A 21st century “zine” using 19th century technology
The Impartial Observer: a quarterly private press journal celebrating contemplative life, creative work, & social action
I see this initiative as an instance and a continuation of the private press movement that flourished in the nineteenth century among artists, writers, reformers, and anyone who could get their hands on a press and type. Digital technologies, of course, have long since superseded letterpress printing in workaday commerce and journalism. But the so-called “typographic tradition” never completely disappeared. (I got my first press at age eight and have played with iron presses and lead type ever since.) Freed of the fetters of trade, letterpress in our time flourishes as a distinct art form.
The Impartial Observer is also a “zine” (pronounced zeen), one of those small-circulation, grassroots magazines produced any-which-way by artists, activists, and others since the mid-20th century. Zines are not newsletters. They are not the mouthpiece of any organization. Instead, they often express non-mainstream views or voices unlikely to be heard otherwise. Darker circumstances elsewhere inspired underground publications in the same spirit: samizdat in the old Soviet Union and East Bloc, and the “mosquito press” in English-occupied Ireland among many other examples.
Zines and private presses have this in common: their creators didn’t need the approval of investors nor seek the imprimatur of the state. (Often, they wouldn’t have got it.) And the best of them advanced their ideas not only by writing, but by getting their hands inky with the production, too. Everyone from Benjamin Franklin, William Butler Yeats and his sisters, Virginia Woolf, Emma Goldman, and many others, all over the political spectrum, lived by the dictum: “no art without craft.”
The Original Newspaper
I took the name Impartial Observer from a short lived, scrappy little newspaper launched exactly 230 years ago a few miles from my home in suburban Washington, DC. It was put out by a young printer, Thomas Wilson, and his wife Alice, from late May 1795 through February 1796. Although there is very little in common between what I am attempting to do now and Wilson’s newspaper, I loved the name and became fascinated with the mysterious story of its short life. I even wrote a comic based on the known history, filled in with my own fictionalized speculations. The original Impartial Observer was a weekly of four quarto pages, later a semi-weekly of eight pages. Of the roughly 65 issues that Wilson produced before he died, copies of only 10 numbers survive — mostly because they were sent out of town to other printers and investors. (Their names were scrawled for the postmaster at the top of page one, so we know exactly who they were.) After Thomas died, Alice tried to keep the paper going by partnering with a somewhat shady entrepreneur, “Dr.” John Crocker, who moved the office closer to the new capitol under construction, jacked up the price, and simplified the name to the Washington Advertiser. Like Wilson before him, Crocker was forever looking for skilled help — and for cotton rags to make the paper he printed on. After three months or so Alice decided this wasn’t working, and she closed up shop and auctioned off the type and presses. Twenty-one copies survive from that second period. I have collected scans of all these known copies — from the Library of Congress, the American Antiquarian Society, Harvard University Library, and one copy from the Wisconsin Historical Society. Together, they present a narrow slice of the history of the early Federal period in mid-Atlantic America. And they give evidence of what we know from other times and places — and do not yet know about our own electronic methods of archiving — that scriptura manet: ‘the written (printed) word remains.’
About the publisher, printer, and editor
Gregory Robison
If you are reading this text — or if you have a copy of the inaugural issue of the new Impartial Observer in your hands — it’s because I already know you in some connection. This is a private press publication for friends. I’m like you: I have many distinct circles of friends (and family from different branches) who mostly don’t know each other. In one sense, this is quite normal. Every person’s portfolio of interests and passions is different. We move through life and around the earth adding and shedding friends as we go. But in a world where powerful economic and political forces seem hell-bent on atomizing us ever more effectively, manufacturing a loneliness that makes us all the more malleable and influenceable, the urgent work for us as human persons is to resist. We ought to find ways to break down the barriers between us, not to reinforce our silos. We need deliberately and intentionally to build stronger circles of confianza. The Impartial Observer is my way to do this among my circles of friends.
For those of you who are game to participate, the method is simple: subscribe and, if you like, send me a “Paragraph” of 100 words — about your inner life; your creative endeavors or experiences; your efforts to promote the common good — and I’ll set it into type, print it, and circulate it among my friends. They may become your friends, too.
(Normal standards of editing apply, of course.)
I became fascinated with the possibilities of very short-form prose of this type from years of teaching writing in my Life Sentences Workshop. Texts composed with an extreme economy of words require “thinking inside the box.” The smaller the box, the more creative you have to be. Paradoxically, a few carefully crafted sentences may be more enduring and have more impact than many gigabytes of emails. And, of course, such short texts are perfectly suited to letterpress!
About the printing and the typographic arts
Letterpress Printing
There was nothing unusual about my learning to set type by hand and print on iron presses when I was a kid. It was a time when “hot type” was the norm for ordinary printing, whether of books, newspapers, catalogues, brochures, or anything else. (“Hot type” refers to the fact that the letters from which copy was printed were lead alloys poured into molds and, when cooled and solid, were used to impress the images of letters into paper.) Printing was one of the industrial arts taught in schools. The many branches of the industry — type casting, papermaking, job printing, etc. — constituted the ninth largest industry in the country. My father worked for a few years in the 1960s at a printing company — although not as a printer: he was a “technical photographer,” doing what was called color separation of film images so they could be printed in four-color process printing…oh forget it, it’s too complicated to explain, and of only antiquarian interest at this point. The basic printing technology continued to improve and become more precise and reliable over the decades, but it was still largely simply an evolution of the methods that had dominated since the 16th century. In any event, Dad bought me a small Kelsey letterpress (straight from the Kelsey Company in Meriden, Connecticut) in 1962 and later an 1889 Chandler and Price floor model press, shown here, on which I happily printed while in high school. I still have the Kelsey, which traveled with me overseas to various locations, and which kept my hand in the craft.