The Tools Needed to Be a Printer in Colonial Times
- Colonial printers required cases of type, one case for uppercase letters, another for lowercase. Each type was a separate piece of metal or wood with the letter carved on its face. Setting up type for printing was arduous, as each piece of type had to be added by hand to the compositor stick, which held the type together. A compositor set the type, which was set backwards, as printing reversed the type. He loaded the type into a composing stick, which held a few sentences at a time. When the type from the composing stick was set into a galley, then woodcuts could be added for advertisements.
- When a few sentences were in the composing stick, they were placed in a wooden frame called a galley. Galleys were then gathered together and locked into a page-size iron frame called a chase. The chase was placed in the coffin of the printing press and the type was re-inked, making it ready. Setting up a newspaper to print could take 25 hours of a printer's time and effort. Workdays were 14 hours long in colonial times.
- Colonial printers generally made their own ink from tannin, iron sulfate, gum arabic and water. The paper used in colonial times was made of linen and cloth rags, which the printer purchased from papermakers. The primary ingredient in ink was iron gall, which came from the galls of oak trees. Mixing the tannic acid with iron sulfate produces the black ink pigment. Some colonial printers sold ink as well as the printed products they made. Inking the type in the coffin was done with two wood-handled, wool-stuffed, leather-covered ink balls that spread the mixture evenly on the type.
- When the coffin containing the ink-saturated type was ready, it was placed on carriage rails that took it to a piece of wood called the platen. The platen held the coffin so when the paper was pressed down on the type, pressure from the screw press could be added to securely print the type onto the paper. When all was set, the pressman or printer put a bar in the screw of the printing press and worked it down, putting 200 pounds of pressure into the process. Each impression lasted 15 seconds or so. The paper was then set aside to dry. When dry, the printer spread liquid alkali over the type to make it easier to read.