Tourist Experience and the Manufacturing Town

This chapter examines the Magnificent Directory produced by James Bisset in 1800 in relation to industrial tourism in Birmingham. Directories were used throughout the eighteenth century to promote manufacturers, but Bisset’s Directory differed in its inclusion of poetry and expensive copperplate prints outlining Birmingham’s genuine manufactories but also an imagined town. This town was inhabited and viewed through the eyes of Classical gods both in the prints and the poetry. The chapter considers how Bisset’s Directory guided tourist experience by framing the town through a lens of wonder and thus highlighting and heightening the curiosity of visitors. It also assesses in what ways the poetic and visual content, as well as Bisset’s use of fine printing and skilled artisans, were employed to alter perceptions of Birmingham.

The Serif-Less Letters of John Soane

This chapter examines the evidence for the architect John Soane as an early pioneer of serif-less lettering in Britain and the progenitor of the sans serif typefaces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It considers the events that led to Soane’s application of serif-less typography and the reasons he became the principal executor of this radical departure from the roman letter. It also proffers suggestions for why Soane promoted this primitivist letter as desirable for inscriptions on buildings as well as for plans, and elevation and perspective drawings in the neoclassical style. The chapter traces Soane’s early career use of sans serif titling on drawings and importantly documents the earliest known extant sans serif inscriptions still in situ on his architecture.

Introduction

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, perhaps more than any other, was a pivotal time in the development of the mechanics and methods of communication. Commercial, political, legal, social and religious interactions were all facilitated by a variety of material processes such as handwriting, painting, drawing, printing and engraving, which coexisted alongside more ephemeral and immaterial means of communication, including voice, gesture, costume and performance. New sites for consuming the products of communication emerged such as coffee houses, oratories, libraries, institutes, theatres, shops and galleries. Developments in road and water transport and postal systems facilitated means of communication and enabled the products of pen and print to travel further and faster than ever before....

Private Pleasures and Portable Presses

In the eighteenth century, non-indentured individuals began to infiltrate the typographic profession and to print for pleasure and sometimes for profit. In doing so they blurred the demarcations between the professional and the layman and, in some instances, challenged the Master Printer at his own game. This chapter considers how printing, one of the most highly skilled, closely policed and most threatening of all the trades became, during the eighteenth century, a craft widely pursued by amateurs. It considers the changing complexion of the lay printer; reflects on what they produced, their motivations for so doing, and the intellectual and technological environment that enabled the emergence of the amateur printer at this time.

Identity, Enigma, Assemblage

The Vocabulary, or Pocket Dictionary (1766) printed by John Baskerville has long remained a puzzle as to authorship and intent. An avowedly ‘small performance’, it is nevertheless strikingly distinctive in a range of ways. This chapter traces its intellectual context in ways which confirm Baskerville’s status as lexicographer as well as printer. Salient, too, is its stance on aspects of faith, morality, and salvation in forms closely aligned with Baskerville’s own thinking. Telling absences appear in terms of the expected ordering and inclusion of headwords, as well as in the attendant framing of definitions. Books, Johnson stressed, ‘have always a secret influence on the understanding’ whereby ideas ‘often offered to the mind, will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them’. The ‘secret influence’ of the Vocabulary is, this chapter argues, a critical aspect of its meaning, and the knowledge that readers might gain.

‘The most beautiful hand’

Shorthand is a significant area in early modern palaeography, with systems widespread in the eighteenth century. Some aspired to a place in the gamut of hands taught by writing-masters at a time when multi-script literacy was a necessary accomplishment for many. John Byrom’s ‘Universal English Short-hand’ was one of the most important prior to Isaac Pitman’s. In contrast with those of rivals such as James Weston, Byrom promoted it to potential learners and patrons as a way of writing ‘in the most … beautiful Manner’. In considering some of its manifold uses by his pupils –effectively a scribal community before its publication in 1767 – this chapter focuses on Byrom’s concern for how shorthand looked on the page. This arose from his near lifelong ambition to print in shorthand – a project which at one stage involved William Caslon – and the chapter sketches some reasons why this ambition was thwarted.

An Archaeology of Letter Writing

This chapter takes a material culture approach in studying epistolary cultures of elite women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing primarily on the correspondence of Georgiana, sixth countess of Carlisle, it considers how the letter as an object could be an important marker of elite status and form part of the performance of aristocratic ideals. By examining the consumption of stationery, the use of paper, access to postal networks and archival practices, this chapter argues that creation, composition, sending and preserving of letters could all be used in the construction of the aristocratic self in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Growth of Copperplate Script

The formation and development of the ‘copperplate’ script was one of the distinctive features of the growth of the British mercantile empire in the eighteenth century. Joseph Champion, whose script typified it, popularised in his engraved writing manuals, and reached its apex in The Universal Penman, a large folio of different scripts and forms used in commercial documents. Through it, ‘copperplate’ spread throughout Britain and its dependencies, and from them to other countries in Europe and North America.

Authorship in Script and Print

This chapter investigates the division of labour between writing-masters and engravers in their joint publications, aiming to uncover the mutual dependencies between the two trades. It describes the different processes that each trade brought to the collaboration, and explores the consequences of those differences for users of their productions. It explores how the marketplace for engraved script was rhetorically addressed in writing manuals while also asking how the reader (and potential copyist) was more pragmatically addressed in the scribal teaching models embodied by the works themselves. It touches on the history of style in handwriting, specifically, that of the ‘roundhand’, which was the dominant clerical hand of eighteenth-century England, and asks how far scribal practice can be retrieved from pedagogical engraved hands. Lastly, it maps out some future research questions into a curious format that, by design, complicates what is practical as well as ornamental in the written word

Print Culture and Distribution

This chapter analyses how the essays that made up the Federalist Papers were distributed and the extent of their circulation in 1787–8. It examines the contingent nature of early American transportation infrastructure within the context of print circulation. Because of the many hazards in transporting newspapers, Publius—the pseudonym under which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay published their essays—was not a continentwide spokesman for the entirety of the Federalist cause during the ratification debates, but rather a local phenomenon, whose provincial life was limited by countless contingencies. By examining the circulation of the Federalist Papers, this chapter helps clarify the meaning of the term ‘print culture’ and underscores the importance of material culture to the history of ideas.