Musings – on the editor's mind

Before Tom Hanks rode through post-Civil War Texas on his rescue mission bringing the 10-years old Johanna to her grandparents south of San Antonio in the film “News of the World,” there was Paulette Jiles’ 2016 novel. Her protagonist, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, was older than the century, having been born in 1798. He had first seen war in 1812 and lived through it again in 1846 in Mexico.

Kidd was old, 72, and thoughtful and wise, not merely because he had experienced war three times, but because he was a printer in an era when every letter was molded out of hot lead and each word and line was set in a stick and rolled with wet ink before paper was pressed upon it. Finished, the words were fixed in time, each sheet off the press armor against whispering rumors.

Jiles has Kidd walk into a small town printer’s office, where he encounters this sign:

This is a printing office

Crossroads of Civilizations

Refuge of all the arts against the ravages of time

ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH

AGAINST WHISPERING RUMORS

INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE

From this place words may fly abroad

NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND

NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER’S HAND

BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF

Friend you are standing on sacred ground

THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE

Maybe Jiles found these words in her research. Maybe she made them up. But they are true in her novel and fiction often offers the possibility of larger truths.

A printer’s office was sacred ground throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Printers and their staffs were then some of the community’s best read and knowledgeable members. Printers were the allies of journalists. Indeed, they were often publisher and editor, as Benjamin Franklin was in the Crown colony of Pennsylvania.

Printers and publishers were often considered troublemakers. More than one was run out of town on a rail, or tarred and feathered, or had his office torched or lost his life.

Some printers and publishers take their words seriously, not because they are smarter than the average citizen but because they appreciate the fact that they stand on sacred ground. Words meant facts. Creating words did not put someone closer to heaven but some printers and publishers understood that the truth would set them, and everyone willing to grapple with and grasp the truth, free.

Creating words did not mean making things up but setting letters in type, molding words from hot lead, meant verifying truth. Ideally.

Then, as now, there were scalawags, scoundrels who took lead and ink and paper and made things up, out of whole cloth, which is what paper used to be made of, before technology advanced to make paper out of trees – which made words cheaper and printed words vastly more accessible to the masses.

Alas, in truth and throughout history, there have always been printers of fact, appreciating that they were assembling truth. There have always been those, who realizing they could fool the masses, readily did so. History is littered with the stories of false prophets and false printers.

What is a reader to do? Discern. How? The words coming from your local printer or publisher, is he one of those romantics who strives to stand on sacred ground?

The words created here have been fixed in time. Evidence abounds.