Introducing William H. Tinson, Stereotyper
Robert Craighead's foreman c1845-1853; Albert W. Whelpley's boss and exemplary "old-time printer" in NYC
Peering into the deep NYPL Digital Collections at letters from William Allen Butler to each of the Duyckinck brothers in August 1850, I ran into a name I never heard of before. For a good while, whole summer days, I could hardly read or even transcribe it right. Somehow I got it, eventually. What had looked to me like “Zensin” or “Jinsen” or maybe “Jenson” turned out to be Tinson. Evidently this Tinson fellow had been charged with overseeing production of the New York Literary World in the absence of editors Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck.
Everyone else just then was going or gone on vacation. Butler’s good friend George was already relaxing in the Hamptons. George’s older brother Evert was about to leave town with his sidekick Cornelius Mathews for Berkshire County, Massachusetts. In Berkshire these hot-and-tired pressmen would cool down and famously recreate with Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other luminaries of American literature.1 Soon Butler and his wife the former Mary Russell Marshall would be rolling their way to Boston and the Atlantic Ocean, with stopovers in Great Barrington (planned) and Pittsfield (longer than planned). Some other time, hopefully, I can say more about the Butler couple’s overeager reception in Pittsfield and some unfortunate consequences of Hershel Parker’s fabulous rendering thereof. Here and now I want to focus on Mr. Tinson, capably serving as de facto editor of the Literary World while the head honchos were away.
Butler called him “Redacteur Tinson” in a letter to George L. Duyckinck dated August 6, 1850:
The Lit World appears to thrive very well under the management of Redacteur Tinson who is apparently very officious and attentive. I have done up considerable copy — e.g. The Berber with which I have peppered & salted a couple of pages in the way of excerpta.
Miss Beecher's Book which I told your Brother, you at least would wish to see cut up in as much as she couples the enormities which she exposes at Yale College with the moral tragedies of the New York Episcopate.
Goethe's autobiography with an exposure of the way Mr. Oxenford's horns gored Mr. Parke Godwin's edition &c. &c.2
Casually as can be, William Allen Butler thus acknowledged his authorship of three uncredited book reviews for the Literary World of August 17, 1850, which happens to be the issue that led with Part I of Melville's pseudonymous review essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Writing on the 6th, Butler never mentions the front-page article (ostensibly contributed “by a Virginian spending July in Vermont”) most likely because it had not been written yet, let alone copied for the printer by the author’s wife, and would not be close to finished for three more days.3
Besides reviewing William Starbuck Mayo's new novel The Berber, transatlantic editions of Goethe's autobiography, and Caroline E. Beecher's crusade on behalf of her wronged friend Delia Bacon in Truth Stranger than Fiction, Butler also helped compile the "Facts & Opinions" section of the same number. On the road in Great Barrington, Butler documented the substance of these recent contributions and reported favorably on Tinson’s performance in a letter to Evert A. Duyckinck dated August 8, 1850:
My Dear Sir,
I have followed pretty fast on your heels as you will see by my Date. I found on Sunday that all the time which I could take for summer traveling must be taken during the next week, and as my wife was anxious to get away, we immoderately made our arrangements for leaving. I gave Tinson matter enough for next week’s paper, and made up as many "facts & opinions" as were come-at-able. Tinson is much more impressed with a sense of editorial importance & responsibility than perhaps either of the Editors in fact….”4
With no idea of saving room for a major literary landmark by Melville, Butler assured Evert Duyckinck that he had supplied Tinson with “matter enough for next week’s paper.” Tinson, placed in the role of acting Editor, struck Butler as “very officious and attentive” (as Butler told George) if perhaps a bit too “impressed with a sense of editorial importance and responsibility” (as Butler tells Evert).
Unheard of in Melville scholarship before now, the man Butler dubbed “Redacteur Tinson” can be positively identified as William Henry Tinson (1813-1864). At the time, W. H. Tinson managed the busy printing office of Robert Craighead, located on the third stories of adjacent buildings at 112 and 114 Fulton street. Well known around town as Craighead’s “indefatigable foreman,” Tinson put the Literary World in type.5 In due course, Tinson would oversee the setting and stereotyping of Moby-Dick, too.
