The first settlers in Canada did not bring printing presses with them; they probably saw no need for printing in a new land in which the struggle for survival and success left little time for culture or political thought. The books they wanted could be sent from the Old World to the colonies. In Europe the invention of printing from moveable types had been perfected in the 1450s, and had since brought some enlightenment and freedom of spirit. When printing became common and books cheap, more and more people became literate and assumed the right to think for themselves. As a result, rulers tried to control the press through licensing and censorship, and did their best to keep it out of the New World completely. One early Governor of Virginia wrote that "learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them. And," he added, "God keep us from both."
But at the same time, printing was important in making people aware of the laws they should obey and for guiding religious thought, especially in Protestant colonies where the Bible was all important. This led authorities to think of the advantages of a controlled press. In 1593 the first printing press of the western hemisphere was set up under the repressive Spanish regime at Mexico City. Another hundred years passed before a second press crossed the sea, brought by the Puritan settlers of New England to help foster their Bible-centred faith. It is typical of the history of printing in the New World that the press was used first in 1639 to print a form for an oath of allegiance to the King, and then in 1640 to print a Psalter. If there had to be a press in the colonies, it was expected to serve Church and State.
Although it was intended as a permanent settlement from which missionary work would be conducted among the Indians, New France never had a printing press. The Jesuits appealed for one in 1665, a full two years after the Puritans of New England had printed a complete Indian Bible; the Sulpicians sought one in 1683, and the French civil authorities in 1749. But all three requests were refused, supposedly for reasons of economy or lack of skilled men. Printing did come to Canada in 1749, however, when the British established Halifax as a northern garrison town to control sea approaches and contain French military power. An English printer was among the first of the new settlers to land but, like so many others, he died before he could start work. Two years later, Canada's first printing press was set up in Halifax by Bartholomew Green, whose family had been printers in the Boston area for a century. Green also died before starting work, but his press was taken over by his partner John Bushel, and the first Halifax Gazette was issued on 23 March, 1752.
A Gazette was not really a newspaper like modern ones. Rather, it was a printed sheet by which laws were proclaimed and public announcements made. In order to cover their expenses, the printers of the Gazettes of colonial Canada included in the publication advertisements and often news reports, reprinted from European or American papers. Printers without the influence to become King's Printer, with the right to issue Gazettes, started weekly advertising and news sheets. In each colonial centre trade and administration developed shops, magistrate's courts, army or navy stations: the merchants needed to advertise; the civil and military leaders needed Gazettes; the churches needed printing for parish and missionary work. Once the press was established the more serious citizens wanted to see local writing published and to have newspapers and magazines that would keep them informed and express their aspirations, the chief of which was an ever greater degree of self-government.
After the American Revolution there was a tendency to clamp down on the press. The reports of the Army and Navy officers who represented the Crown often suggest that they could not understand why the Government in England would not let them treat independent printers as mutineers. Among the Loyalists who fled from the new republic were several printers; some of them were former apprentices of Margaret Draper's Boston printing house, which had been seized for its opposition to the revolution. Like other Loyalists, they were used to governing their own local affairs and expressing their own opinions; above all they were unwilling, loyal though they were to the Crown, to live as civilians under military discipline. There were frequent disputes about libel and censorship between the Canadian printers and the authorities they served. When the first Gazette in Newfoundland was founded in 1807, for instance, the printer John Ryan was put under bond to print nothing that had not been approved by the Governor, to publish no political remarks about any country, and to print nothing that might disturb the peace. Many of the Loyalist printers were involved in libel suits because of their views of how the colonies should be governed. They extended their printing beyond Gazettes and advertisements to independent papers and even the publication of magazines and books. Prominent among them was John Howe, one of Mrs. Draper's workmen, whose son Joseph Howe became one of the first great Canadian politicians.
