Читать книгу Will Bradley, His Chap Book. An account, in the words of the dean of American typographers, of his graphic arts adventures онлайн

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Walter Dorwin Teague

New York May, 1954

Will Bradley, His Chap Book

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Lynn is a shoe town. This is 1875. Most of the work is done by hand. The employees are all natives—Universalists and Unitarians, probably. Many women work at home, binding uppers and tongues of high, lace shoes. You have a little express wagon. You carry finished work back to the factories and return with a supply of unfinished. For each trip you are paid five cents. With your savings you buy a printing press. It is the kind you place on a table and slap with the palm of your hand. In business offices it is used to stamp date lines. Your father is drawing cartoons for a Lynn daily—perhaps the Daily Item. He brings you a box of pi. When you succeed in finding a few letters of the same font you file them to fit the type slot in the press.

Your father is ill, an aftermath of the Civil War. You have moved to the section called Swampscott. This is too far away for you to attend the school to which your class has gone. Your mother goes out every day to do dress-making. A playmate takes you to his school. But most of the time you remain at home with your father. He tells you he hasn’t long to live, says you have been a good boy and that when you grow up you will want to be an artist and there will be no money for your education. He gives you much fine advice which you never forget. Then he sends you out to play. You go to Fisherman’s Beach and watch the fishermen take lobsters out of the boiling pot. They give you the little ones the law forbids selling. You crack them on a rock, and have a feast. Sunday mornings, or occasionally on a Saturday night, you go to the baker’s and get your warm pot of baked beans and buy a loaf of brown-bread—always an event of delicious anticipation. Between meals, when you are hungry, there is often a cold cod-fish cake to be found in the pantry.