More than a year after managing an incredibly speedy recovery from the fire that destroyed Robert Craighead’s former office buildings at Fulton and Dutch, Tinson left Craighead to start his own business as a printer and stereotyper at 24 Beekman street.6 Genuine respect for Tinson and his work ethic is evidenced by the notice of his departure that appeared in the New York Tribune on May 2, 1853. As shown below, the report of a lively workplace party for the outgoing foreman was reprinted with extra good wishes in the Literary World on May 7, 1853:
—The Tribune paragraphs a city incident, connected with the craftiest (that is, in the old sense, the knowingest) of crafts.
“A pleasant little affair came off at Mr. Craighead’s Printing Office on Friday evening last. The employés in that establishment having learned that Mr. W. H. Tinson, their foreman of some eight or nine years’ standing, was about commencing business on his own account, took that occasion to present him with a massive piece of plate, with suitable inscriptions, as a token of their appreciation of the uniform and long continued integrity with which he had discharged the duties of his position.”
The matter for the Literary World has passed through the hands of Foreman Tinson, and we feel under many obligations for the care and diligence with which he has conducted his “department” of this journal. He has taken all the degrees in the under “form,” and we now heartily wish him success in his mastership of a school of his own. — Literary World, Volume 12 (May 7, 1853) page 383.
Corroborating testimony of Tinson’s “excellent” professional reputation in the 1850’s is available in a published 1898 talk by Albert Walker Whelpley (1831-1900) commemorating “The Old-Time Printer.”7 Looking for work in New York City as a printer’s apprentice, Whelpley got his first big break when a friend gave him
“a letter of introduction to W. H. Tinson, an excellent printer, at that time the best-known foreman in New York, and manager of the widely known printing office of Robert Craighead, on the corner of Fulton and Dutch streets. He was of a just nature, but a violent temper. Mr. Tinson honored the introduction, and took the boy, stipulating that he should serve his time at two-thirds men's wages, either working by piece or by the week. And it seemed a great piece of good fortune to drop so easily into such a situation.”
Whelpley followed his reminiscence of Tinson with a rich tribute to the character, industry, and “wonderful intelligence” of all the old-school printers he knew and worked with at Robert Craighead’s printing office:
This office literally swarmed with compositors of wonderful intelligence. It was an office in which slack times were seldom known. It had the cream of literature, as it had the pick of workmen. Here was a representative body of old-time printers that could discuss composition, rhetoric, punctuation; who were conscientious in spacing and leading; who would criticise bad work, and were intolerant of inferior workmen; who gave close attention to all the technicalities that go so far to improve the looks of the printed page. Men who would quarrel with the proofreader when they thought him wrong, and oftentimes carry their point. They were a representative set of old-time printers—middle-aged men—and younger dare-devils who could dance all night and work all day. It is doubtful if ever such another office existed, where there was so much wisdom and so much mirth combined, and so much good and conscientious work accomplished, with the pay so sure.
All the grand English reviews, Blackwood's Magazine, the Literary World, the Medico-Chirurgical Quarterly, and scores of books from those reputable publishers, Wiley & Putnam, Scribner, Wood, Dodd, Carter Brothers, and others, were constantly in process of composing, stereotyping and printing.”
One of young Whelpley’s colleagues at Craighead’s place was Theodore L. De Vinne, the future legend who left around 1848 to work for another Manhattan printer, Francis Hart. At some unspecified time thereafter (early in 1851?) Whelpley also ended his employment with Robert Craighead. In his speech on The Old-Time Printer, Whelpley recalls with regret his decision to leave Craighead during a workmen’s strike. If Whelpley left many months before Craighead’s establishment on Fulton street was destroyed by fire in January 1852, and long before the journeymen “Book-Printers’ Strike” reported in the New York Weekly Journal of Commerce on May 5, 1853, then he could not have helped in the manufacturing of Melville’s great new Whale-book. De Vinne, for a spell Whelpley’s co-worker, was long gone when Melville hired Craighead in May 1851 to set and make stereotype plates of the work later to be named Moby-Dick. However, thirty-seven years later Melville would choose the renowned De Vinne Press to make 25 beautiful copies of his poetry and prose collection, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888).