Supplies for a printing office were fairly difficult to get, as were the skilled workmen needed for any serious printing. The American printers who had taught the Canadians the trade had, after the Revolution as before, a conservative partiality to English presses and types. The process of importation was very slow and complicated by duties and taxes, especially on paper. The first wooden press made in the New World was built in 1679 by Mr. Isaac Doolittle, Clock and Watchmaker of New Haven; by the 1770s presses were being made throughout the colonies. The first Canadian printers doubtless used these American-made presses, which were of the English model, just as they used the iron Washington Press almost exclusively after it came on the market in the 1830s. Type was first made in the Americas in 1769. Though earlier printers had sometimes cast individual letters, rather than wait many months for them to come from England, there were no professional type designers or founders. Like all European printers, those in North America were devoted to the type forms of the great English founder William Caslon. Abel Buell, who conducted the first American experiments, was a silversmith and gem cutter like John Gutenberg, the original inventor of printing from moveable types and so was capable of the various processes of designing the letters, cutting them into steel punches, hardening the punches, striking them into brass matrixes, and finally working with a lead alloy soft enough to cast quickly but hard enough to be used in printing. Unfortunately his letters were merely insipid imitations of the Caslon designs. On a less professional level, much could be accomplished by ingenuity. In 1841, for example, James Evans, a Methodist missionary and founder of the Rossville Mission near Norway House, was unable to secure printing equipment through the Hudson's Bay Company in order to produce printed materials for teaching the Cree Indians to read. As a result, he adapted a jack press which had been used for pressing furs for shipment, cut his Cree alphabet in hard wood moulds, cast type from bullets and the linings of tea chests, and produced on birch bark a hymn book for the Indians. But of course most printers, even on the frontier, had the pride in workmanship they had been taught during their apprenticeships; they aimed at getting the best equipment they could afford.
Paper also presented a difficulty, since it was at the time made only from recycled material, shredded and composted linen rags. No process was known by which paper could be made from a raw material, and new colonies simply could not produce enough rag for a paper industry. Even in Europe, where papermaking centres were located downstream from large cities in order to give them water-power and good rag-picking, shortages were common and paper was quite expensive. After 1767 British paper was heavily taxed. Small mills had been making paper in the American colonies since 1690, but they were not able to produce as much as the country needed. Early Canadian printing was normally done on English paper; the practice continued even after 1803, when two New England paper-makers moved into QuÄbec and established a mill at St. Andrews.
Skilled labour was important in all aspects of the printing trade, which was organized like other trades of the time on a master journeyman-apprentice relationship. Modern trade schools encourage training in a skill, whereas this system discouraged it by forcing young people into long apprenticeships, with no pay or a nominal salary, for up to seven years before they would be treated and paid as journeymen. In this way no trade became too common and the masters ensured themselves a good supply of cheap or even free labour. Unlike many other workers, the printers had to be able to read and write in fact they often complained that they were expected to edit and correct the spelling and punctuation of the customers as well. Being literate, they were perhaps more strongly inclined to independent thought than many other workers were. It is not surprising that political figures like Benjamin Franklin in the United States and Joseph Howe and William Lyon Mackenzie in Canada had been apprenticed as printers. Also printers were especially influenced by the thought of the Anglo-American social radical Tom Paine and they were among the first tradesmen in both the United States and Canada to organize and strike for better pay and working conditions. They set and printed the thoughts of a world entering into its great era of progress, and they wished to progress with it. Mackenzie himself wrote of his striking journeymen in October 1836:
They walk into a warm and comfortable room at eight in the morning, are attended to by apprentices, and their tools are all furnished by their employers. After 10 hours work, at a species of labour so light and easy that women could perform it better than men, they have their evenings to themselves, and seven dollars in cash punctually at the week's end.
In fact, the work was very hard indeed: pressmen often became slightly deformed from pulling the bar of the press, especially the wooden press, which had a fairly small mechanical advantage compositors were subject to blindness after many years of work and often suffered from respiratory ailments, resulting from the dustiness of type cases. They could also be laid off at short notice.
The operation of the early Canadian printing plant depended on various factors: the need for printing and stationery supplies, the availability of equipment and the difficulty of importing it, the supply of paper, and the actual working staff, which consisted of a master printer, a few journeymen, and one or two apprentices. In a small printing establishment the staff was expected to do both composition and presswork. Composition was difficult work, since the compositor or "comp" stood for long hours before a high type frame, selecting letters and spacing them with as much skill as he had, then imposing the completed material into the iron chase of the press, and finally putting the letters back into place. The earliest pay rates for this work in Canada seem to have been thirty-three and a half cents per thousand ems that is, about fifty-six lines of three inches in normal pica type, slightly more than half a cent a line. The press, at first wooden but after the 1830s more likely an American iron press, was run by two men and required tremendous physical effort. The senior workman of the two traditionally chose whether to pull the press or ink the forme: pulling involved "make-ready" to ensure the impression was even, laying the paper onto the "tympan" or frame, running the type bed under the platen of the press, and printing one side of the sheet with two pulls of the bar, on a wooden press, or one on a iron press; inking involved work on the make-ready and inking the type for each impression with a pair of dabbers, called "ink balls", in such a way as to get a uniform colour. At "full press" with two men, the hand press could produce 500 sheets printed on one side only in an hour.
