By Scott Ellwood, Bruce & Mary Crawford Curator
At the Grolier Club Library, catalogues form the core of our research collections. While the majority of these are catalogues of antiquarian books (including private libraries, bibliographies, or lists of books to be sold) we also collect type specimens and catalogues of printing equipment. One particular catalogue of equipment was of particular interest to us because it came from the business of Robert Hoe III (1839-1909), our founding member. R. Hoe & Co. is best known for producing rotary and web printing presses through the 19th century.[1] The Hoe & Co. catalogue dates to 1867, when Robert Hoe’s uncle, Richard March Hoe (1812-1886) managed the business and the machines were much less industrial than they soon would be. Even after new industrial equipment took a leading role in the commercial print world, this catalogue still had a use, as evidenced by copious pencil annotations in Spanish and Arabic by at least two hands, likely from the late 19th or early 20th century. Digging into these annotations reveals how catalogues, despite their ephemeral nature, find new uses with new readers, occasionally preserving this history like bibliographical strata waiting for researchers to come along and read it.
Both the Arabic and the Spanish annotations translate the names of printing office equipment, suggesting that this catalogue, long after it was useless for ordering goods, had a second life as a glossary for Arabic and Spanish-speaking printing novices. The Grolier Club acquired it after it had been deaccessioned from Columbia University’s library, where it had already been rebound. We have not been able to trace when or how it entered Columbia’s library, and the rebinding has removed any provenance clues that might have been in the pastedown papers or free endpapers. Despite the lacunae in its chain of ownership and the fact that the firm shipped their products internationally,[2] it still seems likely that this catalogue circulated in New York City. It was published by a New York firm; it was eventually deposited at a New York university library; and, nearly unique for the United States, New York City has a strong but little-recognized history of Arabic printing, once based in the old neighborhood of Little Syria. The cycles of use through the catalogue’s history make it a deep resource for studying the history of printing in New York. The Arabic annotations in this catalogue give a view into the operations of these Arabic presses through the glosses for particular equipment, and it gives us an opportunity to recall the innovation Arab printers in New York brought to Arabic printing.
The catalogue has 23 Arabic annotations as shown in the pictures and listed in the table below.
| Page | Catalogue product | Transcription of Arabic gloss | Notes |
| 59 | Patent Smith Printing Press | مطبعة يد | lit. “hand printing press” |
| 69 | Cast-Iron Case Stands | صندوق / صناديق | an English translation given, “bases” |
| 82 | News Chase | حديد | |
| 85 | Spring Bodkin | ملقط | label for the tweezer end of a double-sided tool |
| 85 | Spring Bodkin | مخرز | label for the awl end of a double-sided tool |
| 85 | Single Brass Galley | محطّ | |
| 85 | Proof Brush | برش | transliteration of the English “brush” |
| 85 | Iron Shooting Stick | ازميل | |
| 85 | Bodkin | مخرز | |
| 85 | Planer | سهلة | |
| 85 | Lead Cutter | مقطة رصاص | |
| 85 | Composing Stick | مصفّ | |
| 85 | Screw Wrench | رنش | transliteration of the English “wrench” |
| 85 | Iron Bound Mallet | شاكوش او دقماق | two words for hammer or mallet |
| 85 | Job Roller [i.e. ink roller] | محبرة | more commonly used for inkwell |
| 86 | Composition Kettle | سطل / دست | “pail” / “kettle” |
| 86 | Ink Muller and Stone | بلاطة الحبر | lit. “ink tile” |
| 86 | Ink Brayer [i.e. mixer or grinder] | مدلكة | the same term also glosses the attached stone of the Ink Muller and Stone, above |
| 90 | Hydraulic Press | مكبى ماء | |
| 91 | Double Vertical Steam Pump | طلمبة | |
| 93 | Double-Geared Iron Standing Press | مكبى برغى | an English translation given below each word, “screw press” |
| 104 | Power Paper Cutting Machine | مقطع ورق | |
| 111 | Shears and Iron Table for Mill-Board | مقطة مقويّ او مقطة كرتون | “مقويّ” is written above with English translation, “mill, paste or cardboard” |
We can learn a great deal from what the Arab annotator translated and nearly as much by what they did not. While the Spanish annotations begin from the table of contents, the Arabic translations begin on page 59 with the Smith handpress. This was not the first handpress listed and pictured, but it is the first that depicts the full bed and tympan. Even though the annotation is simply “hand printing press,” it appears that the annotator selected the most diagrammatic image available that illustrates all the parts of the press. Considering that the translation is not a literal translation of the name of this Patent Smith Printing Press, and that the annotator does not translate the description below the image, it seems likely that the intention was to repurpose the catalogue as an illustrated glossary for basic printing equipment. This is the pattern throughout the volume. From this point on the Arab annotator, when they chose to provide a term, only gave a translation with the first example of a piece of equipment.
It is notable that the Spanish annotator worked in a similar way, providing the basic term paired with one illustration when the catalogue includes multiple products of a kind, such as presses or paper cutters. The Spanish annotator also provides many more terms, including specialized compositional furniture and binding equipment that the Arab annotator does not translate. This suggests that the Arab annotator had a more restricted set of equipment to translate, but no less specific. For example, on a page illustrating three pre-fabricated type forms, the Spanish annotator gives a translation next to the “Book or Shifting Bar Chase” while the Arab annotator gives a translation next to the “News Chase.” Neither of these appear first on the page, indicating that the annotators were labelling the chase most familiar to their working context, even though they both give generic terms. The Arab annotator’s choice of the “News Chase” as their generalized illustration has some significance because most Arab printing in New York at the turn of the 20th century was for newspapers.