And Whelpley for his part was far from being done with Tinson, or with Melville. As Whelpley himself relates, his “career in New York closed with working for W. H. Tinson, on Beekman street” where “he made friends with the versatile publisher, George P. Putnam.” The timing of Albert W. Whelpley’s employment with W. H. Tinson, stereotyper at Tinson’s new establishment “on Beekman street,” along with the specific mention of George P. Putnam, suggests that Whelpley might have been involved in setting type for Putnam’s magazine, where Melville’s historical romance “Israel Potter” appeared in nine installments from July 1854 to March 1855.
Cracking open my treasured copy of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine Volume 4 (July to December 1854) I can verify the credit to W. H. Tinson on the verso of the title page, below the copyright statement:
W. H. TINSON,
PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER,
24 Beekman Street.
Curiously and perhaps not accidentally, the name of Albert W. Whelpley already belongs to the known provenance of a note Melville wrote to George Palmer Putnam on November 9, 1854, when submitting the conclusion of “Israel Potter” in manuscript. After informing Putnam, “Herewith you have the affair to the Finis” Melville added:
“Having forgotten the number of the last chapter sent you, I leave the numbering of the following ones to the printer.”
The physical document belongs to the grand Albert W. Whelpley Autograph Collection of the Cincinnati Historical Society Library, as helpfully indicated in the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville’s Correspondence.8 Elsewhere Whelpley is listed with other nineteenth-century autograph collectors who acquired twenty of the Melville letters printed therein. However, no reference appears anywhere in the 1993 volume concerning Whelpley’s job as a twenty-something compositor in the Beekman street office of W.H. Tinson.
With particular reference to the cover letter Melville wrote Putnam on November 9, 1854, Whelpley obviously had relevant personal experience of working for “Old-Time Printers” in New York City. More than that, Whelpley by his own published account worked for W. H. Tinson, the very printer and stereotyper employed by Putnam to set and stereotype the magazine version of Israel Potter. Indirectly via Tinson, conceivably, young Whelpley himself might have received the note to Putnam in which Melville decided to “leave the numbering” of the final chapters in his popular Fourth of July story “to the printer.” Holman and Gray, a different company of printers and stereotypers, completed Volume 5 in 1855 for Dix & Edwards, the new conductors of Putnam’s magazine. Nonetheless, as shown on paper covers of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine for March 1855, the issue featuring the concluding chapters of “Israel Potter” was definitely produced by Albert W. Whelpley’s employer, W. H. Tinson.
TA DA.
Whenever and however Whelpley acquired it, Melville’s letter of 9 November 1854 to George P. Putnam held considerable personal significance as a memento of his youthful occupation in New York City, “working for W. H. Tinson, on Beekman Street.”
The boy's career in New York closed with working for W. H. Tinson, on Beekman street. And this office was also a famed one. Here he made friends with the versatile publisher, George P. Putnam, and met and conversed with Bayard Taylor, Frederick Cozzens, author of the "Sparrowgrass Papers," John Brougham, Edward Stephens, author of "Jonathan Slick in New York," Tuckerman, the essayist, our Western poet, W. W. Fosdick, and Frederick Saunders, author of "Salad for the Solitary;" in this office was printed John Mitchel's Citizen, and here came daily those Irish patriots, John Mitchel, John Savage, Thomas Francis Meagher, and scores of others. These were the days when the author came to the printing office with his proofs, and often explained his corrections and the wherefores to the compositor.9
W. H. Tinson’s office, like that of Whelpley’s previous employer Robert Craighead, “was also a famed one.” Whelpley apparently remained there until 1856, at least. In his published encomium of the “Old-Time Printer,” Whelpley gives 1857 as the first year of his new job setting type in Cincinnati.
Immediately after his mention of “the versatile publisher, George P. Putnam” as a personal friend, Whelpley names Bayard Taylor and “Frederic Cozzens, author of the ‘Sparrowgrass Papers’” among literary celebs he “met and conversed with” at Tinson’s printing office. Sure enough, Taylor’s Lands of the Saracen (G. P. Putnam & Co., 1855) and Cozzens’ Sparrowgrass Papers (Derby & Jackson, 1856) were both produced by “W. H. Tinson, Stereotyper.” Likewise High Life in New York by Jonathan Slick (Bunce & Brother, 1854); W. W. Fosdick’s Ariel, and other poems (Bunce & Brother, 1855); The Bunsby Papers by John Brougham (Derby & Jackson, 1856); and Salad for the Social (De Witt & Davenport, 1856) “by the author of Salad for the Solitary,” Frederick Saunders.
