The Inland Printer, Vol. 23, April to September 1899
Six monthly issues of The Inland Printer, the Chicago trade journal of the printing and allied industries, bound as one 489-page volume.
What it is
Six monthly issues of The Inland Printer, the Chicago trade journal of the printing and allied industries, bound as one 489-page volume. Each issue opens with a feature: W. Irving Way on Theodore De Vinne as scholar-printer, Frank Holme on training an illustrator, Charles H. Cochrane asking whether printers are slaves to fashion for refusing ragged-right text. Regular departments follow on process engraving, lithography, estimating, job composition, and a blunt review of readers' specimens. The volume also reprints Elbert Hubbard's "A Message to Garcia", reports how the Ault and Wiborg ink company sold its colors through a year of illuminated inserts, deplores a county printing contract won for $1, and runs Musgrove's "Advertising for Printers" column, where one printer's monthly blotters, folders and booklets lifted his sales. Dense supplier ads close each issue.
Why read it now
The volume is most useful as a record of how printers and their suppliers marketed themselves, and much of it still applies. The Musgrove case is a clean small-business example: a printer raised his advertising from $25 to $45 a month, about 3 percent of sales, sent a different piece each month to 2,500 names, and reports monthly sales rising from an average of $1,400 to $2,673 by April. It is one self-reported case, not a controlled test, but steady, varied mail to a fixed list is what later direct-mail practice also recommends. The Ault and Wiborg inserts show a supplier teaching while it sells, turning samples into a series people kept. Cochrane's case for ragged-right text reads as modern because it later became normal. Dated: the price and process detail, Hubbard's contempt for ordinary workers, and most of the typography rules. Use it by planning twelve small, different mailings to one list and tracking sales against the same months last year.
Passages worth keeping
Some people say there's no money in advertising the printing business. Don't you believe it. There's lots of money in it.
يرد الطابع على من يقول إن الإعلان لا يفيد المطابع، ويؤكد من تجربته أنه يجلب مالًا كثيرًا لمن يحسن استعماله.
To call to the notice of possible purchasers the products of an ink factory, it is manifestly important that the colors should in some way be shown.
إذا كنت تبيع شيئًا يُحكم عليه بالعين، فعليك أن تعرضه نفسه في الإعلان لا أن تصفه فقط.
matter set with a ragged edge on the right was exactly as good as matter made even on the right, whether it was printed with a typewriter or by a printing press.
السطور غير المتساوية من جهة اليمين تؤدي وظيفة القراءة كما تؤديها السطور المتساوية، والتمسك بالتساوي عادة لا ضرورة.
It is not book learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebra which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing
يرى الكاتب أن ما يحتاجه الشباب هو الجدية والأمانة وسرعة التنفيذ، لا مزيد من المعلومات.
The papers print pictures because there is a demand for them
الصحف تنشر الصور لأن القراء يطلبونها، فالرسام يعمل لسوق لها طلب وليس للفن وحده.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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