Moxon's "Mechanick Excercises" (1683-84)

Nicole Howard begins chapter 4 of The Book: The Life Story of a Technology with a detailed description of daily life in a London printing operation in the year 1640. Her account is taken directly from the second volume of Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Excercises. Check out the digital facsimile available online from the Schoenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania: Mechanick Exercises.

Below is a quick summation of Moxon's importance, excerpted from Jeremy Norman's "History of Information" website:

English hydrographer, printer, punch cutter, globe maker, and instrument maker Joseph Moxon published in London his Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing as part of his survey of the chief trades of his day. This was the first printing manual published in English, and the first comprehensive manual in any language published on printing—a trade that was passed down through apprenticeship, without truly useful printed manuals, since the mid-15th century.

Moxon's Mechanick Exercises was intended to furnish his readers with basic instruction in all the chief trades of his day. Fourteen numbers, devoted to smithying, joining, carpentry and related arts, were issued between 1677 and 1680, before possible disappointment with sales, and the "breaking out of the [Popish] Plot"— which "took off the minds of my few customers from buying. . . ." (Moxon's "Advertisement," Vol. ii)— forced Moxon temporarily to cease production.

¶ Volume 1 was the first book in England to be published in parts, or fascicules. Moxon resumed the series in 1683 with Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, issued in twenty-four parts during 1683 and 1684. The general title page was issued with the first number in 1683, and bears that date in its imprint. The numbers were each two printed sheets (16pp., 4to) with one or more copperplate engravings, at 2d. per sheet and 2d. per plate. "Although 500 copies were printed, very few complete sets have been preserved, the work being, perhaps, the most difficult to obtain in the whole range of typographical literature" (Bigmore & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing II (1880) 54). Bigmore & Wyman describe a second edition of 1693-1701, and a third edition of 1703, a portion of which they say is the "fourth edition." It is not unusual for sets of this very rare work to combine parts from different editions.

Moxon had worked for years as a master printer. He had also cut steel punches for letters, made moulds and matrices, and cast and sold type. In 1676 he published Regulae trium ordinum literarum typographicarum, or the rules of the three orders of print letters... Shewing how they are compounded of geometrick figures, and mostly made by rule and compass. Useful for writing masters, painters, carvers, masons, and others that are lovers of curiosity. (Bigmore & Wyman II, 56).  His type in that work were based on Dutch originals that he knew from experience in Holland.

In the second volume of Mechanick Exercises  Moxon provided detailed technical accounts of the tools of the compositor and pressman, the art of typefounding, and the work of the compositor, corrector, pressman and other members of the printing trades as they had come down to his day. Most of these skills had not changed materially for nearly two hundred years, and would remain unaltered until the mechanization of printing in the nineteenth century. Moxon's manual "put into writing a knowledge that was wholly traditional" with such success that it was copied by virtually every writer of printing manuals and served as a standard text for over two hundred years.