Herman Melville the magazinist, living the dream so to speak on his Arrowhead farm-place in Berkshire, is not named with Taylor, Cozzens, Tuckerman, and other authors (many of them Melville’s friends or literary acquaintances) who routinely “came to the printing office” from 1853 to 1856 with revisions, explaining their “corrections and the wherefores to the compositor.” From Pittsfield, Mass. Melville did most of all that by mail, as evidenced in his extant correspondence with various representatives of Putnam’s and Harper’s. Tinson, as George P. Putnam’s stereotyper of choice in 1854-5, certainly did put the magazine version of Israel Potter in type. If Whelpley never got to meet Melville there in person, he owned and surely cherished one of Melville’s handwritten communications to George P. Putnam. Likely forwarded to Whelpley’s boss on Beekman street, whom Whelpley highly estimated (in spite of Tinson’s “violent temper”) as a fine example of the “Old-Time Printer.”
W. H. Tinson presumably would have encountered Melville years before. Robert Craighead’s redoubtable foreman might well have conferred with Melville in May or June 1851 about the composing and plating of his Whale book, not yet titled “Moby Dick.” As chronicled by Hershel Parker in his Historical Note for the 1988 Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick, Melville “was still working on the book at the time it was being set in type.”10 Who knows, maybe Foreman Tinson was there to greet Melville in person when he showed up at the third-floor offices of Robert Craighead, determined “to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my ‘Whale’ while it is driving through the press.”11
Cornelius Mathews gave an engaging three-part account of his and Evert Duyckinck’s 1850 getaway to western Massachusetts titled “Several Days in Berkshire,” serially published in the Literary World on August 24, August 31, and September 7, 1850; reprinted in Melville in His Own Time, edited by Steven Olsen-Smith (University of Iowa Press, 2015) on pages 41-51.
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "August 6, 1850" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/a77c7c40-63da-013d-ab67-0242ac110005
On the composition and reception of “Hawthorne and His Mosses” see chapter 36 in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 1, 1819-1851 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; paperback 2005) pages 752-781, especially 755-760. For links to online versions and background see the post on Melvilliana, here:
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/06/links-to-hawthorne-and-his-mosses-1850.html
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "August 8, 1850" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8538aa80-2731-0133-18ea-58d385a7bbd0
William H. Tinson was celebrated in print as Robert Craighead’s “indefatigable foreman” for his Herculean labors early in 1852, when Craighead’s place of business on Fulton Street was destroyed by fire. From the front-page advertisement that appeared in the New York Tribune on January 27, 1852 (emphasis mine): “Notwithstanding the loss of our plates by the fire at Craighead’s Printing-Office, by the assistance of our friends controlling the great steam press of Baker, Godwin & Co., the hands of Mr. Craighead, and especially the unparalleled exertions of his indefatigable foreman W. H. Tinson, we have been enabled, in the space of two days, to retrieve our losses and be the first in the field” (offering the New York Herald Law Reporter’s account of the sensational Edwin Forrest Divorce Case).
For more about the devastating fire on Fulton street see my 2023 post on Melvilliana:
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2023/10/robert-craigheads-third-story-rooms-on.html
A. W. Whelpley, “The Old-Time Printer” in American Printer and Bookmaker Volume 26 Number 5 (July 1898) pages 230-234.
Herman Melville, Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth (Northwestern University Press, 1993) pages 272-273 and 804.
https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810109957/correspondence/
Whelpley, “The Old-Time Printer,” page 232. For a briefer glimpse of Whelpley’s New York career, long before he took charge of the Cincinnati Public Library, see Joseph Dana Miller on “Libraries and Librarians” in The Bookman Volume 6 (January 1898) page 415.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Volume 3 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1988) page 663. At page 629, also in connection with the hiring of Robert Craighead, Parker designates Melville’s work in June 1851 as “the intense final phase of intermingled composition and proofreading.”
Quoted from the undated letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (May 1851) as printed by Julian Hawthorne in Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1885) at page 402. About the disputed conjectural date of this letter see the 2023 post “Mid-to-late May maybe” on Melvilliana, here:
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2023/10/mid-to-late-may-maybe.html