the book collector
strain to turn the rollers and draw the bed or plank of the press between the pair of rollers. As he dreams, Hanckwitz, with Smutty Dick and Black Tom, is visited by an astrologer, Albumazar (rhyming with ‘star-gazer’) who begins to tell them of his art. They profess their ignorance:
We Printers know no Globe or Sphere, Our Judgement lays in good strong Beer,
They know nothing, they say, of the mathematical sciences of cartography and cosmology, let alone astrology. Albumazar is un-convinced, seeing in the appearance of the ink-smeared printers and their sinister machines the evidence of their diabolical pursuits: Altho’ it seems by common Fame,
You’re cloak’d up by a specious Name, Call’d Printers of the Rolling Press, ’Tis plain you the Black Art profess.
Enraged by this accusation, the printers set upon Albumazar; there is a clap of thunder, the devil carries him away and Hanckwitz wakes up. Hearing the clock strike five, he hastens to put on his shabby work clothes and go back to labour at his rolling press. The significance of the Essay is that it gives us a rare insight into how engraving was regarded in Britain at the time. It shows the persistence of the association of printing with Satanism into the eighteenth century and the extension of this association to copperplate printing. We are reminded of the long hours of eighteenth-century printers and the ‘Vision’ gives us an unprece- dented glimpse of the copper plate printers’ workshop. In comparison with platen presses for letterpress printing we know very little about the construction and operation of early rolling presses. Historical presses survive in relatively small num- bers: something of a puzzle. The latest census of surviving wooden typographic presses or common presses lists seventeen presses in the UK alone; the census of wooden rolling presses lists eighteen worldwide, including only one in the UK. Admittedly the latter, published in 1996, needs updating: I know of another six presses, but none in the UK. The ratio of seventeen common presses to one
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