There are further clues that the Arab annotator probably had a printing office for newspapers in mind as we examine what they did not translate. They do not gloss a single binding tool, where the Spanish annotator has translated almost all of them. They also do not give translations next to the furniture for creating curved lines of type, which were useful for various types of job printing but unnecessary for setting straight lines in columns of type. Again, the Spanish annotator did include translations on these pages.
Even though this Arab annotator seems to have had a relatively focused printing office in mind, it would be a mistake to generalize that Arab printers were simpler or retrograde operations. The history of Arab printing, and printing in the Islamicate world in general, has only recently begun to shed the legacy of Orientalist narratives about Arab and Islamic culture as anti-modern and resistant to technology. A generation of scholarship has been reframing Arab and Islamicate print cultures in direct opposition to these Eurocentric narratives of printing.[3] Even when considering the history of printing in New York, we need to guard against stigmatizing comparisons and generalizations when we discuss Arab printing.
In fact, Arabic newspaper printing was a sophisticated and innovative incubator for mechanical composition of Arabic letters. The editor of the Lebanese newspaper al-Hoda, Salloum Mokarzel (1881-1952), adapted a mechanical composition machine for setting Arabic characters. The Brooklyn-based manufacturer Mergenthaler Linotype provided the machine for Mokarzel to re-furnish for Arabic characters in al-Hoda’s basement at 55 Washington Street.[4] This address was at the center of the old neighborhood Little Syria, the heart of the Arab community in New York (and the United States at the time). Between 1892 and 1907, there were 21 Arabic daily newspapers in the United States, and 17 of these were based in New York City.[5] Mokarzel likely began to develop the machines to compose Arabic types in 1908, using types of his own design or adaptation. The October 1911 issue of the Linotype Bulletin announced his success, and the earliest specimen of his Arabic Linotype known is in the 1915 Mergenthaler Linotype Specimen Book of Type Styles, which displays the Linotype 22 pt. Arabic.[6]
Mokarzel not only had the technical difficulties of mechanized composition of Arabic letters to contend with, but he also had the technical limitations of the existing Linotype machines that were designed for Latin character sets and composition. Since Linotype machines operated from magazines of 90 characters (really 89 characters plus an en quad for the spaces), Mokarzel had to edit a typical font of Arabic type of nearly 500 sorts down to something that could fit in a single machine. For the Arabic 22 pt., he ended with 181 characters, consolidated into two magazines with 3 additional sorts for setting by hand. Mokarzel’s Arabic Linotypes were the first Arabic fonts for mechanical composition, and they were successful enough for the Mergenthaler Linotype company that they funded a trip for Salloum to visit Lebanon in appreciation for his collaboration with them.[7]
When we turn back to the Arabic glosses for printing equipment in the 1867 Hoe & Co. catalogue, we see that they in fact testify to the range of equipment being used by Arab printers. Looking again at the Patent Smith Printing Press, the Arabic translation is specifically for a “hand printing press.” This exactness indicates that the annotator worked at a time and place when other types of presses including rotary, steam, or other mechanical presses – perhaps Linotype machines, too – are commonplace or familiar to the Arab printers expected to read these notes. The Arab annotator, then, was likely working in the same era as Salloum Mokarzel, but in the context of contemporary hand-printing.
This scratches the surface on just one layer of printing history embedded within the catalogue. A researcher with familiarity in Arabic dialects may be able to trace where this Arab annotator came from (or perhaps earlier generations of their family, given the English transliterations for “brush” and “wrench”). Deep research might also be possible with the Spanish annotations, or a case study that explores the life of this catalogue as a whole and how it may have moved between printers of different languages.
[1] “Robert Hoe, 3d, Dies in London,” New York Times (New York, NY), September 23, 1909, accessed April 20, 2024, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1909/09/23/101898574.html?pageNumber=11.
[2] In the description for the iron Patent Smith Printing Press, there is reference to special shipping for large presses “destined for Mexico, South America, or other mountainous regions where there are no carriage roads,” see page 59.
[3] Hallie Nell Swanson recently gave a talk, “Moving Stories: The Indo-Persian Romance” on Persian printing at Fort William College in Calcutta, India, at the Bibliographical Society of America’s annual meeting, January 26, 2024; her article in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America forthcoming, 2024. For more on printing and typography in the Islamicate world, see: Titus Nemeth (ed.), Arabic Typography: History and Practice (Salenstein: Niggli, 2023); Erol A.F. Baykal, The Ottoman Press (1908-1923) (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Kathryn A. Schwartz, “Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?” Book History 20.1 (2017): 1–39; Hala Auji, Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Leiden: Brill, 2016); and Geoffrey Roper (ed.), Historical Aspects of Printing and Publishing in the Middle East, Papers from the Symposium at the University of Leipzig, September 2008 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
[4] Titus Nemeth. “Arabic hot metal: the origins of the mechanisation of Arabic typography,” Philological Encounters 3.4 (2018): 4, accessed February 13, 2024, https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/87152.
[5] Bruce Burnside and Sam Dolbee, “Ottoman New York: Episode 320,” Ottoman History Podcast, June 24, 2017, https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/06/ottoman-new-york.html. The New York Arab community from Greater Syria published 50 Arabic periodicals between 1890 and 1940; see, Carmen Nigro, “Remembering Manhattan’s Little Syria,” Blog, New York Public Library, November 19, 2015, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/11/19/manhattans-little-syria.
[6] Nemeth 4, 8-9, 13.
[7] Ibid.
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