Representing the Labour of Printing in Image and Text

Abstract

Abstract This chapter investigates how the technologies of the printed word were presented and described, in image and text. It focuses on images of the labour of printing, and on printed texts that aimed to describe and explain this labour. Over the course of our period, trades were opened up in print in new ways. The trend for printed instructional literature, covering topics from chess-playing to hunting to husbandry, was expanded to cover more codified artisanal, skilled labour too—including printing. This chapter shows how European images of printers at work, instructional texts about printing from seventeenth-century England and France, and a later georgic poem all aimed to reveal the work of printing both letterpress and copperplates, at the common and the rolling press. Both text and image work to make visible the labour of printing and, by codifying it, aim to set this work within a structure of trades which was at once more open, more respectable, and more strongly tied to the global.