healy, can start you as an apprentice. However, a young man beginning a career should be most careful in making his selection. You have been careful. You want to be an artist. But the business of Lyon & Healy is musical instruments, not art.
Next morning you are introduced to Mr. Rand, or Mr. McNally. A Mr. Martin then sends you upstairs, a couple of flights, to Mr. Robinson in the designing and engraving department. Beginners do not receive any pay, but you are put to work at a long table facing a row of windows and with yards and yards of unbleached cotton-cloth stretched on a wire at your back. You are now learning to engrave tints on wood-blocks — under the erroneous impression that designers and illustrators engrave their own blocks.
Mr. Bromley has found a room for you at the home of a friend, an art dealer. It is at Vincennes Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. You walk to and from Rand McNally's, located on Monroe Street, dreaming happily.
One morning, after a few weeks of getting nowhere, for you are no master of tint-cutting, it percolates through your skull that inasmuch as wood-engravers never seem to be doing any designing probably designers never do any engraving.
A momentous discovery, this, for you have broken into your last twenty-dollar gold piece — as a matter of fact there is just about enough left to pay for taking your trunk to the depot and to buy a second-class ticket back to that printing shop in Northern Michigan.
"Sometime, if you care to come back," states Mr. Robinson, in a letter which must have been written immediately after your departure, "and if you will remain half an hour later in the evening and sweep out, and come in a half hour earlier in the morning and dust, Rand McNally will pay you three dollars a week."
SECOND SOJOURN IN CHICAGO
A few months later, when you have just turned into your eighteenth year and have saved sixty dollars, three twenty-dollar gold pieces, it is time to return to Chicago. You tell Mr. Newett. He wishes you well and says that if you care to remain with Iron Ore he will take you into partnership when you are twenty. This is a big temptation. You admire and like your boss. He is a grand person — your idol. Saying goodbye involves a wrench.
You are now back with R-M staying half an hour at night and getting to work a half hour earlier in the morning and all is well with the world.
At the time of your first visit to Chicago, line photo-engraving was not even a whisper, and halftones were not even dreams. On your second visit, pen drawings are beginning to receive direct reproduction.
Folding machines are unknown; and in a large loft, at long tables, dozens upon dozens of girls are hand-folding railroad timetables. This loft is on a level with the designing department. Between the two there is a brick wall through which, about two feet up from the floor, has been cut an opening in which there is a heavy, tin-covered sliding door. When you take 14 × 22 metal plates down to the foundry to be routed — by someone else, for you don't like machines — you pass through this loft, between the girl-adorned tables. You, in turn, are adorned with the side-whiskers known as mutton-chops — trying to look older than your years. Also, in accord with the custom of the times, you wear tight-fitting pants. One day, in returning from the foundry with a metal plate on your shoulder, you pull back the sliding door and when you lift one leg to step through the opening the pants rip where the cloth is tightest. On another occasion when again carrying a plate on your shoulder your jacket pocket catches on a key at the end of a paper-cutter shaft and the shoddy that had once proved so disastrous in your pants now probably averts a serious accident.
Web presses and automatic feeders are also absent. In the basement at Rand McNally's there is a battery of drum-cylinders printing James S. Kirk "American Family Soap" wrappers. The stock is thin, red-glazed paper, and the sheets a double 24 × 36, or perhaps even larger. You marvel at the skill with which boys do the feeding; but even greater is your wonder at the hand-jogging and cutting of these slippery and flimsy sheets.
Invitations are sent out for an inspection of the composing-room of the Chicago Herald, now newly equipped throughout with Hamilton labor-saving furniture. You attend. Compositors are sticking type for the next edition. A little later the Herald places on display its first web press. This showing is in a ground-floor room, a step or two down from the street, next door to the Chicago Opera House, where Kiralfy's Black Crook is now playing and Eddie Foy is putting audiences in "stitches." The press is a single unit standing in a shallow pit surrounded by a brass rail.
Comes now the winter. It is a Saturday. You are at the home of your boss. He has invited you to spend the afternoon learning how to paint. His easel is set up in the basement dining room. He is talking to you about religion, gravely concerned at learning that you sometimes attend the Universalist church. He believes you to be a heathen and suggests that you become converted and join a fundamentalist church — says that as long as you remain outside the fold and thus are not a Christian he cannot be interested in helping you become an artist.
The dear man! He wants so much to save your soul. Meanwhile, his good wife is laying the table for their evening meal. Her smile is motherly. Maybe she has guessed you were counting the plates. Pleasant odors come from the kitchen. Our gracious host brings your coat, helps you put it on, hands you your hat, opens the door and you step out into a Chicago snowstorm.
At this point the script calls for slow music and heart-rending sobs — another Kate Claxton in the Two Orphans. Alas for melodrama! This is a beautiful snowstorm. The evening is mild and the flakes are big. They sail lazily through the amber light of the street lamps, feather the bare branches of trees that print a fantastic pattern against the red-brick housefronts. The drifts must be at least an inch deep. And tomorrow ... tomorrow, you will, as always happens on Sunday, go to a restaurant on Clark Street where you will be served two pork tenderloins, flanked by a mound of mashed potatoes topped with gravy, and one other vegetable, and supplemented by bread and butter and a cup of coffee — all for twenty cents. Joy bells ringing!
A couple of weeks later you are standing at a case in the printing plant of Knight & Leonard. Mr. Leonard happens to be passing. He stops and glances at your galley, type arrangement for a catalog cover. He is interested and asks where you learned job composition. In one graphically condensed paragraph, dramatically composed, for it has been prepared in advance in anticipation of this much wished-for opportunity, you tell the story of your life — and make a momentous proposition.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Will Bradley's Graphic Art by Will Bradley, Clarence P. Hornung. Copyright © 2017 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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