The American Printing History Association

 Printing History: selected articles
 "H. L. Mencken: in the Steps of Gutenberg"

About APHA

Printing History

Regional Chapters

APHA Events

Site Map

Join APHA

"H. L. Mencken: in the Steps of Gutenberg"
By Stephen O. Saxe, with Vincent Fitzpatrick, and Frederick N. Rasmussen.
[From: Printing History, vol. 5 (1983), No. 1 (whole number 9), pp. 29-32.]

On November 26 1888 my father sent his bookkeeper, Mr. Maass, to the establishment of J. F. W. Dorman, at 217 East German street, Baltimore, and there and then, by the said Maass's authorized agency, took title to a Baltimore No. 10 Self-Inker Printing Press and a font of No. 214 type. The press cost $7.50 and the font of type $1.10. These details, which I recover from the receipted bill in my father's file, are of no conceivable interest to anyone else on earth, but to me they are of a degree of concern bordering upon the super-colossal, for that press determined the whole course of my future life.

So wrote H. L. Mencken in the first part of his autobiography, Happy Days. The chapter is titled "In the Steps of Gutenberg," and in it Mencken describes the small press that was his father's Christmas gift to him when he was eight, his first attempts to print with it, and how it started him on the road to journalism and, ultimately, fame. The chapter is enchanting to the lay reader, but for anyone with an interest in printing it is doubly so.

We are unusually fortunate to have many of the bits of Mencken's early printing and other ephemera still extant, and they are reproduced on these pages for the first time. The J. F. W. Dorman Co., founded in 1865, is still located in Baltimore, where it manufactures rubber stamps, signs, and stencils. We have not the space to reprint the chapter mentioned, but it is highly recommended to anyone who finds these illustrations interesting.

[Click images for larger views]

Copyright 1983 The American Printing History Association. All rights reserved

Addendum 12/2005: An interesting note: Mencken's father, in attempting to print, "smashed all the Black Letter lower-case r's." Mencken therefore called himself H. L. Mencken, and so he was known from then on. -Stephen O. Saxe.

The illustrations are also available here: http://photobucket.com/albums/v655/sos22/Mencken/

View contents of vol. 5 (1983), No. 1 (whole number 9)

View online articles

See other articles by Stephen O. Saxe

See Current Issue

Author, Subject and Title Index (Issues 1-32)

Back Issues Available

Join APHA

Contact APHA

Copyright 2006 The American Printing History Association. All rights reserved.
APHA Contacts