Gordon’s US Patent model for a platen job press mounted on the base of the case made by GPO carpenters. (GPO)
On Wednesday, March 15, 2017, Frank Romano, President of the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts, visited the Government Publishing Office in Washington to transport an 1874 U.S patent model of a platen printing press which GPO is lending to the museum. APHA’s Chesapeake Chapter sponsored a “going-away party” in GPO’s Visitor Center at which GPO Director Davita Vance-Cooks and Deputy Director James Bradley formally turned over the model to Romano. The model was prepared for transport to the museum by cabinetmaker John Beckel of the GPO Carpenter Shop, who constructed a specially fitted case for the model to travel in. [Read more]
Both speakers in this session summoned science. But just a dram of detail is divulged now. Mr. Barnum’s talk (Mr. Cameron did not attend) will be posted in full on this website after all the conference events are summarized. Prof. Risseeuw’s investigations are ongoing, therefore the aim is to avoid mischaracterizing his conclusions. [Read more]
The Government Publishing Office in Washington D.C. recently acquired two original news photographs of its most famous and beloved Linotype.
The machine, a Model 5, serial no. 14168R, shipped in June, 1910, to Pierre Lafitte & Co., a Paris agent, and was purchased by a French printing firm. Had it not been one of two requisitioned for the American Expeditionary Force by Major W.W. Kirby seven years later, the machine might well have ended its life in the same obscurity shared by many of its Brooklyn-built brethren. [Read more]
The completion of GPO Building 3 (at right) in 1940 brought the total floor space of the GPO facility in Washington, DC to 33 acres.
The United States Government Printing Office (now known as the Government Publishing Office) was called the “Largest Print Shop in the World” for many decades beginning around the turn of the twentieth century. Everything about the operation at that time and through the 1970s seems, especially in our age of miniaturization, just huge. The plant, affectionately called “The Big Red Buildings,” eventually expanded to four structures on North Capitol Street amounting to 33 acres of floor space. The annual production of documents was nothing short of vast, reaching well into the billions of copies annually by 1940, when 5600 people worked there. At its peak, in the 1970s, our employee roll reached over 8000. [Read more]
Session IV, Panel 1. “Print paper ought to be as free as the air and water”: American Newspapers, Canadian Newsprint, and the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, 1909–1913,” presented by Geoffrey Little ¶ “Forest/ Trees/Paper /Documents: Proposals for Papermaking at the U.S. Government Printing Office,” presented by George Barnum.
Paper mill in Kapuskasing, Ontario, n.d. Library and Archives Canada.
This session brought together the serendipitous pairing of Geoffrey Little and George Barnum for a panel titled Twentieth-Century Paper in Circulation. Paper played a key role in debates over U.S. tariffs and the growth of the U.S. Government Printing Office (US GPO). Papermaking thus became an important point of engagement for working out tensions between robust cultural discourse, government publication and commercial opportunities for profit. The two well-researched presentations highlighted how manufacturers, politicians and government officials negotiated the meaning of papermaking in a capitalist republic with an increasingly strong central government. [Read more]
