Why to Mind Your "p"s and "q"s, While Upside Down and Backwards

From the Tubac Presidio
State Historic Park booklet
on Letterpress Printing

That's the first printing press in Arizona. And that is Jim, coaxing it to do what it has done since 1859, doing what he has done more recently in more modern ways.

The Washington Hand Press was built by the Cincinnati Type Foundry Company, and it came to Tubac--about an hour's drive south of Tucson--first by barge down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, by ship to Indianola, Texas, then by wagon train through San Antonio and Ft. Bliss, to Tubac, where it printed the first newspaper in Arizona: The Weekly Arizonan.

The press made its way to Tucson, to grander duties, eventually to the Arizona Historical Society, and is now on loan, back to Tubac, again, where Jim and Elizabeth Pagels--in period clothing--tell its story, and print occasional items.

1859: Brahms First Piano Concerto was composed in 1859, and the French passed a law specifying that the A above Middle C should be set to a frequency of 435 Hz. Ground was broken for the Suez Canal, the Comstock silver load in Nevada was discovered, the first dog show was held in England, Joshua Abraham Norton, in San Francisco, proclaimed himself, Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton I, Emperor of the United States of America, John Brown led a raid on the federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, Charles Darwin published, "On the Origin of Species", Dickins, "A Tale of Two Cities" was published in periodical form in England, and in Tubac, the well-traveled Washington Hand Press published, "The Weekly Arizonan".

The Civil War happened soon, the press went on to other tasks, but it is operating still, just as it originally did, transforming laboriously set, individual characters, inked by a hand roller, onto sheets of paper.

Jim and Elizabeth will show you how it is done, now and then. It is a labor of love.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

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