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  • From the Periodical Archives: "A Ramble Through the Mechanical Department of the 'Lady's Book'"
From the Periodical Archives: "A Ramble Through the Mechanical Department of the 'Lady's Book'" by C. T. Hinckley. Godey's Lady's Book 45 (October 1852): 306-14.

The following essay was the fifth in a series of essays on "Everyday Actualities," all written and illustrated for Godey's Lady's Book by C. T. Hinckley. Cornelius T. Hinckley, who was born in Massachusetts around 1820, worked as a wood engraver in Philadelphia from 1845 to 1857.1 He evidently had some ambitions as a writer, as well, however, and his series of "Everyday Actualities" for Godey's was a sort of nineteenth-century version of The Way Things Work. Each of the essays in Hinckley's series (which ran to twenty installments over two years) provided a detailed and readable behind-the-scenes look at the manufacturing process of products that would be familiar to the readers of Godey's. The first four essays in the series (June to September, 1852), for example, all treated aspects of the manufacture of fabrics—from the bleaching of various kinds of fabrics, to the printing and calendering of calicos (Hinckley returned to this subject in his ninth installment, as well, on the dyeing of fabrics). With this, the fifth installment, Hinckley turned to magazine and book production, narrating a tour of the various departments of the Philadelphia firm that printed Godey's, T. K. & P. G. Collins. The following month, Hinckley described the operations of the Philadelphia bookbindery, Lippincott, Grambo, & Co.; and in his seventeenth installment (March 1854), he treated the related topic of paper manufacture. Hinckley tended to favor local Philadelphia manufacturers, devoting installments to a local marble works and a local manufacturer of gas fixtures as well as the Philadelphia printer and bookbindery; but he also devoted two installments to an Albany, New York manufacturer of piano-fortes, for example. Other installments described the manufacture of brushes, enamel and enameling, the production of artificial flowers, and the history and mechanics of artesian wells and urban waterworks. Toward the end of the series, "Everyday Actualities" began to lose its distinctiveness, describing household [End Page 103] crafts and domestic skills, and almost entirely without illustrations: the installment for May of 1854 (unsigned by Hinckley, so perhaps by another Godey's contributor) was on "Painting on Velvet," and that for June of 1854 was on "Preservation of Food."

Fortunately for readers of American Periodicals, the installments on print culture are among the very finest of the series—carefully and amply illustrated, with clear and precise descriptions of the production process. The modernization of print technology in the nineteenth century was essential to the rapid and inexpensive production of large print runs of magazines such as Godey's, and the tour of the Collins brothers' printing establishment is particularly interesting for the snapshot it provides of a major printing establishment at a moment of very rapid transformation of that technology. Established by Louis A. Godey in 1830 (with Sarah J. Hale as its literary editor after 1837), Godey's Lady's Book quickly became one of the largest circulating magazines in the country, and the Collins brothers became Godey's printers in 1840. In July of 1849, Godey claimed a circulation of 40,000; by the end of 1850, he boasted that "We have published 70,000 of the November and December numbers. The next year we presume our edition will be 100,000."2 How was the magazine produced in such numbers? Looking back at the mid-nineteenth century from the perspective of the 1930s, Ruth Finley emphasized the primitive, artisanal mode of Godey's production in the 1850s, noting that the type was set by hand, from hand-written copy-texts; that it was printed on flat-bed presses, one sheet at a time; that the magazine pages were folded by hand, sewn and bound by hand, and wrapped, addressed, and mailed by hand.3 Moreover, Godey's' famous fashion plates were also painted by hand, in water colors, and in February of 1851, Godey boasted that the magazine employed "one hundred and fifty...

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