Palmer & Rey's Third Revised Specimen Book and Price List of Printing Material
A 352-page catalogue from Palmer & Rey, type founders and press makers at 405 Sansome Street, San Francisco, with branches in Portland and Los Angeles.
What it is
A 352-page catalogue from Palmer & Rey, type founders and press makers at 405 Sansome Street, San Francisco, with branches in Portland and Los Angeles. It opens with terms: prices may change, write for an estimate, do not cut up the book, order by full name or number. Ready-made estimates price whole plants, from hand-press outfits for country weeklies at roughly $400 to $750 to small and medium job offices. A Business Talk answers what customers keep writing about: cash with small orders, C.O.D., credit only with references, complaints, and old type taken in at 8 cents a pound. Then the faces, each line with its count and price: roman text in the Catiline passage, gothics set with jokes and California farm words, ornamented faces such as Cirrous and Ivy, borders built into finished panels, Page wood type sold as agents, and a priced list of presses and tools.
Why read it now
Three things still work. The estimates sell a whole outcome, not parts: a complete newspaper or job-office plant at one price, the same move as a modern starter bundle, which cuts the buyer's decision work. A Business Talk is an early FAQ, written to cut correspondence and blunt about who gets credit and why; clear terms reduce back-and-forth and bad debt now as then. And the book is candid: of its own Pioneer press it says the only wonder is the low cost of the outfit. Research on two-sided messages finds that admitting a limit can raise credibility. The specimen lines are jokes and local words, so a browser can find a page again, and the border panels show the parts already built into a job. The promise that new faces will appear in the firm's trade paper, the Pacific Printer, turns the catalogue into a series, like a product newsletter. Dated: cent prices per letter, credit backed by chattel mortgages, patchy OCR. Use: publish packaged quotes at two or three sizes and a plain terms page that answers what sales keeps answering on WhatsApp.
Passages worth keeping
ALL CAST ON THE INTERCHANGEABLE SYSTEM OF TYPE BODIES.
كل الحروف مصبوبة على نظام مقاسات موحد، فيمكن جمع حروف من خطوط مختلفة في سطر واحد دون عناء في الضبط.
Send us the full title of any size and style of type or number of cut, and we will guarantee correct filling of order
إذا ذكرت الاسم الكامل للحرف ومقاسه أو رقم الرسم، تضمن الشركة أن يصلك الطلب صحيحًا، فالدقة في الطلب يقابلها ضمان.
It is a good idea, when asking an estimate, to tell the amount of money the selection is to be limited to, and let us name the best outfit for the price.
حين تطلب تقديرًا اذكر ميزانيتك، واترك للشركة أن تختار لك أفضل تجهيز بهذا المبلغ.
We earnestly request our patrons to report to us at the earliest moment all cases of dissatisfaction
تطلب الشركة من زبائنها أن يبلغوها فورًا بأي عدم رضا، لأن أصحابها لا يرون كل تفصيلة بأنفسهم.
There is nothing wonderful about this kind of newspaper work, except the cheapness of the outfit for it.
تعترف الشركة بأن مطبعتها الصغيرة لا تتميز بشيء سوى رخص تجهيزها، وهذه الصراحة تزيد الثقة بباقي الكلام.
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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