The actual printing process was considered work for journeymen; the apprentices were supposed to help in various ways such as cleaning up, bringing food and beer, and trying their hands at the skills they were expected to acquire. In fact, the apprentices were frequently used for journeymen's work without being paid for it. On the other hand, the masters had themselves been through the traditional apprenticeship, and there is no evidence to suggest that ill-treatment of printing apprentices was ever common. Often a good apprentice was helped in starting his own office, and fairly frequently one married into his master's family.
Where records survive they indicate that the printing house had fairly long periods of inactivity, much of which was spent in discussions of matters of interest and, if the accounts can be believed, in drinking beer. Journeymen were notoriously independent men, inclined to quit at short notice and move on; through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth the tramp printer was a common figure, the best known of them being the Duke in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.
Printing was at first a small business, supplemented by the selling of paper, books, diaries, pens and related supplies in a front shop. Bushell, Canada's first working printer, seems to have run his business with the aid of his son and his "handsome, but unfortunate" daughter Elizabeth, who is said by the American printer Isaiah Thomas to have been very skilled at both presswork and composition. As the demand for printing grew and as the trade became established in the relatively new surroundings of Canada, shops became larger and business more stable.
The largest and most efficient of colonial printing houses in Canada was set up in QuÄbec in 1764 by two Scottish-American printers, William Brown and Thomas Gilmore, with the encouragement of General James Murray, the first British Governor. Brown and Gilmore formed their partnership at Philadelphia in August 1763, and immediately issued a prospectus for a bilingual paper, the Quebec Gazette/Gazette de QuÄbec. One partner went directly north while the other went to England for a new press and equipment. The first number of the new paper, with alternate French and English columns, appeared on 21 June 1764, printed in the popular Caslon types. Both the journal and the business were successful almost at once; Brown was a hard worker and the printing house even improved after Gilmore's early death in 1773. Besides the paper, they printed books in English, French, Latin, and Indian texts for the missionaries.
When Brown died in 1789 the business came under the control of his nephew Samuel Neilson; in 1793 the most talented of the early Canadian printers, John Neilson, took over. He had all his uncle's virtues as workman and man; his business prospered and he added to it a long political career in the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, where he supported the British colonial system while defending the rights of French Canadians. His standards were high, in printing and politics both, and his shop gave Canada what it had badly wanted, a centre where apprentices and journeymen could gain experience and skill before moving on to places where the press was needed.
Growth and the beginnings of political action made the craft of printing an integral part of Canadian life at last, and the end of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of independent printers whose weekly newspapers, unlike the Gazettes, had strong opinions to express on colonial affairs. About 1800 the position of King's Printer in QuÄbec passed to a French Canadian, Pierre-Edouard Desbarats, the founder of a long line of QuÄbec publishers.
Printing came to MontrÄal with the help of the new American republic, whose government sent Fleury Mesplet into French Canada with a press to spread republican ideals. After a disastrous start, Mesplet got into business but began by printing neither a newspaper nor propaganda; rather, his business was almost entirely with the Church until 1778, when he founded the Gazette du commerce et litteraire, a completely French journal which was soon suppressed because of articles on legal matters which angered the British authorities, and articles on Voltaire which angered the Church. After some time in prison he founded the MontrÄal Gazette: Gazette de MontrÄal, which still survives, and did much government printing though he was, properly speaking, a fugitive from justice.
The first printer of Upper Canada was, ironically, a French Canadian, Louis Roy, who had learned his trade with Neilson in QuÄbec. John Graves Simcoe, even before leaving England to take up his post as Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, wrote to Lord Dundas about the need for a printer in his administration. Roy was offered the post and he produced in January 1793 Simcoe's speech at the opening of the Legislature, the first printing in what is now Ontario, followed by the Acts of the Legislature and, in April, the Upper Canada Gazette or American Oracle. Roy left Newark, then the capital of Upper Canada, in 1794 and the office of King's Printer passed through a few incompetent hands there and at York (now Toronto) until 1801, when another printer from Neilson's office, John Bennett, took over the post.
