The World Cup (of Printing History)

I volunteer for the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts as the person who runs the museum’s Twitter account (@MoPrinting). I’m a soccer fan too so I decided that it would be fun to run a series of printing history milestones about the countries participating in the tournament. The United States wasn’t in the tournament, so I knew that the focus would be on the countries that had qualified. I started the hashtag #worldcupofprintinghistory at the very end of the ‘Group’ stage when the teams are divided into groups, with each team playing three games to determine who moves on. At the end of the Group stage the initial thirty-two qualifying teams had been distilled down to sixteen (the so-called Round of 16). They were Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, England, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Uruguay. From a printing perspective, it was a great disappointment that Germany, the reigning World Cup champion and tournament favorite, was bounced out in the Group stage. How could the home of Gutenberg not be part of the #worldcupofprintinghistory? So sad.

I started the hashtag with no idea of what I would be tweeting, yet I was pretty certain I’d be able to find at least a few printing history milestones for each country. God bless Wikipedia. They have a page that covers, for almost every country in the world, the date and place (and sometimes additional details) on the establishment of the first printing press. This page, which is called ‘Global spread of the printing press,’ was a gold mine for the #worldcupofprintinghistory Twitter hashtag. Even so, the entries for some countries, like Egypt for example, were quite vague. The first printing press in Egypt was in Cairo in 1798. Okay. That’s it? I ended up defaulting to related topics, which in the case of Egypt turned out to be papyrus (“Papyrus was manufactured in Egypt as far back as the fourth millennium BCE. The earliest archaeological evidence of papyrus was excavated in 2012 and 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf, an ancient Egyptian harbor located on the Red Sea coast.”).

It also became clear as I pulled out these nuggets from early printing history that the story of the printing press is often closely tied to religion, colonialism, war, slavery, revolution, and censorship. What had started out as a light-hearted Twitter exercise to promote historical figures like John Baskerville and Alois Senefelder was taking a decidedly serious turn. Here’s an example from Senegal: “Circa 1776: Senegal’s Gorée Island houses the “Maison des Esclaves” (Slave House), a stark reminder of West African slave trade. Gorée Island was the site of the first printing press in French Africa.”

Also, given that my choices were fairly arbitrary and limited to what I could easily find on the Internet (or extract out of the great mind of Frank Romano and some other helpful friends), the account started to get noticed by PhD historians who actually know their topics very well. I was scolded a couple of times for rookie mistakes like spelling Claude Garamond’s name with a ‘d’ (serious folk spell it ‘Garamont’), but what the heck, it meant the tweets were getting noticed.

I spent some time trying to connect with printing museums around the world and my best effort in that regard was with a museum in France. Like the French team, which won 4-2 in the World Cup final versus Croatia, and also won the hearts of many soccer fans around the world, the Musée de l'Imprimerie et de la Communication Graphique in Lyon, France (@MusImprim on Twitter) won my heart with the way they embraced the #worldcupofprintinghistory hashtag and provided me with many memorable French printing milestones, including this factoid: “1957: From the workbook of Louis Moyroud, who with René Higonnet invented photocomposition. Born in France they patented their invention in the U.S.”

By the time the quarterfinals came around I wanted to be sure that I had a relevant picture with every printing milestone. Here again, the Internet did not disappoint. Looking for a picture of a specific incunabulum? No problem. (Note: A book, pamphlet, or broadside printed in Europe before 1501 is considered an incunabulum.) Searching for an image of Bla? Baromi? or the Spovid op?ena? Again, no problem. Had it not been for Croatia’s unlikely run to the final I might never have learned about Bla? Baromi?, a Croatian printer & calligrapher who in 1494 founded the Senj printing press, the 2nd oldest Croatian printing press.

It should come as no surprise that many of the famous figures in the history of printing are male. Even today printing is often a male-dominated profession. To add some balance to the #worldcupofprintinghistory initiative I had an idea I wanted to try out for the semi-finals. Why not identify four women with a role in printing history from the four semi-finalists (Belgium, Croatia, England, and France)? I tried but this turned out to be harder than I imagined. There’s a great old book by Tammaro de Marinis called “Women Printers of the 16th Century” but its focus was on Italian women and Italy had not qualified for the World Cup. England and France were relatively easy. Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union, though not a printer herself, established many clandestine printing sites in England using table top presses to produce material promoting the women’s movement. A current day figure, Mme. Nelly Gable, is a punch cutter (maybe the only woman ever to have that occupation) for the Imprimerie National in Paris, France. A good start, but I faltered with Belgium and Croatia. Ultimately I just ran out of time. I’m hoping for a better showing when the Women’s World Cup comes around next summer in France.

So what did I learn? The meaning of the word incunabulum for one, but a whole lot more. For example, that the first printing machine in Colombia was used to print legal documentation on a farm, a hacienda at Valle del Cauca in 1669. That ‘The London Gazette’ was the first regularly published English newspaper (starting in 1655). That the first French book with illustrations in the text was ‘Mirouer of the Redemption of the Human Lineage’ (1478). That the first book printed in New Julfa, Isfahan, Persia (now Iran) was ?????? ? ????? (Saghmos i Davit - Psalter) in Armenian. This happened in 1636. That a new type of multi-color woodblock printing called nishiki-e was invented in the Japanese Edo Period (around 1765). That it was Jewish refugees from Portugal who founded Morocco’s first printer in 1516. That the first printing press in Panama arrived in 1820 when it was still a Spanish colony. It was used to produce a weekly newspaper called La Miscelánea. That the last known copy of one of the earliest books to be printed in Polish, ‘Hortulus Animae polonice’ (1513), was lost during World War II. That host country Russia was the site of an underground printing press producing revolutionary leaflets and a social-Democratic newspaper in Moscow during the first Russian revolution. (Today this site is a museum.) That the world’s oldest extant book (1377) was printed with movable metal and published in Cheungju, Korea. That the first papermill in Europe (1151) was at Xàtiva (Spain). That Swede Astrid Lindgren, author of ‘Pippi L?ngstrump’ (Pippi Longstocking) is the most read Swedish author with over 100 million copies printed worldwide in more than 80 languages. That a canal on the Rhine built in the 12th Century to operate corn mills was converted in 1453 to paper production. That a proclamation issued by the prize agents of the British forces in Uruguay on May 9, 1807 is probably the earliest Uruguayan imprint.

And so on and so on.

The best way to get a taste of this adventure is simply to sign on to Twitter and search on the #worldcupofprintinghistory hashtag. After that, I recommend that anyone with an interest in printing, typography, design, letterpress, paper, books, posters, typewriters, or related topic should (a) visit the museum (15 Thornton Ave., Haverhill, MA), and if you are not local (b) visit the museum's web site (www.museumofprinting.org) or follow the museum on social media at Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

In closing I’d like to thank my helpers including Frank Romano, Pat McGrew, Hamilton Costa, Fabian Ruiz, Jeanne Penvenne, Eddy Hagen, and the Musée de l'Imprimerie et de la Communication Graphique. My congratulations to France, the 2018 World Cup winner. Allez les Bleus!