An Unhinged History of American Publishing, Episode 6--HarperCollins, or: Is This Burning an Eternal Flame?

Cognitive dissonance is the American way.

Nearly two hundred years ago, on Cliff Street in Lower Manhattan, all day long, in the windowless basement of a brick building, a draft horse turned in circles.

He belonged to Harper & Brothers, an 11-year-old company that was already one of the country’s most prolific book publishers. White and fluffy-hoofed, he walked around and around, yoked to a vertical shaft that rose up, up, up through the ceiling and onto the shop floor, where, by some proto-steampunk magic, the Harpers’ Treadwell Power Press whirled away, printing off book after book after book. The Harpers’ specialty was all things “instructive, interesting, and moral.” They were super, duper Methodist. The horse circled away.

At the time, Treadwells represented the cutting edge of printing technology. When James and John Harper started their business in 1817, most books were still printed using onerous Gutenberg-era movable type. Stereotyping—the process of casting type into a metal plate that could be stored and used for future printings as needed—wasn’t perfected for commercial use for a few years later, around the time James and John’s younger brothers Wesley and Fletcher bought into their partnership.

The four Harper brothers adopted stereotype technology before pretty much any of their competition. It made their output fast and flexible. In a time before international copyright, when American publishers made much of their money by reprinting British titles, this proved an enormous advantage. The Harpers prospered.

This was a fast-moving era in the history of the book, however; a mere five years after the Harpers bought their Treadwell, it was already obsolete. In 1833, they replaced it with an Adams Power Press: powered by steam engine, capable of finishing 1000 impressions an hour.

There was no longer any need for the horse in their basement. Fear not, however: they were nice to the horse, sending it to their dad’s farm on Long Island.

Wouldn’t you know: the horse’s retirement pasture was near enough to a factory that you could hear its whistle echoing across the fields. Every day, when he heard the dawn whistle, he’d go outside, walk over to a solitary tree, and pace around it in circles all day long, still powering a ghost press. He wouldn’t stop until the evening whistle blew some twelve hours later.

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You are no doubt familiar with the concept of eternal return—the idea that the past forever repeats itself from age to age, changing only in its superficial particulars. Nietzsche was a big proponent.

Whenever I think of eternal return now, I think of the Harper brothers’ horse, turning and turning around that tree.

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A stereotype printing machine makes a distinctive noise as it turns: click, click, click. The French word for “click” is cliché, which is—fun fact—where that word comes from. Click, click, click: the same old language; the same old noise.

All the the words we have for a certain kind of problem—a certain laziness borne of capitalistic efficiency—come from the metaphorical cachet of 19th century publishing, a world led in the United States by the Harper brothers.

Stereotype. Typecast. Cliché.