During the early nineteenth century printing in Canada grew into a viable business; books on many subjects were written and printed, and the larger towns all through the eastern half of Canada had one or more newspapers. The latter served as organs of opinion on political and other matters, in both English and French Canada. By the 1830s the trade was widespread, there were sufficient customers for the printing trade, and there were many skilled tradesmen who were adequately organized to form unions and strike against their employers. Furthermore, the equipment of the printer, which had scarcely changed at all since Gutenberg's invention in the 1450s, suddenly became the concern of the inventor and mechanical innovator. In 1800 the problem of resiliency of material for press manufacture was solved by Lord Stanhope, who used a system of counterweights to duplicate in an iron frame the springiness of the wooden press. Once an iron press had been perfected, the wooden press rapidly disappeared from all printing houses, and before the end of the 1830s the universal printing machine of Canada was the Washington Press, a large iron machine with an extravagantly large type bed for newspaper and general printing. Its advantages over the old wooden press were many: its platen, which was ten times as large as that of the wooden press, was driven downwards by a knuckle joint activated by a curved bar, which allowed tremendous multiplication of force and permitted the printer to produce one side of a large newspaper at only one pull; the platen returned to its rest position rapidly by spring action, allowing for faster work; and, despite its considerable weight, the press could be taken apart or set up in ten or fifteen minutes, in contrast to the wooden press which needed many adjustments. The weight of the Washington was itself an advantage, since it stabilized the press on the floor, and so could be put into almost any building. The wooden press, in contrast, had to be braced against rafters, and so could only be used in a very substantial building.
Composition of texts remained a matter for skilled labour, which was fairly plentiful in eastern Canada. The experienced compositor could set, correct, impose, and finally distribute a great deal of material in a week's work. As more comps became available, more and more printed matter appeared in Canada and, by the beginning of the 1830s, the political press was fully established. In colonial times a paper objecting to the authorities could simply be closed, as occurred with the Gazette littÄraire de MontrÄal in 1778. The first major clash between government and the press occurred with the suppression of Le Canadien at QuÄbec in March, 1810, after four years of increasingly strong attacks on the British establishment; significantly, the government tried to replace it with Le Vrai Canadien, a French publication supporting official views. But throughout Canada the press and politics were coming together: Joseph Howe's Novascotian in Halifax, Le Canadien in QuÄbec, William Lyon Mackenzie's Colonial Advocate and Egerton Ryerson's Christian Guardian in Toronto all had strong views to express on how Canada should develop as a nation, and all had some effect on the evolution of colonial to responsible government and the merging of the self-governing territories of British North America into the Confederation of 1867. Editors and printers almost all had political roles to play, Mackenzie as rebel and first mayor of Toronto, Joseph Howe as champion of Responsible Government in Nova Scotia, and others, like John Neilson, in the Legislative Assemblies of their provinces.
As areas became more settled the demand for printed matter became greater; the press followed the westward expansion of the Dominion, in much the same manner as in the United States, with printing firmly established in the eastern areas, moving to the west coast, and then gradually moving again into the centre of the continent. Weekly Gazettes were followed by regular weekly newspapers, which became dailies when the demand occurred; church and mission presses became more active, and a Canadian literature came into existence and required printing. Many of the first Canadian books are now extremely rare, and nobody knows how many have completely disappeared over the years. It is certain, however, that plays, novels, and poems were printed in almost all Canadian centres through the nineteenth century and that local publication remained fairly strong even after the development of a centralized publishing industry in Toronto in the early years of the twentieth century.
While the press was spreading through Canada, the general growth of literacy throughout the world resulted in greater demand for printed material, rapid technical improvements in printing equipment, and a greatly increased demand for paper. Perhaps the main achievement in spreading the printed word was the development by several inventors at the start of the nineteenth century of machines for making paper; not only did the Fourdrinier and Dickinson machines industrialize the old craft of hand-dipping paper moulds into vats of "stuff", but they also were capable of producing an endless roll or "web" of paper instead of just individual sheets. The first Fourdrinier machine in Canada was set up at Portneuf, QuÄbec, in 1843 aptly the year in which a German inventor developed the process by which paper could be made of ground wood pulp instead of linen rag. Canada's supply of water power and scrub trees was to make it a great centre for the industry; in the early 1970s Canada was producing more than a third of the world's pulp and paper.
