Printers’ Letters: Epistolary and Compositional Exchanges

• In Event: Epistolary Politics

Abstract

In the classical anarchist movement (roughly from the Paris Commune to the Spanish revolution), letterpress printers were central to the movement. Local anarchist organizations were organized around their periodicals, and printers were essential to those publications. Anarchist printers were more than the technicians of publishing; they were central to their groups’ organizing and to the global network of publication and correspondence that solidified the international movement.

This paper investigates the relation between the letters that printers wrote to each other and the letters with which printers wrote. The first is an epistolary activity - an exchange of written correspondence, often combining reflections and queries into the printing process with exchanges and exhortations about the anarchist movement. The second could be thought of as compositional - sorting the letters in their cases, setting the type (upside down and backwards) on the composing stick, filling the galley, locking the chase, pressing the ink on the paper, binding the pages. In both epistolarity and composition, the thing and the meaning are entangled: letters, presses and publications are familiar objects to be handled, shared, and saved; they also contain, as Lisa Gitelman remarks in Paper Knowledge, “patterns of expression and reception discernable amid a jumble of discourse” (p. 3).

This paper focuses on epistolary and compositional relations between two late-19th century anarchist printers: Georgia Replogle, who wrote and printed the San Francisco-based journal Egoism; and Benjamin Tucker, editor and sometimes printer of the better-known Boston journal Liberty. In a series of letters, Tucker rants about the alleged inferiority of women printers to Replogle, who calmly publishes Tucker’s letters in the perfectly-composed pages of Egoism. While it is not impossible that the entire performance was tongue-in-cheek, it is more likely that Tucker was expressing a common resistance among male printers to their female counterparts. By studying the discursive context of these exchanges, which included several letters between Replogle and Tucker, letters from other readers, and the journals themselves, in which the letters were published, I aim to theorize the relation between epistolarity and composition in anarchism.

Author

• Kathy E. Ferguson, University of Hawaii, Manoa