|
|
| |
Hot Type, Hard Times 1900-1910
The Post Register's exhibit at the entrance to Eagle Rock, USA
|
     
   
Click Picture to Zoom In | 1887 Clamshell Jobber
Printing a newspaper was little more than a sideline for most frontier newspapers. Their primary business lay in commercial jobbing - butter wrappers, broadsides, ad fliers, office forms and letterheads, and the occasional circus poster. Newspaper offices held a variety of presses for a wide range of printing purposes.
This rare Eclipse job press with clamshell mechanism was made by J.F.W. Dorman of Baltimore, Maryland under an 1887 patent. It's typical of the kind of press favored on the Western frontier: foot-powered with a sturdy, reliable mechanism easily maintained and repaired, compact and easily moved from place to place.
The manufacturer stopped making presses following a disastrous fire in Baltimore in 1904 - the same year as Idaho Falls' Sept. 11 downtown fire that wiped out several businesses and singed the Register offices at 256 Broadway and the Times offices down the street.
But presses of this type remained popular throughout the 1930s before being supplanted by electric-powered letterpresses. A few electric-powered clamshell jobbers were produced, but none achieved the level of simplicity and harmony of man and machine offered by their predecessors.
The owner, Graham Whipple of Idaho Falls, printed some of the items for the museum's current exhibit on this press, and we are grateful for the opportunity to include it in this display. |
|
Return to the Hot Type, Hard Times Main Page
|
|
|
|