Presses were also being built for speed in production and efficiency; as early as 1814 the London Times had built a steam-driven press making its impression with a cylinder rather than a flat platen, and from it came a large variety of smaller cylinder presses. These presses, either with fast hand feeding of paper sheets or with automatic feeding, became generally available in the 1830s, and within twenty years were quite common, replacing even the big Washington as the normal press for the Canadian newspaper and book printer. Even small cylinders could print over a thousand pulls an hour, some of them actually printing both sides of the sheet in that time, while a two-man crew had to work very hard to print 500 sheets an hour on the hand press. The second main development was a smaller press for jobbing work, printing of minor jobs such as billheads and cards as distinct from books and newspapers. The platen jobber was perfected about 1850 by George Phineas Gordon. The Gordon treadle platen press can still be found in many Canadian printing houses, and some are still being manufactured. Since the press inked itself, the pressman merely had to keep it in motion with the foot treadle, or by power if desired, and lay on and take off sheets as fast as he could. Even the earliest platen presses were capable of printing 1,200 pulls an hour with a good operator, and later models with automatic feeding of paper produced much more than that.
Two further technical developments that emerged in the nineteenth century were stereotyping and hot-metal keyboard composition, both of which really had to await the creation of a sufficient demand for printing to allow the trade to bypass the objections of the well-organized and vocal compositors. Attempts at both developments had begun as early as the eighteenth century, but had been stopped by technical difficulties and opposition from compositors, who traditionally had sufficient strength even to stop printing large numbers of copies from one setting of type. Stereotyping consists of impressing the type forme into a mould of plaster of paris or of a waxed cardboard known as "flong"; the actual printing is done from type metal formes cast from these moulds. As a result, the book would never have to be set up in type more than once. What made it finally possible to get the compositors to accept stereotyping was the rotary press which printed both sides of a sheet or web of paper in a continuous process from cylindrical stereotype plates, made on a special curved casting box. The rotary was perfected in the 1860s and by the end of the nineteenth century was common in almost all large newspapers, as in fact it still is.
For most of the nineteenth century composition of texts by hand still slowed down the printing process, and little success was ever achieved by ingenious machines that set ordinary type by keyboard action. By the 1880s it was clear that not even large teams of skilled comps could keep up with the fast presses. Rapid progress was made on two hot-metal machines, that is, machines that worked by keyboard, assembled brass matrixes rather than types, and then cast the text in metal forced into the matrixes from a melting pot. The Lanston Monotype machines had keyboards that produced a perforated ribbon which then activated a caster, which produced the text as set by the keyboard operator; the text came out in individual letters, which gave the machine its name. Though an American invention, the Lanston Monotype machine has always been much more popular in Europe than in the New World, and is usually considered an excellent machine for setting the texts of books. The Linotype machine, almost universally used throughout Canada ever since it came on the market in large numbers in 1890, also used a keyboard to assemble matrixes, but then cast the text one whole line at a time. It was simpler to operate and maintain than the Monotype, not very expensive for the service it gave, and so it was an instant success, with more than 6,000 sold in the first ten years of its manufacture. The advantage of both hot-metal machines was the speed with which text could be set up in type for printing. An added benefit was that the printer did not have to keep a large stock of type on hand at all times. The Linotype especially changed the nature of printing in Canada, enabling even small country printers to bring out relatively large newspapers and books.
Through the latter half of the nineteenth century there had been several developments in the field of lithography, the printing from a smooth surface of images treated to take ink against a background surface treated to reject ink. In Canada, as elsewhere, lithography became the common method of printing pictures, labels, and large coloured posters. In the middle years of the twentieth century a further development of offset lithography the transfer of an image from a smooth plate to a rubber roller to the paper to be printed revolutionized the entire printing process by making type, typesetting machines, and all the old presses at once obsolete. Most printing at the present time is done by photolitho-offset, and most texts are set up by film-setting machines that produce the letters on plastic strips or sheets.
Printing in Canada now is totally different from the skilled trade it once was. Type foundries have disappeared, the attractive messiness of the old printing house has been largely replaced by neat electronic machines. But the printer's business, preserving thought, remains unchanged.
