Connections: The Printer’s Devil

This old house, pardon me, I mean office building, is full of surprises; you never know what will be unearthed in the archives, or a filing cabinet, or an old desk. What we need here is a resident historian.

Over the years we have stumbled upon all manner of fascinating artifacts — from glass-plate negatives from the 1880s to scrapbooks showing rascally teenagers frolicking on the beach before World War I — tucked away for safekeeping in unlikely places. I can’t remember what we were searching for recently when we came across the original bill of sale of this newspaper from George H. Burling, who was its editor and publisher from 1885 to 1890, to Edward S. Boughton, whose family owned the paper until Arnold and Jeannette Rattray bought it in 1935. The date was June 18, 1890. The price was $100.

The bill of sale is short, with the typed text taking up only half a sheet of ordinary stationery. Signed “Geo H Burling” (without periods) it also carries his seal — an upside down, deep red ziggurat, which must have been pasted down. The document is in remarkably good shape.

One would have to be a student of printing presses to be familiar with the devices that were sold along with “all subscription lists” and “good will,” although today everyone who uses a computer is familiar with the word “font” as well as “type.”

Quoting the bill of sale, it included “150 pounds brevier type, 50 pounds minion type, 10 fonts metal job type, 1 font wood type, 3 double case racks, 12 cases, 1 Washington hand press, 1 office desk, and all other office furniture now in the tenement now occupied. . . .”

Even though we have tons of ancient and quite beautiful type stored away — you can’t throw it away, can you, though I have the feeling that the Etsy.com “maker” generation would love to get its hands on it — I never before gave any thought to the type’s having to be set by hand, or to what toil was involved in working a hand press, although I’ve now scouted out explanatory images on the web.

In the supplement we put out for our 100th anniversary, The Star’s original staff was reported to be the editor and a 15-year-old apprentice or printer’s devil, Norman W. Barns, who was paid 25 cents a week. Lucky Norman! He turned the crank that powered the press and “still remembered 50 years later how his arms would ache.” Five hundred copies were printed.    

Walter Burling, George’s father, had started nine Long Island papers before The Star, including The Sea-Side Times, now The Southampton Press, in 1881. He established his son George as The Star’s editor and publisher. It also was reported that George Burling could compose what he wrote directly in type, skipping the step of writing it down and making the process sound as if it was even more direct than computers make possible today.

Quoting again from our anniversary issue:

“George Burling preferred to live in Southampton, a more convivial place for a young man. He commuted to his workplace” — it was an old carriage barn on Main Street, East Hampton — “by catching the train to its terminus in Bridgehampton and covering the last few miles in a bumpy and slow ride on a stagecoach. He nursed the paper through its first five years but in 1890 it was producing a profit of $15 a week, slim even in those days.”

Walter Burling thought a “married man should take the paper and settle down with his family as a resident of the place. . . .” Well, The Star has been edited by a “resident of the place” and a family man or woman ever since. Today, David Rattray, the editor, runs the show, and it won’t be too long before the Rattray family will have been at the helm for 100 years.