As I await the arrival of replacement parts for my Kelsey Excelsior press, I’ve been reading up on the Kelsey company and its significance for the rise of amateur printing in the United States. The late nineteenth-century advent of small, easy to operate presses such as the Excelsior (1872) and the Novelty Press (1867) transformed printing from a trade that took years of study into an activity that anyone with interest and a disposable income could learn at home. Press designers including William A. Kelsey hoped their diminutive machines would appeal to small business owners eager to save costs by printing their own labels and invoices. But “job” or “toy” presses also found lasting popularity with a younger audience: children, who embraced printing as a way to earn money and to make their voices heard.1
Early small press advertisements encourage children to print greeting cards and other documents in exchange for cash, promising to make “Every boy his own printer!” and “Every Boy a Ben Franklin.”2 Promotional materials from the 1870s reproduce glowing testimonials from customers such as ten-year-old Lester Leland of Boston, who wrote Kelsey to “tell you about the Excelsior Printing Press my mother bought me last spring. I am ten years old and I have earned ten dollars and put it in the Savings Bank.” Shelby Brooks of San Francisco, another Kelsey correspondent, fared even better: “About three months ago I bought one of the Excelsior presses…& now have about sixty dollars that I have made with it. I go to school every day & print in the afternoon & evening.”3
These ads for small presses reinscribe play as useful, framing printing as a pastime that will prepare children for an adult world of work. Yet many child printers found a more creative—and at times, rebellious—use for their small presses in amateur journalism. The 1867 arrival of the Novelty Press fueled an explosion of amateur newspapers, which increased in number from less than 100 to around 1,000 over the course of the ensuing decade.4 Amateur newspapers enabled young printers to form social networks and subcultures, voice opposition to adult authority, and even, in the case of some teen boys in 1880s Arkansas, express their fandom for Emily Dickinson.5
Amateur newspapers are a fascinating piece of early US print culture. But as I began dipping in to their history, I started to wonder whether there were some Jane Mecoms hiding amongst the Ben Franklins. In other words: where were all the girl printers?
Busy printing, it turns out. It is admittedly much, much easier to find historical accounts of boys at the press. The strictures of nineteenth-century gender roles meant that fewer girls received presses as gifts or were encouraged to take up printing as a hobby. Yet nineteenth-century girls did teach themselves to print, and the girl printers whose lives I’ve started to trace were successful both as writers and as businesswomen. Here’s a glimpse into a couple of their stories.
The Lukens sisters and Little Things
In March 1871, fed up with home schooling and the long shadow of winter, the five Lukens sisters of Brinton, PA produced their first issue of Little Things. Carrie, Maggie, Nellie, Emma, and Helen Lukens were inspired to create their newspaper after reading Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women (1869), in which the March sisters publish a journal called “The Pickwick Papers.”6
Like their fictional precursors, the Lukens sisters wrote out the first issues of their newspaper by hand. Finding this scribal work tedious, however, the sisters lobbied their widower father for a printing press and were successful by issue #3 (May 1871).7 The Lukens sitting room, now covered in trays of type, became their print shop; an old copy of Thomas MacKellar’s American Printer (1866), their instructor. Their progress was slow but steady: while the typesetting for the initial four-page printed issue of Little Things took a month, by issue #10 the sisters report a publication timeline of two to three weeks, draft to distribution.8
Access to a printing press enabled the Lukens to increase their circulation numbers as well as to send their newspaper to well-known authors including Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Child, somewhat rudely, returned her copy. But Alcott wrote back, praising the sisters for their efforts and informing them that “I admire your [pluck] and perseverance [and h]eartily believe in [w]omen’s right to any branch of labor.” Two years later she also sent the Lukens an original story, “Patty’s Place,” which the sisters published in the August issue of Little Things, by then renamed the Young Folk’s Journal.9
Alcott’s comments about a “[w]omen’s right to any branch of labor” anticipate criticism that the Lukens and other nineteenth-century girl journalists often faced; namely, the accusation that they did not do their own printing. In December 1871, the sisters published the following notice in Little Things:
There appear to be a great many who do not understand that we print on our own paper. We would say to them that we have a printing press with a full supply of type and all the necessary appurtenances for the business of newspaper publishing.
It was true, the Lukens admitted, that they hired a man to “pull the lever of our press” (to me this suggests they were not printing on a toy press but something bigger and harder for children to operate; this makes sense considering that at 12 by 8 inches, Little Things is on the large side for an amateur paper). But as they emphasized, “all the ballance [sic] of the work we do ourselves, beside doing our share of the work for a good sized family.”10 By the time the sisters ceased production of their paper in May 1874, they had published 39 issues and gained over 1,000 subscribers, all while carrying out their schoolwork and their not insignificant domestic chores.
Libbie Adams and the Youthful Enterprise
A few hundred miles north, another girl printer named Libbie Adams found herself dealing with similar accusations. Adams, whose full name was Laura Elizabeth Adams, founded her Elmira, NY paper The Youthful Enterprise in 1874.11 At ten pages, the Enterprise was longer than most amateur papers of the day and featured an unusually broad range of poems, news stories, and excerpts, as well as selected letters from readers.12
According to Our Free Lance, another amateur paper, such achievement was surely not the work of a girl. “Girls of fourteen,” editor John Hosey writes in a fall 1876 issue of Our Free Lance, “are not supposed to ‘[sic] print, edit and publish an amateur paper as large as the Enterprise. Queer, isn’t it?”13
Adams did not take kindly to the suggestion that someone else published her paper. In her December 1876 “Editor’s Drawer,” Adams includes the following affidavit, witnessed and signed by six prominent Elmira men:
1st. BE IT KNOWN, that L. Libbie Adams, of the City of Elmira, Chemung Country, and State of New York, on being sworn, deposeth, and saith, that she is the editor and proprietor of a ten(10)pp., thirty(30) column publication, entitled “The Youthful Enterprise,” now published at No. 400 High St., Elmira, County and State, aforesaid.
2nd. That all the Composition Work, Revising, &c., of said paper is performed by her, unaided or assisted by any other person or persons.
3d. That from January 1st., 1874 up to May 1st. 1876, the press work also, was performed by herself, on an eighth medium, hand-inking Star press; and since that date, on a quarter medium Job Press (Gordon) by assistants.
4th., That her exact age is fifteen (15) years, nine (9) months and twenty-six (26) days.
[…]
To all of which she now subscribes and makes oath this 20th. day of November, 1876.
Signed, L. LIBBIE ADAMS.
The issue also reprints a subsequent letter from Hosey, who promises to include Adams’s “vindication” in the next installation of Our Free Lance, as well as a salty reply from Adams herself (“We would thank you for your kind opinion, manly brother Hosey, but honor is a plaything which you seem to throw around very carelessly”).14
Oh, Printer Adams: you had much better things to do than to prove yourself to John Hosey! You had submissions to review, articles to write and edit, type to set, and pages to print. What a pain it must have been, gathering up the sworn testimony of all those men, mailing off the packet of proof to Our Free Lance.
Yet as a result of Adams’s public response to Hosey’s accusations, Libbie Adams and the Youthful Enterprise became widely known, attracting the attention of journalists across the pond: the October 1876 issue of The Victoria Magazine (London) mentions “a youthful editor…named Libbie Adams, [who] edits a paper called ‘The Youthful Enterprise.’ The little sheet is said to have a circulation of over three thousand.”15
I don’t know if Adams read the Victoria Magazine. I do know that the magazine’s editor, Emily Faithfull, was an activist responsible for founding the feminist Victoria Press, and a fierce advocate of women in the printing and publishing fields. The work of the girl printer—printing and fighting for the right to print—was also the work of the woman printer; in the years to come, Faithfull and others would be called upon again and again to prove that yes, women did have the mechanical ability and intelligence to compose type and run presses.
Did Adams continue printing as an adult? Did the Lukens sisters? The surviving information is scant. But their publications remain, the printed words still bold and clear; read them, if you dare.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to sort some type.
Yours in ink,
Ms. Printer’s Devil
On the history of small presses, see Elizabeth M. Harris, Personal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: David Godine, 2004); and Harris, The Boy and His Press (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1992).
See Lara Langer Cohen, “Emily Dickinson’s Teenage Fanclub,” Emily Dickinson Journal 23, no. 1 (2014): 34; Harris, Personal Impressions, 9.
Quoted in Harris, Personal Impressions, 21.
See “Amateur Newspapers,” American Antiquarian Society, https://www.americanantiquarian.org/amateurnews.htm; Jessica Isaac, “Graphing the Archives of Nineteenth-Century Amateur Newspapers,” Book History 19 (2016): 317-348. For a fuller sense of amateur journalism’s scale, the American Antiquarian Society currently holds over 3,900 amateur newspaper titles published before 1900 in its collection; many though not all of the publications were printed by children.
Cohen, “Emily Dickinson’s Teenage Fanclub.”
I base my account of Little Things on Daniel Shealy, “The Growth of Little Things: Louisa May Alcott and the Lukens Sisters’ Family Newspaper,” Resources for American Literary Study 30 (2005): 160-77. Carrie, the eldest sister, was seventeen when the Lukens created the paper (Shealy 161); I have been unable to determine the ages of the other sisters.
Shealy, “The Growth of Little Things,” 165.
Shealy, “The Growth of Little Things,” 168.
Quoted in Shealy, “The Growth of Little Things,” 168; Shealy 173.
Quoted in Shealy, “The Growth of Little Things,” 168.
Thanks to the Chemung County Historical Society for tracking down the detail of Adams’s full name.
On Adams and the Youthful Enterprise, see Issac, “Youthful Enterprises: Amateur Newspapers and the Pre-History of Adolescence, 1867-1883,” American Periodicals 22, no. 2 (2012): 158-77.
Hosey letter quoted in the Youthful Enterprise, December 1876, page 1; reprinted in Isaac, “Youth Enterprises,” 168.
“Editor’s Drawer,” the Youthful Enterprise, December 1876, page 1; reprinted in Isaac, “Youth Enterprises,” 168.
“A Youthful Editor,” The Victoria Magazine (Oct. 1876), 570.